A global chorus of tradition and fellowship

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Tuesday, December 10th.

This is The World and Everything in It and we’re so glad you are along with us today. Good morning. I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard.

Coming next: musical traditions.

It was in the early 1800s that musicians traveled around New England teaching a method of singing. It relied on a four-note system of shapes … squares, triangles, and diamonds.

Fa-Sol-La or shape-note singing used British folk melodies to sing the words of hymns.

EICHER: The boisterous songs were used at camp meetings and revivals, but soon they were replaced with more refined European music. But shape-note singing didn’t die.

Here’s WORLD Correspondent Amy Lewis.

SINGING: [BRETHREN WE HAVE COME]

AMY LEWIS: When Natalie Sims learned about old-style shape-note songs and Sacred Harp music, she and her husband were living in Connecticut in 2001.

SIMS: We came across Sacred Harp singing actually from hearing it on the radio. So we went and looked up the internet and found our local singing, which was, at the time, a bit over an hour's drive away, and just went and tried it and fell in love with it.

Even though they enjoyed it, her husband Shawn Whelan says it was a steep learning curve.

WHELAN: They opened up the books, they said, welcome. Look at this number on this page and go. And launched into this breakneck speed song that we'd never heard, and we were expected to sight read and sing along with all of that. Like, ah, strap yourself in for the roller coaster ride.

For the next 6 months, Sims and Whelan attended every shape-note event they could. Then they moved back to Melbourne, Australia.

SIMS: And we thought, oh, we'll just find our local group and we'll sing with them. But there was no local group. So we thought, well, we better start one, because we like it.

That was 23 years ago. Since then, they have helped a number of groups form in Australia. Sims teaches briefly at the start of all-day sing-alongs.

SIMS: So the different shapes that we have is fa, so, la, and mi. A way to remember the name, the shapes and their names, is fa is like a triangular flag, so like some bunting or something like that. So is round, like the sun…

STUDENTS: Fa, so, la, fa, so, la, mi, fa

In November, one of the groups they helped form in Kyneton, Victoria, held their annual all-day sing in the cavernous Kyneton Mechanics Institute. It’s about an hour drive from Melbourne and a 90-minute flight from Sydney. Four Sydneysiders made that trek, including Angharad Davis.

DAVIS: So I've come down from Sydney to the Kyneton all-day Sacred Harp singing, which is a yearly gathering in which Sacred Harp singers from around Australia—especially from the Melbourne region and the Victoria region—come together for a day of loud singing, good fun, fellowship, and food.

Davis learned about the singing method 10 years ago while studying musicology in Connecticut. She now writes shape-note songs and submitted several to the revised Sacred Harp songbook due out next year.

Shape-note singers at Kyneton Mechanics Institute in Kyneton, Victoria Photo by Amy Lewis

Shawn Whelan has also tried his hand at song writing.

WHELAN: Even the new songs typically are tunes and arrangements which are set to some old words going back to Isaac Watson's time. Some of the words that we sing, then have some very old fashioned theology that wouldn't be sung in a lot of churches these days, certainly not in mine.

SINGING: Oh that I could repent…

WHELAN: I sometimes say I enjoy some of the songs despite the words. There are other songs I love because of the words.

Experience is the best teacher for people learning. People like Kate Reed visiting from Dunedin, New Zealand.

REED: There’s a website called Sacred Harp Bremen that has the music and a little MIDI recording, so you could sing along and learn the songs. I have a little loop pedal, so I would learn all the parts and sing all the parts, because I didn’t have anyone to sing with, because there’s none in New Zealand.

This is the second time she’s flown to meet other singers in person. She and nearly 20 others sit in a hollow square facing each other.

SINGING: Fa so la…

After choosing a pitch, the singers first sing through the song with the names of the notes. Each song has a new director who stands in the middle and faces the tenors who carry the melody-line. The director swings his or her arm up and down to keep simplified time. Singers keep time the same way, lending a pulsating rhythm to the music.

SINGING: [Pulsating rhythm]

Reed was fascinated by more than just the music.

REED: Hearing this sort of the quality of the singing was really otherworldly, and also it came into my life at the similar time that my faith was developing. So it's really, it's an important part of that, the music and the words and the style of communal singing and that kind of, like, it's quite desperate. A lot of it, it feels really desperate and, but also so joyful.

SINGING: Would to God I had died, oh my son, oh my son. Absalom.

Natalie Sims says the loud, sometimes discordant chords make shape note gatherings unusual. As well as who is welcome.

SIMS: Anyone can come and sing. You don’t have to be a great singer, you don’t have to want to perform. You don’t have to have any experience or any goals. You can just come and sing it…and you get to meet a bunch of different people that you wouldn’t normally meet from day to day life.

By the end of the day in Kyneton, the 18 singers from two countries and three states have sung an astounding 65 songs under 12 different directors.

Reed is used to singing by herself. But today she’s not alone. She hopes someday there’s a group in New Zealand to sing with her.

REED: I know the difference of singing with other people, because the feeling of the sound being more than what you can contribute. At the same time, your contribution is really important, and you're kind of carried along. I think it's so beyond you, but so important. You know, you get to be in two worlds at once.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Amy Lewis in Kyneton, Victoria, Australia.

SINGING: Thus may we abide in union

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