The Psalmist's Harp Inaugural Singing -- Monday, 16 December 2019

Note: I had intended to post this update much nearer in time to the first singing, but life interposed; I present the below to you with apologies for my lateness and with a better-late-than-never mindset.

The Psalmist's Harp: Inaugural Singing, Monday, 16 DEC 2019

4:00 PM*, Summerall Chapel, Low Country Shape Note Singers and Citadel Southern Harmony Singers in Attendance

The inaugural singing from The Psalmist's Harp was the concluding event in a three-day-long singing weekend in Charleston, beginning with the monthly Low Country Sacred Harp/Shenandoah Harmony Singing on Saturday, followed by the the Fifth Sunday Citadel Southern Harmony Singing on Sunday (commuted to SUN 15 from SUN 29 DEC, to accommodate the travel plans of the regular singers in the group). 

I don't necessarily intend that rigorous minute-keeping will be a part of the custom in singing from this book -- though I guess that's a decision that will ultimately be made by the singers, not by me -- but I did make a note of the songs called (and their callers) during our inaugural singing, posted below:

Minutes of The Psalmist’s Harp Inaugural Singing

Psalm 147 Coronation.............Mitchell Stecker 

Ps. 1 - Sweet Prospect..............Stephen Jones

Ps. 42 Genevan 42.....................Rob Dillon

Ps. 16 Messiah.............................Sarah Boice

Ps. 15 Dade City........................Liz Garrett

Ps. 60 Dives & Lazarus.............Sharon Strong

Ps. 109 Depravity.......................Tom Ivey

Ps. 91 Pleading Savior..............MS

Ps. 88 Jones..................................SJ

Ps. 86 Heavenly Dove...............SB

Ps. 20 Garrett............................LG

Ps. 140 Connector.....................SS

Ps. 141 Downpatrick..................TI

Ps. 146 Hallelujah.....................MS

Ps. 146b Livonia..........................SJ

Ps. 33 Mary Blain.......................SB

Ps. 119Resh Savannah Hwy......LG

Ps. 72 Woodbird.........................SS

Ps. 150c South Carolina...........TI

Ps. 76 Marini...............................MS, at LG's request

Ps. 100 Old Hundred & CM Doxology

It was a pleasant afternoon of singing, and I believe we all enjoyed the experience; we're hoping to integrate The Psalmist's Harp into our Wednesday night singings on a regular basis. 

*The singing was scheduled to start at 4:00, but did not begin until about 4:25, as I (along with the books) was caught in some particularly egregious Charleston traffic. 

The Kickstarter is Live!

Now that the compilation of the tunebook has been completed, the Kickstarter has officially been launched (the approval process was much speedier than anticipated)! 

See the link below for details on pre-ordering a book and rewards for early backers, including a discount on a box of 10 books for those who would want to start using the tunebook  in a social singing context.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/thepsalmistsharp/the-psalmists-harp-the-whole-psalter-set-to-fasola-tunes

Thanks in advance for your support!

Presenting: The Psalmist's Harp!

Dear singing friends everywhere,

It gives me great pleasure to announce that the First Electronic Edition of The Psalmist's Harp is now available! As stated before, my plan is to offer the PDF version for free download indefinitely, for anyone who would like to examine its contents, to have an electronic version for study or singing, or who would like to print the contents and produce their own physical book.

I am in the final stages of setting up the Kickstarter, which will help defray the cost of the first printing run. You'll be seeing more information about that in the very near future.

For now, enjoy the electronic version, and please feel free to share whatever feedback you may have!

UPDATE: The Kickstarter is now live! If you appreciate the book, please consider contributing to the cause of getting it printed.

The time is drawing nigh

I've had my hands full with other obligations, so not only am I behind on an update, progress on the compilation has also been slow-going. However, the pace has picked up in recent days, and the end is in sight.

I completed the preface this afternoon, and am currently finished with revisions of Psalms up through the middle sections of the 119^th psalm. At this rate, the compilation should be complete and ready for electronic publication by the end of the weekend. At that point, I’ll  plan to officially launch the Kickstarter (a topic I’ll provide more details about in a post in the next couple of days), and subsequently begin the process of publishing the physical book!

For now, as a curiosity for you to consider, I’ve attached a concoction of mine based on a familiar William Walker tune, composed in homage to that great compiler who was active just up the road from myself. I incorporate the tune in two ways, one of which is more immediately apparent than the other. We’ll try it at the weekly Citadel singing this evening and see how it turns out. Feel free to do the same. 

Something for Reformation Day

I wish I could provide a more exciting update, but unfortunately I have not had a lot of time to devote to the compilation over the past few weeks, as the number of my professional demands has been exceptionally high. Furthermore, we’re holding steady at three tunes to go, as I’ve been mostly concentrating on boring things like indices, and so I don't have anything new and exciting to post.

As a result, I’ve instead decided to share a seasonally appropriate update from repertoire that I had previous typeset. While the vast majority of 19^th century shape note activity was English language based, there were a handful of four-shape tunebooks published with text entirely in German, or as bilingual German-English collections, including Choral-Harmonie (Gerhart & Eyer, 1818), Die Neue Choral Harmonie (Musselmann, 1844), and Die Pennsylvanishe Choral Harmonie, compiled by T.R. Weber, which ran for at least fifteen editions.

Below is a tune excerpted from one such collection, Die Union Choral Harmonie (Henry C. Eyer, printed by Francis Wyeth: Harrisburg, PA, 1836). In honor of Reformation Day, I hope you’ll enjoy Asylum, one of the entries for the 46^th Psalm – I suspect many of you will recognize the tune, even if Herr Eyer names it something unfamiliar. Give it a sing if you have an opportunity this weekend – or some other time – and if you’re feeling up to it, give the German a shot. Viel Spaß!

An Update/Some words (and shapes) on a new tune, 111 WAREH

UPDATE: We’re getting close now: each psalm has a text, each text has a tune, and all but three of those have been typeset! That said, there is still a significant amount of revising and editing to do before the volume is ready for printing, but I’m still clinging to my goal of having a book in hand by Christmas. Onward!

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I’d like to share another of the new tunes that will appear in the collection, this one written in honor of a singer many of you know, Tarik Wareh. Tarik had made a comment on a Facebook group or another electronic medium wondering about the use of organum-derived compositional techniques in fasola music.* This was something that I had also wondered about in the past, but had not devoted the time or energy to exploring. I took the occasion as an opportunity to tinker a little bit, and the tune below is what I came up with.

I had originally intended to write a three-voice tune, treating the tenor as the cantus firmus and the treble as the organal voice. However, I had a difficult time wrangling the ranges of the voice parts in that approach, and decided to shelve it in favor of a slightly more manageable (if somewhat watered down) technique in which the bass, tenor, and alto voices are freely composed, and the treble voice acts as a sort of organal voice to the alto. To facilitate harmony more idiomatic to the fasola tradition, a further liberty has been taken in somewhat freely vacillating between parallel fourth and parallel fifth organum, with the changes happening at the four primary structural points in the tune’s phrasing.

Although the final product turned out significantly differently from the original intent, I think it serves as a(n unsurprising) proof of concept that organal techniques can indeed be used to convincing effect in fasola composing. Tarik took the tune to the weekly Schenectady, NY Sacred Harp singing and they were kind enough to sing through the tune. Below are a couple of recordings Tarik managed to grab of the tune...what do you think?

*I’m pretty sure George Jackson uses the term “folk organum” in White Spirituals but the thesis is still too raw to consult my notes or the book and confirm it.

New Facebook page! Plus an update & new tune

While I intend to continue posting the bulk of the project's updates to this medium, I am excited to announce a new Facebook page! I'll try to duplicate most of the content found here over there, but I figured it would probably be more convenient for many of you to be able to follow updates in your newsfeed compared to on an independent website.
Check it out and like the page here: https://www.facebook.com/ThePsalmistsHarp

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On to the update....

As of yesterday, the current count stands at:

-2 texts awaiting to be paired with tunes
-9 texts paired with tunes awaiting typesetting
-186 entries (out of a total 198 to be included in the first edition) completed!

The most recent of these is the tune included below. The end of the book will offer three newly composed tunes -- one short meter, one common meter, and one long meter -- affixed with paraphrases of the doxology in the appropriate meter. The thought behind this is that many ancient Christian practices involve the singing of the doxology at the end of psalm singing; in this way, singers will have texts in each of the three most popular hymn meters, and would be able to insert one of the three as a last verse of one of the psalms in the book. Or, for the more adventurous, a leader could also attempt an "at-will" text-tune pairing by drawing a familiar text from the book and pairing those words with the new tunes.

Give MAGNOLIA, the short meter tune, a shot -- we tried it out at our weekly Citadel shape note singing last evening and thought it was alright! (By the way, in case you were wondering, all three of the doxology tunes do share an arboreal theme.)