Singing New Tunes
While I was in New York City for my Eyebeam show with Tintinnabulate, I got to go to a specially scheduled Northern Harmony and unusal material singing at Aldo’s house in Brooklyn. In addition to a bunch of Northern Harmony books, people brought photocopies of tunes taken from a variety of 19th-century sources and a selection of original compositions. Aldo had a bunch of his songs. I had two of mine, “Nashville Airport” and “Pleasure,” and also brought a few pages from the newly typeset JL White Sacred Harp. We had a very talented bunch of singers, and it was exhillarating to spend nearly a whole singing sight reading new music.
It was lots of fun reading Aldo’s pieces, and it was a thrill to hear mine sung. We sang “Nashville Airport” first. I wrote the tune to “Nashville Airport” en route back home from my second trip to Alabama this summer. I was sitting next to Dana the whole time, and later this fall, I asked her to choose a text for the tune. She picked the “Give me a calm and thankful heart…” text that John Hocutt set in “A Thankful Heart,” a favorite text of mine, and a clever reference to our journeys that summer. This was the first singing of the tune, and I was surprised by the sound. It felt hollow and in a few places the voicing seemed unbalanced. The piece never attains the richness or soaring quality that some Sacred Harp songs have. All the same, it was consonant, and interesting, and more traditional than anything I wrote before the summer, so I was happy with it.
The singers enjoyed it very much and wanted to sing the other piece right away. “Pleasure” is one of my more recent tunes. I wrote it in December, after one failed attempt, trying to write a setting of the text to 178 for a selection of songs I was hoping to put in a small handmade tunebook (though that project is now on hold until at least after my thesis). The song came out well, and despite a slightly odd ending, it sounds very much like Sacred Harp music. I thought this piece went even better than “Nashville Airport” at the Brooklyn singing, and the singers enjoyed it as well.
Two days later, and back in Troy, I brought these two pieces as well as “Prospect Heights” to the Cambridge singing to give to one of the singers there, who is hoping to compile all the loose music that has been sung at that singing from time to time. I hadn’t really even intended to sing my songs, but the singers there were interested. We ended up singing all three in a row, in the same order as at the Brooklyn singing but with “Prospect Heights” tacked on to the end. All thee sounded good, and the singers liked them all, though I still think “Pleasure” is my favorite. I had brought “Prospect Heights” to this singing over the summer, where singers had liked it very much, George Seiler in particular, but alongside these two newer songs, it felt like the weakest of the three to me. There was some interesting conversation about other settings of the “Death like an overflowing stream…” text. There have been many many settings of this text over the years. Kerry expressed interest in some time singing all the settings of the text back to back, which I think would be a lot of fun.
Otherwise, we sang a number of great fuging tunes from the Sacred Harp and a few from the Northern Harmony. Toward the beginning we sang through the Sacred Harp from page 192 to 203, only skipping a couple of songs. I sang the tenor part the whole time, which made for another evening of non-stop sight reading.
The next Cambridge singing will be the first practice singing of my thesis songs, and we scheduled it for the 12th! So, that’s a little bit nerve wracking, but it’s really what I have to do if I want to finish in time. I’ve finished the rough draft of the narrative, so now I really need to write the poems and then proceed to the songs themselves.
Anyhow — while I was typesetting the three tunes of mine that got sung this week, I was also reorganzing my shape note music web site. I took down all the old crappy songs that were up there, and put up these three, and a page linking to the various shape note music-related artwork I’ve worked on over the past year.
Nashville Airport, Pleasure, and Prospect Heights are all available for download as PDF files, and as MIDI files.