Tag: Berkeley local singing

Eight straight days at work, and a twelve-hour day the day before, left me with little energy for singing. Not long before the break, my voice got smaller and smaller and at last I just stopped trying to sing, and listened to the altos. They were worth listening to: Linda and the three Eric(k)as were singing particularly well tonight, with that warm powerful vocal quality I particularly like in Sacred Harp altos; and I particularly noticed how a good alto section can drive the rhythm of the rest of the class.

Posted a week late, had no time all last week!

We were talking to a new singer during the break this evening. She’s a visiting scholar from Sweden, she was curious about Sacred Harp singing and had some questions. Why do we sing at a pitch lower than the written pitch? My explanation is that most of our tenor singers really don’t have the range to sing the highest notes (many voices are really mid-range voices, not true tenors or sopranos), so we tend to sing songs between a second and a fourth below written pitch. She wanted to know where Sacred Harp singing fits into the wider spectrum of musical styles; this was a little more challenging to explain to someone who is not from the United States, but she knew about American bluegrass music, and got how Sacred Harp is related to bluegrass.

Then she wanted to know why we sing so loud. I guess one reason is that we like to sing loud, and another reason is that it’s actually easier to sing loudly than to sing softly, but the reason I gave was this:— this music was originally (and still is, for many singers) sacred music, and the loudness seems to me to come naturally as an expression of religious ecstasy. So as not to confuse the issue further, I did not go on to say that I used to get that same sense of religious ecstasy from punk rock concerts — but that was true for me, and it is why I like Shani’s characterization of Sacred Harp as the punk rock of choral music.

Tonight’s singing started out sounding quite good — lots of newcomers, but each section sounded solid. But part way into the evening, we began to slide out of tune with one another, and I could hear individual voices beginning to wobble; this began to happen as the class got louder. I’m increasingly convinced that the high ceilings in All Saints Chapel tend to push us to sing louder and louder as we try to hear our voices over other voices; when you sing louder and louder, eventually you pass the point where you can control your voice adequately. Not only that, but when there’s too much echo and reverberation, you can’t adequately hear what others are singing, and you tend to get out of tune and out of rhythm with other singers.

I mentioned this in passing to Rebecca at the break, and she said she had noticed something to that effect; she said it was especially noticeable since she had sung the day before at the San Francisco monthly singing, where there are low ceilings and you can hear other singers better. And perhaps I’ve become especially aware of the weakness of All Saints recently because the second Sunday Palo Alto singing is in such a good singing room; the contrast between the two singings makes me really notice the problems in Berkeley.

On the drive home, Will and I were explaining to the two non-singers riding with us how the singing went. Will summed it up best when he said that musically it wasn’t the greatest experience, but we went a long way towards building community.

None of the people who regularly pitch for us came today. Erika did most of the pitching for us during the Other Book singing in the first hour, in many cases pitching songs that she had never seen before, a difficult task which she did quite well. But at first the class didn’t always give her the time to think through a pitch, and make necessary corrections. It was a variant of the problem the Berkeley singing has been struggling with for the past year: we have not been listening to each other, and paying close attention to all the sections, and all the singers.

Erika had to leave at the break. Suddenly leaders found themselves pitching their own songs, and discovering how hard it is. When you’re pitching, you really need everyone in the class to listen to you, waiting until you really have the pitch you want. We’ve gotten used to having very able pitching in Berkeley, so the class has the bad habit of latching onto a pitch, and sounding the chord, before the person pitching has actually settled on a pitch. Early in tonight’s singing this led to a certain amount of frustration: the person pitching would sound a tentative pitch, then rethink that pitch, but before he or she could sound the new pitch, the class was sounding the chord for the initial pitch.

But in the second half of the singing, after the break, the class began to relax and wait until the person pitching had really decided on a pitch. We started listening better — listening not just to the person pitching, but also listening to all the other sections while we were singing the notes, and then if we heard one or more sections struggling with the pitch, we paused until the person pitching could revise the pitch.

This, I think, was at the heart of the community building Will was talking about on the drive home: listening to one another, and working together so that we all sounded good.

28 people turned out to sing at the weekly Berkeley singing tonight. In some ways it was a typical Berkeley singing: energetic, loud, relatively fast. Clarissa, one of the out-of-town singers who came to the all-day singing on Saturday, said afterwards that it was a very good singing, and it was.

But, as Marsha noted, David pitched the tunes somewhat lower than usual. David has a very good ear, and listens closely to the class. Maybe he heard what I heard: quite a few tired voices. Towards the end of the two hour singing tonight, I could hear some of voices getting tired, drifting off pitch, not able to keep constant volume. My own voice was tired after three days of singing: the muscles of my throat and mouth couldn’t keep up with the fast tunes, and the muscles of that support breathing were tired enough that I just couldn’t support the highest notes. I was glad that David pitched a little lower than usual.

Thank goodness I don’t have to preach any time soon.

I went to the weekly Berkeley singing, but only spent forty-five minutes singing, and left at the break — my allergies were acting up, and I could feel it in my voice.

It was a small singing, with less than a dozen regular singers — and four brand-new singers. Wish I could have stayed, but there’s no sense in ruining my voice.

We had two new tunes at tonight’s Other Book singing. Gabriel’s tune, the first Sacred Harp tune he’s written (though he’s written other music) was great fun to sing; each part was a good melody on its own, but there were some very interesting harmonies between the parts. And Will brought a new tune by Warren, a tune which is going to appear in the next issue of The Trumpet; it sounded like a camp-meeting tune, familiar enough to be easy to sing, but challenging enough to be lots of fun. (Alas, although I have three tunes written, my job has been crazy and I had no time to print out my tunes.)

The Other Book Singing went well, but when we got back to the Denson book, the singing quality went down. Usually we got the other way: lots of us are sight-singing during the Other Book Singing, and we sing better when we’re singing from familiar Denson book material. But tonight’s class kind of struggled with the Denson book tunes: we kept slowing down the tempo, and our intonation was sometimes way off (I heard minor seconds and even major seconds that were not written in the music). I began to think maybe we need to pay just as much attention to the familiar tunes as we do to the ones we are sight-singing! And this conclusion was confirmed when Joanne stood up to lead: she made a point that we should all take care to listen to each other, and for that one tune we sang very well; but then on the next tune we got sloppy again, and our intonation drifted way off.

The most transcendent moment came early in the singing, during the Other Book Singing. Will led “Nearer My God to Thee” from the Cooper book, at a very slow tempo: I’ve rarely heard the Berkeley group sound better.

Les and Patti, two singers from Illinois whom Carol and I met at Camp Fasola, were in town; Carol and I drove over with them from San Mateo to Berkeley. Traffic was extraordinarily light, and we arrived twenty minutes early, so we showed Les and Patti a limited view of the Golden Gate a block from All Saints Chapel, but with the fog coming in from the Pacific, all we could see was the tops of the two towers of the Golden Gate Bridge.

As we started walking back to All Saints Chapel, a woman stopped us and asked if we would like to see “the fruiting body of a rare mushroom; well, not a mushroom, exactly, since it doesn’t have a stipe and a cap; it’s more of an ear.” We said we would like to see this rare fungus. She told us its name — Otidea smithii — and she showed it to us: small, brown with a cool purple tinge, with a shape that was indeed ear-like (according to a government environmental management paper, the shape resembles “a plastic cup melted on one side, or a spoon, or a rabbit’s ear”). People you meet in Berkeley are rarely boring.

On to the singing, which turned out to be pretty good tonight. However, although others were singing well, I wasn’t: it had been a difficult day at work, I had a hard time focusing. So I put more effort into listening than into singing. Towards the end of the evening, I suddenly began paying attention to microtonality: not all the notes we sing are precisely tuned to a conventional scale.

For example, often when a given section sings notes that are at the extreme upper end of their range (particularly when they ascend to that note skipwise instead of stepwise), they will tend to sing those high notes slightly flat. In one major-key tune this evening, the trebles consistently flattened the highest notes by about a quarter tone, i.e., those highest notes were a little more than half way from the note as written, to a minor second lower. I wish I had thought to make a note of which tune it was, and now I can’t remember; but the note they were flatting was a high G, the tonic “fa,” and the resulting chord sounded interesting and good. We basses did the same thing to our high notes in no. 513 “Joyful,” though we were less consistent within our section; at least one of us was singing the notes right on pitch while I was down a quarter tone; yet this lack of consistency lent a kind of spice to those high notes. This slight flatting of the highest notes doesn’t always happen, but it happens often enough to sound like a familiar part of Sacred Harp singing.

We Sacred Harp singers include other kinds of microtonality fairly consistently in Sacred Harp singing. We are also somewhat prone to singing neutral thirds; that is, we sometimes sing the third degree of the scale such that it’s between a minor third and a major third; although I can only remember this happening in minor key tunes. We use ornaments, such as sliding into notes from below (and more rarely from above), that involve microtonality. And sometimes we just sing badly; our voices are tired, we’re not paying attention, whatever; I heard myself and others slipping into this last kind of unintentional microtonality more than once tonight.

By the way, in case you’re wondering: when Les asked if Oditea smithii were edible, the woman who showed it to us said yes, probably, but that we wouldn’t want to eat it.

Some people at the Berkeley weekly singing asked me to talk to the monthly learner’s group, with the idea that a tunesmith might have something to offer newer singers. Below is a recreation of the session I led this evening:

[To begin, we sang through some scales on page 18 of the Rudiments section.]

Understanding a little bit about the structure of our tunes can make it easier to sing from the Sacred Harp….

We were missing some of our regulars due to the holiday, but there were still better than twenty singers tonight. Most of our singers, say a dozen, were in the tenor section; then there were four trebles, a couple of altos, and three basses. While it can be fun to hear all the parts clearly, I also like singings where the tenors dominate the sound and the other parts merely fill out the tenor line.

I’m still feeling under the weather, so I left at the break.