Tag Archive for 'Berkeley local singing'

Baseball and Sacred Harp singing

11:17 pm, May 14, 2012.

There’s a strong case to be made that singing with a weekly practice singing is like playing on a baseball team. Just as the 160-game baseball season requires strength in the short term and endurance over the long haul, singing full voice for two hours requires strength and singing like that every week requires endurance. And just as it’s a rare ball player who makes it through the whole season, it’s a rare Sacred Harp singer who can show up every week; ball players miss games due to injuries, while Sacred Harp singers miss singings due to jobs, personal responsibilities, travel — and yes, sometimes even due to injuries or hoarseness caused by poor vocal technique.

A baseball team mitigates player turnover by developing a strong bench and a good bullpen. Similarly, each section in a weekly singing can develop plenty of good singers, so that when the inevitable happens and someone can’t show up, you still have enough strong singers to hold down your part. Continue reading ‘Baseball and Sacred Harp singing’

Categories: Singing at home | Tags: . | 0 Comments.

New Thirteenth

11:27 pm, May 7, 2012.

The second tune I presented at tonight’s Other Book Singing in Berkeley. The class gave a wonderful reading of the tune, and they seemed to like it pretty well. The class was, however, somewhat confused by the mediocre typography of my cheap music typesetting program; it was hard to see that the rhythm in mm. 8, 19, and 23 (counting partial measures as one) has a half note followed by a whole note, not the other way around.

New Thirteenth. L.M.

The text is a metrical paraphrase of Psalm 13 by Queen Elizabeth I; the imagery of the poetry is really quite vivid, and the melody seemed to come naturally from the words. The tune uses a number of conventions of eighteenth century singing school and West Gallery tunes, including the typical rhythmic figure of half note, dotted quarter, eighth, half note in the opening of the fuguing section.

Also in the style of some eighteenth century composers, e.g. William Billings, this tune keeps the fuguing section somewhat separate from the rest of the tune, allowing you to pull out the fuguing section and still be left with a coherent plain tune. However, Billings typically stuck the fuguing section on at the end of the paling tune, not in the middle of the plain tune.

Categories: New compositions and Singing at home | Tags: , . | 0 Comments.

San Mateo

11:16 pm, May 7, 2012.

A new tune I presented during tonight’s Other Book singing. The class gave a good reading of it, although as I had suspected, the upper notes of the treble line sounded like they were a bit of a reach; I had rewritten the treble line several times, and I guess I might just revise it again.

San Mateo. C.M.

The text is a metrical paraphrase of Psalm 1 by Robert Burns. The tune uses some of the conventions of eighteenth century tunes in 3/2 of the New England singing school and of West Gallery music.

Categories: New compositions and Singing at home | Tags: . | 0 Comments.

Up and out of “meh”

11:06 pm, May 7, 2012.

After last week’s less than stellar singing, I wasn’t quite as enthusiastic about going to the Berkeley weekly singing tonight. But it turned out to be quite a good singing. I suspect it helped that we spent the first hour singing from “other books” — Cooper book, Eclectic Harmony, Norumbega Harmony, etc. Singing from music I haven’t sung before forces me to pay attention to the music, to sing the notes carefully, and not to try to slide by on my (sometimes faulty) memory of tunes.

Some of the more experienced singers left during the break, but despite that I think the singing got better after the break. I believe this is because some of our newer singers have gotten quite good, especially following the Golden Gate All-day Singing.

It was a warm evening, and we had the double doors behind the alto section propped open. Towards the end of the evening, a homeless woman appeared in those doors, and stood there listening to us with obvious pleasure. In one break between songs, she asked, “Is that medieval music?” and we told her, No, it’s American music, mostly from the nineteenth century. She stayed to talk to people after the singing was over; of course she asked a few people for money, but I also heard some singers invite her to come sing with us any Monday night.

Categories: Singing at home | Tags: . | 1 Comment.

Moving beyond “meh”

11:40 pm, April 30, 2012.

The adjective that best describes tonight’s weekly singing: “meh.”

Every musical ensemble has its moments when not much seems to go right; moments when tempers may grow short, when small errors reinforce each other, when the best musical intentions can’t seem to effect improvement. Tonight wasn’t the worst musical experience I’ve ever had, not by a long shot. (It was nowhere near as bad, for example, as that Christmas Eve gig where the guitarist showed up late and out of tune after which none of the rest of us could ever get back in tune. Nor was it as bad as the time someone asked me, who sings bass for good reason, to sing high harmony over a tenor voice. Nor was it as bad as the choral concert where the basses were singing three different versions of the bass part, none of which was correct.) But tonight was no better than “meh.”

And tonight’s singing got me thinking about what it is I try to do when things don’t go well musically. Mostly I try to focus on the basics of my own performance. So tonight I focused on Sacred Harp basics — trying to sing every note accurately, trying to follow the leader — and on the basics of singing — breathing, intonation, enunciation, and relaxing the throat, face, and mouth. And I also try to stay patient, which is difficult as I am not a particularly patient person, and this is one of my great musical weaknesses.

I think one of the most challenging aspects of making music with other people is the way it can force one to confront one’s own personal weaknesses. While certainly the whole class was having its problems at tonight’s singing, I had to confront my own personal problems as well: that I was tensing up my throat and mouth and not always breathing from the diaphragm, which caused my intonation to waver and which made me mispronounce words; that I was not fully concentrating on singing the notes; that I am not a patient person.

Being a minister, of course I think there’s a theological aspect to this. Making music with others is an exercise in mindfulness and humility. It is an exercise in getting the self out of the way so that we can experience union with something greater than ourselves.

Categories: Singing at home | Tags: . | 1 Comment.

Nearly perfect

11:41 pm, April 23, 2012.

Tonight’s weekly practice singing was nearly perfect:

— We had had a very good all-day singing the day before, and an excellent singing school the day before that, and you could see and hear the quantum leap in leading skills.

– There were only 21 of us, a significantly smaller number of people than we’ve been having recently, but we sounded bigger and warmer and richer (maybe less strident?) than we have in the past several weeks.

— You could tell that the singers were listening to each other; the singing was tuneful and harmonious, and the different sections were communicating with one another.

— Everyone was very supportive of everyone else, and there was no sense of competitiveness; you never had that sense that someone was going to disapprove of you or scold you, and you never had the sense that anyone was trying to show off or sound better than everyone else.

It’s hard to describe this without sounding trite: I felt a sense of joy, a sense of warmth and connectedness with fellow human beings, a sense of being a part of something larger than myself. Perhaps one could use an old-fashioned way of speaking, and say that we were singing for God and not for ourselves; or (if that’s not your theology) one could say that we were singing for something larger and better than our individual selves.

Categories: Singing at home | Tags: . | 0 Comments.

Singing school in Berkeley with Cassie Allen

9:57 pm, April 21, 2012.

Today Bay Area Sacred Harp sponsored a singing school led by singing master Cassie Allen, a fifth generation Sacred Harp singer originally from Alabama. 61 people attended all or part of the singing school, which was held in All Saints Chapel in Berkeley, our usual Monday evening singing space. And although I was working the registration table for much of the class, I was able to hear almost everything from where I sat.

At the beginning of the singing school, Cassie Allen gave an overview of the history of Sacred Harp singing, from its roots in Colonial New England, through the development of four-shape notes and the publication of the first tune book titled The Scared Harp, right up to the present day. She emphasized that this is a living tradition of singing. She also reminded the class that this is a form of sacred song, and the religious aspect is very important to many traditional singers (as is true for some of us who are not traditional singers).

Then she gave discussed and demonstrated some of the core material in the “Rudiments of Music” section of The Sacred Harp, including: note shape and pitches; major and minor scales; accenting the first and third beats; and the modes of time. She spent a good amount of time demonstrating how to lead all the different time signatures.

The people in the class were of many different ability levels, from those who have been singing for decades, to those who started singing months or weeks ago. I was impressed that Cassie Allen was able to keep the interest of the long-time singers, while not leaving the brand-new singers in the dust.

Talking with some brand-new singers after the singing school, I also realized that three hours is not nearly enough time to cover all the material that a new singer needs to know in order to feel truly confident. A week-long singing school like Camp Fasola is an obvious way for new singers to get an intensive introduction to the rudiments, but not everyone can travel to Alabama for a week of singing. Here in the Bay Area, we have a Learner’s Group that meets for a half an hour every month, and we sponsor a singing school about once a year, but it takes us perhaps two years to provide as much formal instruction as in a week as Camp Fasola. Not that I’m advocating for more singing schools in the Bay Area; we don’t have enough volunteers to provide much more in the way of formal instruction. But it is worth remembering that any time we can offer a singing school, we should do so.

Categories: Other events | Tags: . | 7 Comments.

A short singing for me

11:58 pm, April 16, 2012.

I’m getting over an upper respiratory infection that’s been going around the Bay area; I’m no longer contagious, but I only lasted 40 minutes at tonight’s singing. We had a mere 25 singers — after having more than thirty singers for the past size weeks, 25 seems like a small group — 8 tenors, 3 trebles, 6 altos, and 8 basses. The basses sounded fantastic; not only did we have several of our more experienced basses tonight, the newer basses have begun to sound good. I arrived somewhat late, so I got to sit on the back bench, which is where I prefer to be, surrounded by a big bass sound. However, I did not get to sit at the alto end of the bass bench, which was too bad because the altos sounded particularly good this evening.

When my turn to lead came around, I chose no. 291 Majesty, by William Billings. I led it at a fairly stately pace, at about sixty half notes per minute; I’ve come to prefer Billings sung at this slower pace, which is more in line with the performance practice he calls for in the introductions to his tunebooks. The Berkeley singing prefers to sing faster, and the class kept pushing my tempo, which was fine with me; it’s better to feel that a tune is accelerating slightly, than to feel that a tune is dragging. Alas, while I was in the hollow square I noticed that some of our intonation issues have returned, and I have to admit it was nice returning to the back bench of the bass section where the intonation was somewhat more stable.

Even though the remains of the upper respiratory infection gave me a couple of low bass notes I don’t usually have, by the time the break rolled around I was done for the evening.

Categories: Singing at home | Tags: . | 0 Comments.

Forty once again

11:19 pm, April 9, 2012.

Once again this evening, we had 40 singers. We were missing a number of our regular singers, but we had some visitors: the cast of a production of Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible” came to sing with us, as they are going to include some shape note singing in their performance. I don’t quite understand how shape note singing fits in with “The Crucible” — the play is about the Salem with trials, and shape note singing would be an anachronism — nevertheless it was good to have the cast sing with us; and some of them were really excellent singers.

At the end of the evening’s singing, Alex, Jackson, and I were standing around after replacing the pews to their original places. We all agreed that it had been a really good singing. I’d describe it as loud, exuberant, and generally tuneful (and perhaps this means we have finally overcome the intonation problems we’ve been having). I came away with renewed energy, and with my ears ringing.

Categories: Singing at home | Tags: . | 1 Comment.

Hamilton

10:59 pm, April 2, 2012.

A new tune I presented at tonight’s “Other Book” singing. The class seemed to enjoy it.

Hamilton. C.M.

I presented another new tune which was not as successful; I’ll include it here for the sake of completeness:

Gardner. C.M.

Categories: New compositions and Singing at home | Tags: . | 0 Comments.