Many of the newcomers came for the singing school, which was led by Will Fitzgerald, and which began a half an hour before the regular singing. I was still surprised at the number of newcomers, and I’m not entirely clear why there were so many tonight.

We had enough strong singers that each section sounded good. In fact, the class sounded very good indeed. Partly this was because most of the songs people led were quite familiar to the regular singers, and not all that challenging; you could tell that the regular singers chose songs that the other regulars would know well. Leaders also tended to maintain a moderate or slow tempo; sometimes the Berkeley singing has a tendency to sing at a breakneck tempo, which is great fun but difficult for newcomers.

In short, I thought this would have been a good singing for new singers: a singing school to start off, strong singers in every section, sensitive leaders that made sure that newcomers would be able to sing along. I asked my partner Carol, who has just started singing with us, what she thought. She thought tonight was pretty good, but she asked why we didn’t have something for beginners every week. She reminded me of the way the contradance groups in the Boston area structure their weekly dances: the first half hour of every dance consists of instruction, and dances led at a slow speed, all specifically for beginners; as the evening progresses, the dances get faster and more difficult. Beginners come early, and drop out as the dances get too hard for them; the experienced hardcore dancers (the ones who have little interest in teaching new dancers) arrive late so they don’t have to deal with the stumbling new dancers.

Carol wondered why the Berkeley singing couldn’t do the same thing. Her suggestion has merit. But I suspect that it would be difficult to implement: contradances have a single caller who decides which dances to lead; Sacred Harp singings rotate leaders, and it could be difficult to get everyone on board with the idea that the first half hour of a singing should be easy tunes led slowly. The other possibility would be to designate the half hour before every singing as a time for learning; experienced singers who like to mentor new singers would show up, while the singers who only want to sing and lead fast and difficult tunes could arrive late.

Have other local singings tried to set aside a time for beginners at every singing? Would this idea even work? I just don’t know. But I do know that we’re losing too many of our visitors and new singers — the ones who come once or twice, then never return — and that bothers me.

One thing I noticed today was that I liked the room in which we were singing. The Keewaydin Clubhouse, listed on the National Register of Historic Places and now owned by VFW Post 5760, has relatively high ceilings for a Sacred Harp singing, and a somewhat longer reverberation time than usual. But you could still hear every voice quite well, and the sound was mellower and less strident than in some rooms. I found the sound to be as good in the back row of the bass section as on the front bench — different, but as good.

Now we have to run to catch our plane. Suffice it to say that the 2012 Pacific Northwest Convention (Washington) will remain in my memory as one of the best singings I’ve attended, for the quality of the singing, the food, and the hospitality.

One of these other two criteria is how good the food is. But this criterion doesn’t really concern the food. Good dinners-on-the-grounds at all-day singings or conventions, or good snacks at local singings, are expressions of hospitality and of caring for each other or for visitors. The other of these two criteria is how well the class welcomes newcomers and strangers. It’s most comfortable for regular singers to spend all their time greeting old friends, and thus ignoring newcomers and visitors. But the best singings are those where newcomers and visitors are made to feel comfortable and a part of the singing community.

Judged by all three of these criteria, the first day of the Pacific Northwest Convention (Washington) was an excellent singing. The class was indeed energetic, and sang so well that there were many of those transcendent moments when you’re carried away by the music and poetry, and lose all sense of self.

The food was excellent. Not only were there the usual high-calorie, stick-to-the-ribs food you expect to see at a singing — meat and potatoes and casseroles and yummy deserts — but a wide variety of vegetarian dishes and side dishes, even including green vegetables (brussels sprouts! kale!). And the dessert table was incredible, with cakes and pies and cookies and lots of chocolate and more. There was enough food there for twice the number of people who came.

The local singers were incredibly welcoming. My partner Carol has just started singing, and Jim, an experienced local signer, immediately made sure Carol sat next to him in the tenor section, and talked with her during the recesses, and was generally friendly and welcoming. In church, we call people like Jim “pew buddies” — a friendly person who sits next to a newcomer during the service and makes sure the newcomer feels welcome and comfortable.

My cousin and her daughter were supposed to come to check out the singing after dinner. I had asked my cousin to text me when they arrived, and I tried to keep an eye out for them so I could welcome them. But I needn’t have bothered, because the local singers took care of everything. My cousin and her daughter were welcomed at the registration table, given loaner books and basic instruction. Susan, one of the local singers, asked them to accompany her into the middle of the hollow square while she led a song. Then at the next recess, I asked strong local singers if my cousin and her daughter could sit next to them during the singing, and although one person did turn me down, the next two I asked were very welcoming.

So I would rate this first day of the convention as one of the best singings I’ve attended: good singing, good food, and very welcoming. Sacred Harp singings aren’t really about how well I as an individual sang or sounded, or how good the music. The best singings are really about selflessness and radical hospitality and community, and out of these things comes the warmth from which good singing can grow.

This turned out to be the best run-through of a new tune I have yet gotten — it was such a treat to have a talented group of singers who were willing to sing through a tune so carefully. And fortunately, to reward everyone’s patience, the tune turned out reasonably well. (A new singer had to ask if I actually wrote the tune, since it sounded old — I count this a high compliment, an affirmation that this tune “sought the old ways and walked therein.”)

I wrote this tune while thinking of Dominic Zeigler, one of the regular singers in the Berkeley weekly singing, who died last month of a brain aneurysm at age 23, and so it is dedicated to his memory.

Prospect Hill. 10.10.10.10.

A couple of the Palo Alto singers pointed out that the tenor line has an odd-sounding jump in the eighth measure in that first pair of eighth notes, from D (sol) to F (fa). That is true, but when I told them that I wanted that particular sound in the melody line, and besides it’s just a passing note on the second half of a weak beat in the measure and that it doesn’t really matter what note they hit, they were willing to accept it. And when we finally put the parts together, that chord sounded reasonably good — an open V7 chord that’s all sevenths, seconds, and unisons.

By this time, more people had showed up, and pretty soon there were nine of us: two on each part, except three on tenor. We worked through “Goss,” a tune with what I’d call an AA’BA’ structure (though arguably what I’m calling the A’ part should be called the C part). Marsha pointed out that the melody line bore some resemblance to a fiddle tune, especially in the A part. I liked the tune, but wished the last note of the fourth measure of the bass part had been an A (la), not a D (la).

Then we took on “Melanie” by Anne Heider. This is a challenging tune. It’s in 3/2 and begins on the weak middle beat, which is unusual. The harmonic progressions are unusual for a Sacred Harp tune. And the rhythmic pattern in mm. 3 and 7, where bass and treble lines are out of synch with the tenor and alto lines on the weak middle beat is unusual. After we struggled through the notes, we got into a discussion of this tune, and then of other things, and then we took a break so we could eat the yummy snacks Hal and Erika had provided.

And I’ll take this opportunity to leave the Trumpet singing for a moment and discuss whether this and other tunes have too many unusual features to make them Sacred-Harp-friendly….

There’s an argument to be made that “Melanie” and others like it have enough challenging parts to place them outside the core Sacred Harp tradition. But if I look at the tradition as it is written and as it is sung, I don’t think “Melanie” is outside that tradition. The rhythmic pattern in mm. 3 and 7, for instance, is not unfamiliar: we frequently hear singers anticipating a note, or coming in late, and Anne Heider has nicely captured the effect of these practices. As for the challenging harmonic progressions, “Melanie” is closer to the center of the tradition than, say, 68t “Salem.” And as for coming in on the middle beat of a 3/2 measure, I can’t help thinking about Arnold Zwicky’s blog post on 146 “Hallelujah,” where he notes the discrepancies between “the fit between the poetry,… the prosody of the words in spoken language, and the setting to music,” to say nothing of actual performance practice — thus one of the key characteristics of Sacred Harp music is the unusual rhythmic patterns.

Then what makes a tune Sacred-Harp-y if it’s not already in the Sacred Harp book? You could argue that a tune is Sacred-Harp-y if Sacred Harp singers like it. But unless a new tune is dead easy, you’re not going to know what it sounds like in a single reading — and sometimes, as happened with us and “Melanie,” the class will sing enough wrong notes that you really can’t hear what it sounds like, which means the singers really can’t know if they like it or not.

Back when I directed a small folk choir, I could push my singers to sing through a new arrangement or new composition several times, and we could play with the tempo, transpose it up or down to fit our voices, and as director and composer I could correct singers’ mistakes, and singers could correct my mistakes as composer or arranger — it was a very cooperative venture. But in our Sacred Harp tradition, a leader only gets to lead a tune once per class, then we move on to the next tune. While we do this for very good reasons, I think when it comes to new compositions it can be frustrating for both the class and the composer — there’s not as much communication in either direction.

I believe this tends to keep the amount of new compositions relatively small, which is not necessarily a bad thing. The Sacred Harp tradition is a very conservative tradition. We say: Seek the old paths and walk therein. We don’t have a lot of room for new tunes in the central canon anyway: the Denson book is now more than twenty years old, and any new revision won’t have a lot of room for new tunes. Yet while it is good to be a conservative tradition, we want to make sure that we don’t latch on to new tunes simply because they’re the easiest and most familiar-sounding ones to sing; instead, we want to latch onto the best tunes.

To return to today’s Trumpet singing: we got to talking so much that we never did get through all the tunes in the latest issue of the Trumpet. Which meant, to my regret, that we certainly didn’t have time to work through “Melanie” one or two more times, so we could at least get it right.

Telegraph Hill.

After the singing, Will said the problem with this tune is that it goes by so quickly. He’s right that it does go by quickly; it’s only twenty measures long. However, I think many singers really appreciate shorter anthems: you get to have the fun of singing an anthem without the fatigue that can come with a longer anthem. And let’s face it, if you hope to have singers sing a new composition more than once, it has to be manageable and not overwhelming.

This is something of a companion piece to “San Juan Bautista,” which is in the current issue of The Trumpet; maybe they’re part of a suite that I haven’t finished writing yet; maybe a suite of connected tunes is one solution to the problem of how to present longer compositions in a format that singers will want to sing.

Unfortunately, the hemiola figures representing the leaping hart and hind proved to be hard to sing; even with experienced sight readers on both the alto and treble benches, even with the support of a great class, it was difficult. Part of the problem is that it’s a set piece, so there are no additional verses to allow the class to get comfortable with it. Still, it was a lot of fun for me to hear it.

The Frighted Hind.

When I presented it today, there were still only about ten people present, but the class seemed to have fun with it. (We had just been singing from the Cooper book, which helped — this tune is more in the style of the Cooper book than the Denson book).

The Pilgrims Happy Lot. 8.8.6.

(I wrote this tune for David, as he recovers from knee surgery.)

Best of all, the class sounded really good. We have sometimes struggled a little with intonation over the past few months, but tonight all sections were right on pitch. Early on, the tempos started dragging a little, but when Jeremy was leading he called our attention to it by tapping his foot — the class quickly responded and caught up with him, and after that we rarely fell behind the leader’s tempo. And the class didn’t shout or bellow tonight; we were loud, but tuneful and musical. This wasn’t the most ecstatic or transcendent Berkeley weekly singing I’ve ever attended, but it was one of the more musical singings we’ve had.

We lost one of our basses at the break (he had to join the tenor front bench). At the end of the evening, Philip turned to Jeremy and me, the other two basses, and said, “For only three of us, we did a great job.” We did, too: we hit all but one of our entrances on fuguing tunes solidly, we were working together as a team; there’s a good analogy here somewhere between a well-functioning bass section and team sports.