Arguments you wouldn't make in Alabama 11
I spent the weekend at the UK Sacred Harp Convention, singing blood curdling hymns to the glory of god, very loudly with a hundred or so others. Great fun so it was. There’s something joyous about hollering out a hymn that opens with the line “And am I born to die?” and ends with the stanza
Waked by the trumpet’s sound
I from my grave shall rise
And see the Judge in glory crowned
And see the flaming skies
Especially if you’re stood in the middle of a hollow square with the altos behind you hitting a high note that lifts every hair on the back of you neck.
Anyhow, at one point during the Saturday evening social I found myself arguing that, although we singers today may feel grateful to those congregations of singers down the years who have sung these songs and handed the practice down to succeeding generations, there’s no requirement to be grateful, or even to go hunting for ‘authenticity’. Every generation that’s sung these songs and many others haven’t sung them to preserve them or to pass them on. They’ve sung them because the act of singing them has helped them to get through their lives. The songs we have, we know because successive generations have found them to be worth singing or recording. And we sing them for similar reasons. Future generations can go hang, I sing this stuff because it makes me feel good, not because I have some kind of duty.
“It’s a Darwinian argument,” I said, “Though obviously, I wouldn’t put it like that in Alabama…”
Songs are memes. The Darwinian analogy fits perfectly. I’d never thought of it like that before, but it makes complete sense.
Nor had I really. I was just trying to make a point about how we don’t have to do things the same way as the tradition bearers we learn from (because if we did, there would still be strange fruit hanging from poplar trees and slaves working in the fields to pick just one tasteless example of Things We Don’t Do Any More) and realised I was essentially explaining traditions with a neo-Darwinian/Selfish Gene type analysis.
The more I think about it, the more I am sure that what I tend to think of as the Darwinian Syllogism is a massively important and universal principle that was only coincidentally first noticed in relation to explaining biological evolution. The basic mechanism pertains where ever you find the necessary conditions. And the necessary conditions aren’t all that unusual really. At least, not in any of the ‘fuzzy’ fields of human endeavour.
It’s amazing how often you find out what you think while you’re arguing about it…
“Future generations can go hang, I sing this stuff because it makes me feel good, not because I have some kind of duty.”
Er—This Sacred Harp singer actually does both. Yes, I love to sing it [and just spent my weekend at the United Sacred Harp Convention in Alabama], but I also care about it enough to want to pass it on, and evangelize for it as well. Duty isn’t opposed to love; it grows out of it.
Heh. On the internet all arguments are made in Alabama. I always forget that.
@David: I love this stuff enough that I want to pass that enthusiasm on to others too, but if it is a duty then it’s a duty to those poor benighted people who haven’t heard it, rather than to the people who inspired me in the first place. It’s also enlightened self interest – the people who inspired me are mostly older than me. If I can’t encourage others to keep singing then there will come a point when I simply won’t be able to sing with the kind of numbers of singers that really bring sacred harp to life (it’s great in our monthly Newcastle sings, when we’re lucky if there’s 10 of us in the room. It’s amazing at the UK National when there were 100 of us. What it must have been like in Alabama this weekend? Well, it gives me the shivers just to think about. I hope you raised the roof)
Interesting. Just this weekend one of my shapenote colleagues was reporting a principle of one of the major singing school teachers—not a musical one, it was that “if you are going to sing the repeat on the words, you have to sing it on the notes.” And I thought: HAVE to? Sure, you could argue it’s a good idea, so we remember how to do the turn, but HAVE to? Why? There was a certain quality of “Because that’s how it’s done in Alabama” about it.
I am the singer Piers was having this discussion with at the UK Convention.
Sorry, Piers, but I’m still not completely on the same page with you folks here, I’m just not persuaded by this argument. This is not just any old kind of music, but rather an organic thing with its own traditions, standards etc. What you are arguing is like saying to Olympic high-jumpers that if they like, they should use springier poles, and while you’re at it a little performance enhancing drugs can never hurt. Or maybe if you play bridge, why not just make up different rules. After all, it’s only someone’s else’s tradition, and you say ‘f* that’. I don’t have a problem with disliking certain aspects of a tradition, but I do have a problem with the idea that tradition is there to be rubbished.
If you don’t like singing Sacred Harp to the “standard” (and there are actually very few) and want to sing it some different way, then by all means knock yourself out, but you’ll have to accept that there will be those (like me) who think what you’re doing isn’t really the art form (or the Olympic discipline if you want to use that analogy), but rather something else. And – I mean this in the nicest possible way – I will tend not to take you as seriously as I would if you weren’t trying to rubbish the entire system. If that’s ok with you, then it’s ok with me!
Best regards,
Michael
PS: Maybe “Japanese tea ceremony” would also fit as an analogy. Anyway: I personally think it is absolutely brilliant that this organic tradition has survived for 200 years in rural America. It has certainly enhanced my quality of life, and I think it would be great if I could help it to survive another 200 years.
You mistake me badly if you think I’m trying to ‘rubbish’ the tradition I’m afraid. I too think it’s brilliant that it has survived as long as it has, it would be wonderful if it were to continue. But that doesn’t mean that there is any requirement to preserve traditions exactly as we have received them (even assuming that were actually possible). We may choose to try and do that in whatever way we see fit, but that’s a very different deal.
Looking at your analogies, I assume you meant pole vaulting, which is definitely a sport which has been affected by technological development of the poles used. As far as I can tell, about the only thing that hasn’t changed is that the poles are restricted in length. Certainly modern materials and technology are changing most other olympic disciplines – both at the level of new running surfaces, lighter shoes, speedo skinsuits, track bikes and in terms of an improved understanding of optimum diet etc.
As for bridge, do you mean contract bridge, or its parent auction bridge, or its parent whist, or its parent hazard. Each game in that chain came about because players took the bits of the old game that worked for them and tweaked the rules to come up with a better game. Auction bridge never really survived the transition to contract bridge, but people are still playing whist.
Personally, I’m all for learning how others carry a tradition and how it as been borne in the past. But I’m exceedingly wary of condemning others because they choose not to. What seems most important is the fellowship of the hollow square that I’m singing in today. I don’t care why everyone else is there, be they atheist or believer, traditionalist or iconoclast, or someone we persuaded up from the library the day before. All that matters, all that ever will matter, is the singing.
And lunch. Lunch is important.
I hope to see you at lunch (and at the singing before and after) on Saturday? Best, Michael
Sadly not I’m afraid. Too much stuff to do at home.
There was, as you may know, something on the order of 40 or 50 four-shape tunebooks and probably 20 or 30 7-shape tune books printed in this genre in the 19th and 20th centuries. Most of them have disappeared without many traces (unless you count recondite essays in American musicology journals or antique booksellers specialising in musical Americana). A notable exception to their disappearance has been the Sacred Harp, in both of its versions, and one or two other very local tunebooks such as the Christian Harmony and the New Harp of Columbia. I would postulate that one of the main reasons that Sacred Harp has hung on is because it has this whole system of traditions that has grown up around it since it was first published in 1844, and that those traditions and the music quickly became self-perpetuating. I certainly agree with you that it is possible for traditions to evolve and that they are tweakable. That doesn’t really constitute any contradiction of or tension with the idea of respecting tradition within some kind of reasonable framework. I am not and have not been arguing that Sacred Harp may not be sung by women who are wearing trousers (which is an attitude that was prevalent not so many years ago and even today is discussed in some very conservative SH circles). To the contrary. One of the interesting developments in Sacred Harp today is how it is being sung by young urban hipsters, some of whom want to travel to the rural South and experience the tradition in its organic, natural setting. This doesn’t mean that they are then converted (whether to the religious world-view of the traditional singers in Cleburne County, Alabama or to their social or racial attitudes or anything like that). They will tend to go back home to Brooklyn or Northampton Massachusetts or Portland Oregon and continue to attend their local singings wearing their dreadlocks, grungy jeans or various rings in noses and lips. But nevertheless, there is an interest there. I think one of the amazing but under-discussed stories in all this is the way their influence is having an effect on the lifelong singers, many of whom are Primitive Baptists living in very rural places much like where I grew up. Finally, I believe what one can say is that if you allow them to, the traditions that are “good” can sometimes adapt themselves slowly but surely to changes in society. Sometimes the traditions need a little help along the way, and there is nothing wrong with that. However, at least in the US, there is a real hunger, even in places like Portland Oregon, to connect with something that is so authentic and organic as Sacred Harp singing in its natural state, and that accounts at least to some extent for the renaissance of this music in the US. I recommend the book published this year by Prof. Kiri Miller of Brown University, Traveling Home: Sacred Harp Singing and American Pluralism.