The American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress presents
the Benjamin Botkin Folklife Lecture Series AN ACQUISITIONS &
PRESENTATION PROJECT October 21, 2010 Event Flyer Makers of the
Sacred Harp: Presented by David Warren Steel Sacred Harp singing
is a community musical and social event, emphasizing
participation, not performance, where people sing songs from a
tunebook called The Sacred Harp. The book uses a system of
notation in which each note is represented by one of four
shapes. While not identical to the congregational singing of
18th-century New England, Sacred Harp singing preserves several
fundamental characteristics from that era, including a complex
of musical skills learned in singing schools and a repertory of
religious part-songs by European and American composers, printed
in an oblong songbook. Sacred Harp singings employ a distinctive
"hollow square" seating arrangement and a rotation of leaders;
participants begin each song by singing sol-fa syllables
followed by one or more verses of