Northampton Harmony was unintentionally the only performing Sacred Harp quartet of the late 20th century. That didn’t seem remarkable at the time, because why would there even be one? Sacred Harp singing is decidedly community music practice, not only because that’s what people decided over time but because of the nature of the music. It’s hard enough to make more than a twenty-minute set of full bore, two minute songs in hardcore punk, which built a whole ethos around performance as assault. Some years later, in 2004, in the wake of the attention the movie Cold Mountain brought to the practice, early music group Anonymous Four released an album centering shape-note music broadly described. They made it work by taking the lead of larger ensembles like Boston Camerata and Northern Harmony by employing a lighter touch, bits of arrangement, “dynamics” and other, more concert-friendly, repertoire. Also, they sang good. But Northampton Harmony was always less interested in performing than in singing this great music together and spreading the word that anybody who wanted to could do the same. In our performances and recordings we did think about things like song order, variety and trying to sound good, but our focus was less on any sort of professional aspirations than take-it-or-leave-it documentation of our micro-community music practice of Sacred Harp singing and dumpster diving for useful, unused music. It’s been lovely to see so many of the songs we helped introduce to Main Street America find a home in other people’s mouths, at home and abroad.
Several of us started making music together in various combinations as a small coalescing friend group in our teens and twenties involved in stuff including alt-rock, overtone singing, composition, Karnatak and experimental music. Kelly and I, along with early shapenote conspirators Paul Booth and Michael Theodore (Batteries Die), sang in the first modern staged performance of Hildegard von Bingen’s Ordo Virtutum directed by Robert Eisenstein. For some reason Kelly and I also sang a Mozart piece accompanied by composer Harold Meltzer, the only time I ever tried Western classical singing until my “how do you get to Carnegie Hall” moment with Evan Chambers’ symphonic song cycle The Old Burying Ground.
I had first encountered Sacred Harp as a discrete category in the course of writing a term paper on traditional arts in the United States for an American History class when I was 16 and thought it was strange and interesting, but no more so than other music I was excited about: George Crumb, Meredith Monk, Nina Simone, Throbbing Gristle, Fred and Annie McDowell, Ali Akbar Khan, Factrix/Cazazza, kabuki opera, Angel Witch, Krzysztof Penderecki, Black Flag, Alvin Lucier, Florence Foster Jenkins, The Ramones, Harry Partch, Shaker songs, New England ballads- there was a lot of competition for my attention, especially from my own bands.
