Word: chorales
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...Sacred Harp for Health Re "Give Me That Old-Time Singing" [Jan. 28]: during my four years as a Sacred Harp singer, I discovered that beginners enjoy a warm welcome and excellent coaching. Experienced singers get a break from worrying about dynamics and tone quality. Everyone receives choral singing's documented benefits of stress reduction, lowered blood pressure and enhanced immunity. Best of all, we have an opportunity to create beautiful music that sometimes seems like a direct communication from the past to the present. Thanks for highlighting this life-affirming pursuit. Susan Matthews, Chicago
Actually, it was a resurrection. The singers--housewives, ex-punkers, Evangelicals, atheists, Jews and Buddhists waiting for their usual venue above a local bar to open--were devotees of a Christian four-part choral style called Sacred Harp (the name refers to the human voice and a songbook published in 1844). Once America's dominant religious music, it was eclipsed after the Civil War. By 1960, say scholars, as few as 1,000 people clustered in the Deep South knew the style...
...otherworldly open fifths--has been obsolete for more than a century. Its notation, in which triangles, circles and squares indicate pitch, looks like cuneiform. Yet it exudes power and integrity. Five people sound like a choir; a dozen like a hundred. It is one of the most democratic choral forms: no audience, no permanent conductor--just people addressing one another...
...There were noticeable intonation problems throughout “Choral Fantasy”—especially in the brass and violin sections—and minor issues with the ensemble of the piece, particularly during the performers’ entrances...
...However, the overall effect of the work was almost mythic. The waves of sound continued to build to the end of “Choral Fantasy” with the full grandeur of the choir’s pure harmonies, the strings’ furious tremolo, and Elkies’s intense scales and arpeggios. The evening as a whole was similarly fantastic...