Tag: San Francisco monthly singing

Carolyn organized a fifth Sunday singing in San Francisco, at the Episcopal Church of St. Mary the Virgin. Since I had no duties at my congregation I was able to attend. The church is beautiful, and beautifully maintained — a late nineteenth century wood-frame structure. The ceilings were a little higher than Sacred Harp singers prefer, but nevertheless I thought the sound was quite nice. Indeed, the only problem with the sound was that out of about 25 singers, there were only half a dozen men — but that has nothing to do with the building.

What was particularly nice about this singing was that perhaps a dozen members of the church joined us, mostly members of their choir. They were all good singers, and seemed to pick up Sacred Harp singing quickly. As it turns out, their music director, Chip, has had them sing from The Southern Harmony, and some of them had even accompanied Chip to the Big Singing in Benton, Kentucky. So they knew what shape-note singing should sound like!

After the break, Chip, the music director, led us in a couple of tunes by William Walker from the Southern Harmony. He told the altos that at the Big Singing, altos were not supposed to sing with the basses, and usually sang with the trebles. I love William Walker, and it was both interesting and fun to sing several of his tunes in his original arrangements — makes me want to go to the Big Singing myself some day.

This afternoon I managed to slip away from work and drive up to San Francisco for the monthly singing there. Carol and I arrived about twenty minutes after the singing was supposed to have started, but people tend to arrive late to that singing, and there were only half a dozen singers there. But after an hour, at the break, there were more than a dozen of us. I had to leave after the break to get back to work, but I did get a chance to chat with some singers I haven’t seen in a while — then we started the long drive back to church. We spent more time driving than singing, but it was worth it.

The San Francisco monthly singing was small this month. I know two of our regulars were singing in Christmas gigs, and probably several more had other holiday-time commitments, so we were down to about ten singers, two of whom were brand new. At one point, we had four in the bass section, and one singer in each of the other three sections. I like bass-heavy singings anyway, and since the tenor, treble, and alto were good strong singers, I thought it was a very nice sound indeed.

Erica and Hal brought copies of The Christmas Harp, a collection of shape notes tunes with Christmas-themed poetry, edited by Karen Willard. We sang quite a few songs from The Christmas Harp, and while it was challenging to sight-read so many tunes, it was worth it. We made a stab at singing Billing’s Shiloh, a tune which I absolutely love; but it is a challenging tune, and except for the first verse the words are printed at the bottom of the page, not with the notes; so we only sang the one verse. However, Karen Willard also paired Billings’s words to Shiloh with a charming plain tune by Billings, Jamaica; thus we at least got to sing most of Billings’s poetry for Shiloh.

All in all, a very enjoyable singing.

The Christmas tune “Star in the East” appeared in William Walker’s Southern Harmony as a three-part tune. It’s a great tune, and in the last decade, it has been reprinted as a four-part tune in Norumbega Harmony and The Christmas Harp. Now here’s yet another “Star in the East”; I wrote the alto part for this one, trying to retain as much as possible the incredibly spare harmony of the original while also making the alto part reasonably enjoyable to sing:

Star in the East.

We sang this at today’s San Francisco monthly singing, and it sounded fine.