Sacred Harp
Sacred Harp singing is a tradition of sacred choral music which developed in New England and perpetuated in the American South. The name is derived from The Sacred Harp, a historically important shape-note tunebook printed in 1844; multiple subsequent revisions of the tunebook have remained in use since. Sacred Harp singing has roots in the singing schools that developed over the period 1770 to 1820 in and around New England, related development under the influence of "revival" services around the 1840s. This music was included in, and became profoundly associated with, books using the shape note style of notation popular in America in the 18th and early 19th centuries.
Sacred Harp music is sung a cappella and originated as Protestant music. The contemporary Sacred Harp tradition includes singers and events in the American South but also across the United States as well as several other countries, particularly the UK and Germany.
The music and its notation
The name of the tradition comes from the title of the shape-note book from which the music is sung, The Sacred Harp. This book exists today in various editions, discussed below.In shape-note music, notes are printed in special shapes that help the reader identify them on the musical scale. There are two prevalent systems, one using four shapes, and one using seven. In the four-shape system used in The Sacred Harp, each of the four shapes is connected to a particular syllable, fa, sol, la, or mi, and these syllables are employed in singing the notes, just as in the more familiar system that uses do, re, mi, etc.. The four-shape system is able to cover the full musical scale because each syllable-shape combination other than mi is assigned to two distinct notes of the scale. For example, the C major scale would be notated and sung as follows:
Image:TheShapesOfShapeNoteSinging 4ShapeSystem.gif|center|600 px|The C major scale in shape notes
The shape for fa is a triangle, sol an oval, la a rectangle, and mi a diamond.
In Sacred Harp singing, pitch is not absolute. The shapes and notes designate degrees of the scale, not particular pitches. Thus for a song in the key of C, fa designates C and F; for a song in G, fa designates G and C, and so on; hence it is called a moveable "do" system.
When Sacred Harp singers begin a song, they normally start by singing it with the appropriate syllable for each pitch, using the shapes to guide them. For those in the group not yet familiar with the song, the shapes help with the task of sight reading. The process of reading through the song with the shapes also helps fix the notes in memory. Once the shapes have been sung, the group then sings the verses of the song with their printed words.
Singing Sacred Harp music
Sacred Harp groups always sing a cappella, that is to say, without accompanying instruments. The singers arrange themselves in a hollow square, with rows of chairs or pews on each side assigned to each of the four parts: treble, alto, tenor, and bass. The treble and tenor sections are usually mixed, with men and women singing the notes an octave apart.There is no single leader or conductor; rather, the participants take turns in leading. The leader for a particular round selects a song from the book, and "calls" it by its page number. Leading is done in an open-palm style, standing in the middle of the square facing the tenors.
The pitch at which the music is sung is relative; there is no instrument to give the singers a starting point. At a given singing event, one or more people are designated "keyers"; they are responsible for choosing the key at which the song will be sung and intoning it to the group. The singers reply with the opening notes of their own parts, and then the song begins immediately. Leaders have the option of keying their own songs, if they are able and choose to do so.
Musical style
As the name implies, the tunes in the Sacred Harp and related tunebooks are predominantly sacred music and originated as music sung by Protestant Christians. Many of the songs in the book are hymns that use words, meters, and stanzaic forms familiar from elsewhere in Protestant hymnody. However, many other Sacred Harp songs are quite different from mainstream hymns in their musical style: some, known as fuguing tunes, contain sections that are polyphonic in texture, and the harmony tends to deemphasize the interval of the third in favor of fourths and fifths. In their melodies, the songs often use the pentatonic scale or similar "gapped" scales. The harmonic and contrapuntal style of Sacred Harp singing is often referred to as "dispersed harmony".In their musical form, Sacred Harp songs fall into three basic types. Many are ordinary hymn tunes, mostly composed in four-bar phrases and sung in multiple verses. Fuguing tunes contain at least one prominent passage, usually after a homophonic opening couplet, in which each of the four choral parts enters in succession, in a way resembling a fugue. Anthems are songs with non-metrical text drawn directly from scripture; they are sung through just once rather than in multiple verses, and tend to be longer than hymn tunes and fuging tunes.
Sacred Harp singing deviates in several respects from typical choral music. It is not generally rehearsed or performed for an audience: singers participate for the sake of the experience in itself, as well as for the sake of the friendships and social ties of the community. Songs are generally sung in strict time, without pauses at the ends of phrases. A prominent feature of the vocal style is accent: instead of phrases being sung legato, downbeats are sung louder than offbeats, enhancing a shared feeling of pulse and providing rhythmic interest to the singing experience. Especially at large singings, the volume of the sound is generally loud.
Although Sacred Harp singing is heavily reliant on the printed book, the style of singing and social customs are also transmitted orally. In some cases, singers deviate from the music in specific ways that cannot necessarily be assumed from the book itself.
Teaching music in the Sacred Harp style
Sacred Harp music continues to be taught in "singing schools" by members of the singing community.The Sacred Harp, as is typical of shape-note tunebooks, contains a section on rudiments, describing the basics of music and Sacred Harp singing.
Books in contemporary use
The most common tunebook in the Sacred Harp tradition is The Sacred Harp: 2025 Edition, published by the Sacred Harp Publishing Company; David Ivey was the editorial chair for this revision. This book is used as the principal or only book at the majority of major singing events. This book is often known as the "Denson Book". Work on this revision began in 2018; the first public singing from this revision took place with the 2025 session of the United Sacred Harp Musical Association on September 13–14; it has a green cover. Previous editions date back to 1911.Also commonly used is The Sacred Harp, Revised Cooper Edition, colloquially known as the "Cooper Book" or the "blue book". It has significant overlap in contents with the Denson Book but a different revision history dating back to a 1902 revision. The Cooper Book contains a much higher proportion of songs influenced by gospel music than the Denson Book. In some regions, the Cooper Book is the primary edition of the Sacred Harp used; elsewhere, some singers appreciate it as a secondary book that provides variety.
Many Sacred Harp singers also sing from other tunebooks. Several of these have histories and communities of their own, and many continue to be edited and revised to fit the needs of contemporary participants. Many who sing from these tunebooks, however, are also familiar with the more prominent Sacred Harp editions. These other books include:
- Less common editions of the Sacred Harp, such as the J. L. White book
- Other historical four-shape tunebooks, such as the Missouri Harmony or Judge Jackson's Colored Sacred Harp
- Seven-shape tunebooks such as The Christian Harmony and Harmonia Sacra
- Contemporary tunebooks such as the Shenandoah Harmony.
Venues for singing
Some of the largest and oldest annual singings are called "conventions". The oldest Sacred Harp convention was the Southern Musical Convention, organized in Upson County, Georgia in 1845. The two oldest surviving Sacred Harp singing conventions are the Chattahoochee Musical Convention, and the East Texas Sacred Harp Convention.
Singings are not restricted to members of an organization, but are communicated verbally at other singings, through social media and email lists, in unofficial public listings, and in Sacred Harp Singings: Minutes and Directory, published annually by the Sacred Harp Musical Heritage Association. "Minutes" of conventions and all-day singings are also kept as a record; recent minutes are published in this annual volume as well as online.
History of Sacred Harp singing
Marini traces the earliest roots of Sacred Harp to the "country parish music" of early 18th century England. This form of rural church music evolved a number of the distinctive traits that were passed on from tradition to tradition, until they ultimately became part of Sacred Harp singing. These traits included the assignment of the melody to the tenors, harmonic structure emphasizing fourths and fifths, and the distinction between the ordinary four-part hymn, the anthem, and the fuguing tune. Several composers of this school, including Joseph Stephenson and Aaron Williams, are represented in the 1991 Edition of The Sacred Harp. For further information on the English roots of Sacred Harp music, see West gallery music.Around the mid-18th century, the forms and styles of English country parish music were introduced to America, notably in a new tunebook called Urania, published 1764 by the singing master James Lyon. This stimulus soon led to the development of a robust native school of composition, signaled by the 1770 publication of William Billings's The New England Psalm Singer, and then by a great number of new compositions by Billings and those who followed in his path. The work of these composers, sometimes called the "First New England School", forms a major part of the Sacred Harp to this day.
Billings and his followers worked as singing masters, who led singing schools. The purpose of these schools was to train young people in the correct singing of sacred music. This pedagogical movement flourished, and led ultimately to the invention of shape notes, which originated as a way to make the teaching of singing easier. The first shape note tunebook appeared in 1801: The Easy Instructor by William Smith and William Little. At first, Smith and Little's shapes competed with a rival system, created by Andrew Law in his The Musical Primer of 1803. Although this book came out two years later than Smith and Little's book, Law claimed earlier invention of shape notes. In his system, a square indicated fa, a circle sol, a triangle la and a diamond, mi. Law used the shaped notes without a musical staff. The Smith and Little shapes ultimately prevailed.
Shape notes became very popular, and during the first part of the nineteenth century, a whole series of shape note tunebooks appeared, many of which were widely distributed. As the population spread west and south, the tradition of shape note singing expanded geographically. Composition flourished, with the new music often drawing on the tradition of folk song for tunes and inspiration. Probably the most successful shape note book prior to The Sacred Harp was William Walker's Southern Harmony, published in 1835 and still in use today.
Even as they flourished and spread, shape notes and the kind of participatory music which they served came under attack. The critics were from the urban-based "better music" movement, spearheaded by Lowell Mason, which advocated a more "scientific" style of sacred music, more closely based on the harmonic styles of contemporaneous European music. The new style gradually prevailed. Shape notes and their music disappeared from the cities prior to the Civil War, and from the rural areas of the Northeast and Midwest in the following decades. However, they retained a haven in the rural South, which remained a fertile territory for the creation of new shapenote publications.