Tag: William Billings

Carol and I headed over to the Berkeley weekly singing tonight, for a third day in a row of singing. It was a smaller turnout than usual; I counted fourteen people at one point. The singing was very good, in the best tradition of the Berkeley weekly singing: fast, loud (but not too loud), and pitched a bit high. And while we did get a little screechy a couple of times, mostly we were very much in tune with each other.

After hearing 268 David’s Lamentation sung quite slowly at yesterday’s Healdsburg singing, I decided to lead it at a fairly quick tempo. I was thinking of a field recording I got a few years ago from Hal Eisen, which was only identified as being by “Alabama Sacred Harp Singing Convention”; in this recording the singers used a tempo of about 116 beats per minute. (Note that William Billings, the composer of David’s Lamentation, specified that 2/4 time should be sung at 120 beats per minute.) Berkeley singers like to sing fast, and tonight we sang it at about 120 beats per minute; furthermore, the class sang it the way I like best, with a bit of a swing to it. Sung at the slow tempo, you can sense King David’s sadness at the death of Absalom; but at the quicker tempo, I get more of a sense of the sharp urgency and complexity of David’s grief.

It was a typical holiday singing, with fewer singers than usual. And we were missing the singers who usually run things: when it came time for our break, there was no one present to call for announcements.

Which brings me to an admission: I am not a particularly good Sacred Harp singer, nor shall I ever be particularly good. I have a slow ear, my voice is unreliable, I’m easily led astray by others, and above all I’m not serious enough. This last failing may be the most damaging. Singing and music for me are a means to an end, and that end is best described as some kind of transcendent ecstasy. Not that words adequately describe what I’m trying to get at. Some of the old Southern Sacred Harp singers might have called it a longing for union with God. William Billings tried to describe it many times, as in this description of fuguing tunes:

Now the solemn bass demands their their attention, now the manly tenor, now the lofty counter [alto], now the volatile treble, now here, now there, now here again. — Oh inchanting! O ecstatic! Push on, push on ye sons of harmony, and
   Discharge your deep mouth’d canon, full fraught with Diapasons;
   May you with Maestoso, rush on to Choro-Grando,
   And then with Vigoroso, let fly your Diapentes
   About our nervous system.

In his book How Sweet the Sound: Music in the Spiritual Lives of Americans, David Stowe, professor of writing and American culture at Michigan State University, says that in this passage, “a kind of synesthesia is taking place, by which musical tones and patterns take personality and material form…. Also unmistakable is Billings’ sense of the music as erotic, with musical performance of the fuguing tune as an aural orgasm.” [p. 58]

For me, neither the union with God as experienced by traditional Christians, nor the “aural orgasm” that David Stowe finds in Billings is exactly accurate. But that’s the nature of transcendent experiences: you can’t adequately describe them in words.

And the nature of transcendent experiences is that you can’t predict when they’ll show up. I hit a few transcendent moments this evening: moments when suddenly the music was tangible, I could hear its movement around me, and what we were doing transcended our individual abilities and voices. The music transcended our singing of it: I managed to connect with the music that is always there and is always waiting to burst in upon us.

So even holiday singings that are smaller than usual can turn out to be really good singings. Even people like me who are not particularly good singers, and not serious enough, can contribute to a really good singing. If, that is, you’re willing to define a really good singing, not in terms of how it might sound as a performance, but how it felt to those of us who were singing.

So we got to 9:30, the time when we usually end very promptly, and Joanne said she was sorry that we didn’t have time to sing 347 Christian Farewell. We all looked at one another, and we decided, what the heck, we’d go past ending time tonight. We sang as well or better than we had sung all night, and I was glad we had gone past time. Later, after we had put everything away, and stood around talking for a quarter of an hour, and gone our separate ways, I was walking towards my car when David and Joanne drove by with their windows open, singing 347 together as they drove off into the dark and rainy night.

Today is the day before April 19 — and April 19 (as is well know by every schoolchild in Concord and Lexington in Massachusetts) is the anniversary of the Battle of Concord and Lexington, the battle that began the Revolutionary War. I grew up in Concord, Massachusetts, and April 19 was a big holiday for us as kids: we got to go see the parade, and watch the reenactment of the battle (the Red Coats always lose), and wander around town with our friends.

So I could not resist leading Chester, no. 479, by William Billings, with the original words probably written by Billings. The first verse appears in his 1770 tune book The New England Psalm-Singer:

Let tyrants shake their iron rod,
And Slav’ry clank her galling chains,
We fear them not, we trust in God,
New England’s God forever reigns.

The other four verses appear in full in his 1778 book The Singing Master’s Assistant:

Howe and Burgoyne and Clinton too,
With Prescot and Cornwallis join’d,
Together plot our Overthrow,
In one Infernal league combin’d.

When God inspir’d us for the fight,
Their ranks were broke, their lines were forc’d,
Their ships were Shatter’d in our sight,
Or swiftly driven from our Coast.

The Foe comes on with haughty Stride;
Our troops advance with martial noise,
Their Vet’rans flee before our Youth,
And Gen’rals yield to beardless Boys.

What grateful Off’ring shall we bring?
What shall we render to the Lord?
Loud Halleluiahs let us Sing,
And praise his name on ev’ry Chord.

I assume that these last four verses were written after the 1770 book, for these verses mention events that had not yet happened in 1770, but were very much in people’s minds in 1778.

Tonight, we sang the first and fourth of the original verses. Tonight’s class gave a powerful and stirring rendition of this glorious tune — perhaps because these words are more fun to sing than the perfectly fine poetry that’s in the book, for these words were written to match the tune. And in case you want to try this yourself, here’s a PDF of the tune with the four of the original five verses:

Chester. L.M. With original words.