“We Wish You…”

Every year in our congregation, Paul, one of our resident musicians, teaches the children in grades preK – 3 a couple of Christmas songs. On the day of our No-Rehearsal Christmas Pageant, Paul has the children sing these songs at the beginning of the early service.

One of the songs Paul usually has the children sing is “We Wish You a Merry Christmas.” Actually, it’s a great song for anyone to sing. I found an old four-part arrangement, simplified it, added guitar chords — and here it is, in a PDF version that’s copyright-free and sized right to go into the typical order of service:

We Wish

“The Race That Long in Darkness Pined”

It’s way too early for Christmas, but….

My favorite reading for the Christmas season is the King James translation of Isaiah 9.1-8. I love the rhythm of the language, and the beauty of the imagery. From a theological perspective, I’m not willing to say that Isaiah 9.1-8 predicts the coming of Jesus as the one and only Messiah (capital “M”) — I’m in the camp that says there have been and will continue to be messiahs (lower case “m”), of whom Jesus of Nazareth was one. Whatever my theological position, it’s a beautiful piece of prose.

Recently, I stumbled across a metrical paraphrase of Isaiah 9.1-8, done by John Morison for the 1650 Scottish Psalter. It’s not as good a rendition as the King James translation — but because it’s a metrical paraphrase, you could sing it, and how cool is that? So I wrote a hymn tune for it. A polyphonic tune. In Dorian mode. Between the music and the words, this would never be used as a hymn in a Unitarian Universalist congregation. But I had fun writing it, and there are one or two hymn geeks out there who might actually enjoy seeing it, so here it is:

TheRaceThatFingernail

(Click the image for a PDF. Complete words below.) Continue reading ““The Race That Long in Darkness Pined””

What I did with my weekend

I spent this past weekend singing Sacred Harp music: six hours of singing on Saturday, and another hour or so on Sunday. Sacred Harp is a kind of four-part a capella singing which originated in eighteenth century New England, migrated to the South in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, and which is now undergoing a renaissance among postmodern urbanites in the northern and western parts of the U.S. Rolling Stone magazine described it as “a robust, harmonically intricate of country joy and unearthly drone.”

This is sacred music; many of the texts are by Isaac Watts, which means this music would never be sung in most Unitarian Universalist congregations, where people tend to squirm at the mention of God and Jesus. Even though I don’t agree with the theology of most of the songs we sang, nevertheless I got more religion out of singing Sacred Harp than I generally get in a Unitarian Universalist worship service. I’ve been thinking about why that is so, and here are four of my reasons:

(a) Sacred Harp singing is DIY — do-it-yourself — music. There is no paid choir director, no soloists, no experts; there are no performances or performers; everyone participates in order for the music to happen. By contrast, Unitarian Universalist worship services feel like performances in front of an audience; if I don’t show up, it won’t make much difference.

(b) Sacred Harp singing can be, and often is, an ecstatic experience. Ecstatic and transcendental experiences tend to make Unitarian Universalists very uncomfortable.

(c) There’s a broad distribution of ages among Sacred Harp singers, from the late teens to the eighties and nineties. Unitarian Universalist congregations tend to be made up mostly of people who are fifty and older.

(d) The singing is loud, exuberant, and enthusiastic. The tunes are pitched so that ordinary singers can sing them comfortably. By contrast, singing in Unitarian Universalist congregations tends to be restrained, and the tunes are pitched so high that those of us with ordinary voices can’t sing them.

I still love my Unitarian Universalist church; Sacred Harp singing would not be an adequate substitute for what I get out of my religious community. But I can still wish the Unitarian Universalism would embrace the DIY ethos, welcome ecstasy and transcendence, include younger people, and sing better.

Singing with Coleman Barks

Shelley Phillips and Barry Phillips provided the music to accompany Coleman Barks as he read from his translations of Rumi last night at the First Congregational Church of Santa Cruz. Barks grew up in the south and loves shape note singing, so Shelley asked local Sacred Harp singers if they’d come and sing two tunes.

It’s a long way from San Mateo to Santa Cruz, and Carol and I got to the church about ten minutes before the reading was to begin. All the church’s parking spaces were full, and the school parking lot next door was full, too. We parked on the street.

As soon as I walked into the church, someone spotted the maroon oblong Sacred Harp book in my hand, and sent me to sit in one of the front three rows. I recognized Janet and one or two other singers, but no one else — it’s a long drive, and Santa Cruz singers don’t get up to the Bay Area to sing much.

Coleman Barks began reading. I could hear the cadences of Southern preaching in his voice. Shelley and Barry played — Shaker tunes, Sacred Harp tunes, Bach — as he read. People who study liturgy talk about the continuum from ordinary speech through heightened speech, singing, and finally wordless music. As Southern preachers often do, Barks moved along this continuum from ordinary speech to heightened speech; Shelley and Barry Phillips moved along the other end of the continuum, singing and music.

We Sacred Harp singers sang right after the intermission. Sacred Harp singing moves between heightened speech and singing, so we occupied the middle ground of that continuum from ordinary speech to music. Shelley led us in no. 178 Africa; Barks read one of his poems that mentions Sacred Harp singing, then we sang no. 59 Holy Manna (vv. 1, 3, 5). Barks came to sing with us on Holy Manna, standing in the bass section a couple of people to my left.

I think that was about the deadest place I’ve ever sung Sacred Harp in: I could hear a little of what the tenors were singing, and I could hear the bass I was standing next to, and I could hear Shelley, who was standing facing us; and that’s about all I could hear. So it wasn’t the ecstatic experience Sacred Harp singing can be when you can hear and respond to all the other singers; but it was probably a more musical experience for those who weren’t singing. When you’re singing for an audience, I think Sacred Harp tends to morph from an ecstatic form of heightened speech into musical singing — which, honestly, is a kindness to the audience; ecstasy doesn’t sound so good when you’re not singing along with it. Carol was siting out out in the audience, and she said we sounded fine.

Then Barks continued reading his translations of Rumi: poems of ecstatic and transcendent encounters with the divine; poems about mystic experiences, experiences which cannot be adequately communicated to an audience.

Cross-posted here.

Best new song of the season

OK, this song came out on Jennifer Cutting’s 2011 album “Song of Solstice,” so it’s not exactly new. But it’s new to me this year, and I think it’s the best new Yuletide song I’ve heard in a few years.

The song is called “Light the Winter’s Dark,” and below you can find my take on the lyrics, from the singing of Coope, Boyes, and Simpson, the English a capella trio who usually sing traditional tunes. Yeah, the lyrics are a little preachy, but most sacred song is a little preachy. I can’t find the song on Youtube, but you can hear a brief preview of the tune on the CD Universe Web site here; or there’s a longer preview at the iTunes store.

Get the choir in your Unitarian Universalist congregation to sing this song next year…

Continue reading “Best new song of the season”

Making labels

Yesterday, my friend Lewis came over to our apartment. Lewis is a luthier who makes (among other things) Celtic bouzoukis, and he wanted me to make some labels for them.

He brought a bouzouki to show me where the labels would go. I talked to him about light-fast pigments and archival papers, while for his part he told me about the instruments he makes:— His Celtic bouzoukis are beautiful instruments, and each one differs slightly in small details from the others — a slightly different bracing pattern, an inlaid piece of ebony inside the sound box with the number of the instrument. When you look at one of his bouzoukis, he wants you to know that it was made by hand, not by a machine. And he wanted each label to look hand-made, beautiful but with small imperfections.

So we sat at the kitchen table, eating home-made soup Lewis brought, and we made labels. I had some 100% rag vellum which I cut into 1-1/2 by 2-1/2 inch rectangles. Lewis signed each one using a magic marker with light-fat archival ink. I carefully wrote the serial number and “CELTIC BOUZOUKI / Oak. CA” under his signature, and then put a band of red watercolor paint along the top edge of the label. I don’t make many things like this any more; most of the things I make are text or photos or videos meant to go on Web sites, things you cannot touch. Real papers have different textures; they feel good under your fingers and hands, the pen moves over them in different ways, the ink soaks in or adheres to the surface differently. Paints are incredibly sensuous: the pigments finely ground into some luscious medium — linseed oil, gum arabic, casein, beeswax, whatever — and you dip a brush or knife into that vivid blob of color, and as you spread it the color changes as it interacts with whatever you’re painting, and you can smell it, and feel it when you use your fingers to smooth or blend.

The tools you use to make things have their own sensuality. To put the paint on the labels, I used a red sable watercolor brush, a gorgeous tiny little cluster of perfect animal hairs at the end of a delightfully balanced wooden handle. I remember one painting teacher, years ago, who used to insist a good watercolor brush should be as firm as a partially tumescent penis (yes, he was a man). The subject of art is always love or sex or death, but making things is all about sex, all about the act of creation. Creating things to be viewed on a screen is very satisfying — I love the way the completed image or text glows with that faintly blue light that comes out of your screen — but you can’t touch it or smell it while you’re making it. If making things is like sex, then making things for the screen is like reading about sex; it all happens in your mind and eyes, not in your body.

But the metaphor has overwhelmed the subject, because all I was doing was making labels. What amazes me is that the labels I made yesterday — cutting out a rectangle of paper, adding some lettering and a spot of color — will wind up inside musical instruments which are works of art and which may well outlive me. Far fewer people will see the labels I made than will see this blog post, but making the labels was far more satisfying.

Another look at sources of sacred song

Music geeks, this post is for you.

Jay Atkinson mentioned to me that he is tracking down errors in the attribution of some of the readings in the 1993 Unitarian Universalist hymnal, Singing the Living Tradition, and I told him that there are also misattributions in the music. He asked me to give him some examples, and with very little effort I came up with the following:

 

279, “By the Waters of Babylon,” with words taken from Psalm 137, is attributed to William Billings in Singing the Living Tradition. However, this tune does not appear in the definitive four volume Complete Works of William Billings; there is a tune titled “Lamentation over Boston” with the words “By the rivers of Watertown,” a Revolutionary War era parody of Psalm 137, but the tune is utterly different. The second edition (1998) of Between the Lines: Sources for Singing the Living Tradition makes a partial correction, stating “This tune is frequently attributed, erroneously, to William Billings.” On his 1971 album “American Pie,” pop singer Don McLean performs this tune almost precisely as given in Singing the Living Tradition, and attributes it to William Billings; wherever McLean got his misinformation, no doubt this once popular album has spread the misinformation far and wide.

Where, then, does the tune come from? Continue reading “Another look at sources of sacred song”

Classical music video no. 6

There are several young classical composers that critics are calling “indie-classical,’ because they combine the singer-songwriter sensibility of indie rock with classical music complexity and depth. Today you get three videos, all of “indie-classical” music:

Continue reading “Classical music video no. 6”

Classical music video no. 5

Yesterday I mentioned composer Conlon Nancarrow (1912-1997); today’s video is of the Bang-on-a-Can All-Stars playing one of his works. “Study 3a” was originally written for player piano, and was not playable by a human pianist. This transcription, playable by humans, divides up the music among several musicians playing piano, electric guitar, clarinet, sax, cello, bass, and percussion.

Here’s another example of music that defies the boundaries of musical genre. Is it jazz? classical? or what? Nancarrow had played jazz when he was young, before studying “classical” music with Walter Piston, Roger Sessions, etc. This piece is obviously influenced by classical music of the mid-twentieth century, but check out that groovy boogie-woogie left hand on the piano that just gets under your skin and makes you want to dance.

If you’re curious what the original work sounded like, here’s a player piano rendition on Youtube. Me, I like the human-performed version better.