Revising the Sacred Harp — Readable Transcript
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Arrival and opening announcements
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Good morning. Good morning. It is 9:00. We will start. It is 9:00. Good morning. We invite you to make your way into the sanctuary as you can and we will be starting in a couple of minutes.
Here we go.
Welcome and unveiling of the 2025 Edition
Welcome. Welcome. It is time to begin.
A few people are still making their way in. That's fine as you get your books. Welcome to this celebration weekend for the debut of the Sacred Harp 2025 edition. Wow. Thank you. Thank you. When I wrote this talk, I was not expecting that. Thank you very much. I feel the enthusiasm. Thank you. My name is David Ivey and I'm the chair of the committee responsible for the revision of the Sacred Harp songbook Revision. The focus of our meeting today and the upcoming convention weekend.
Specifically, welcome to this full day symposium for an exchange of information on all aspects of the revision of our songbook. We have an amazing turnout of in-person attendees and we are also live streaming the event for the singers who could not be here today and we're very happy that we're able to do that. This symposium is co-sponsored by the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship and the David Goldwasser Series in Religion and the Arts. Jesse, don't go outside, please. I wish to thank Dr. Jesse P. Karlsberg for securing the co-sponsorship and his hard work as co-planner for this symposium.
Thank you also to everyone else who has helped in any way prepare and help get us here today and get and get started. Thank you. We would like to express our appreciation to Holy Trinity Parish Episcopal Church for hosting this special event. This sanctuary is beautiful and we are blessed to be welcomed here. And thank you each one for being here today. Your effort to be in Atlanta this weekend speaks in a full voice for your love for your fellow Sacred Harp singers and for our beloved songbook.
Lindy, would you come to the front at this time?
At this time, Lindy Groening of Alameda, California, who is the lead designer for the revision and was the lead designer for the cover of our songbook. Will now unveil the Sacred Harp 2025 edition songbook.
Thank you, Lindy. The committee had several choices of colors and unanimously selected forest green. We hope that you like it. The color of the book is the only thing we didn't reveal about the revision previously before arriving here. I hope you had fun guessing. I now ask Karen Rollins and John Plunkett to come to the front. I'm a baseball fan and I love the first pitch and the ceremonious first pitch in baseball. But today, I'm asking Karen Rollins, the past executive secretary of the publishing company board of directors, to represent the revision music committee in presenting the first book to the board chairman, John Plunkett.
At this time, we will sing for the first time from the Sacred Harp 2025 edition. Following the song, we will have opening prayer and words of welcome from Father Greg Tallant of Holy Trinity Parish Episcopal Church. Open your books to page 467.
Opening singing
[Congregational singing following the announcement of page 467; the captions do not provide reliable lyrics.]
Opening prayer and parish welcome
Let us pray. Gracious God, I give you thanks for this gathering. I give you thanks that their offerings will bless this place, that their blessing of this music will soak into the walls of our church and be a blessing here for a long time. God, I ask you to watch over this gathering to help them all to arrive safely, to travel home safely, and to let the time in between be a time of renewal and joy. I ask you to bless this new book that it might bless others for years and years.
Oh God, whom saints and angels delight to worship in heaven, be ever present with your servants who seek through art and music to perfect the praises offered by your people on earth. And grant to them even now glimpses of your beauty and make them worthy at length to behold it unveiled forever more through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Amen.
Please be seated. Once again, welcome to Holy Trinity Parish. My name is Greg Tallant. I am the rector or senior pastor here, one of the priests here. On behalf of the whole parish, I'm just I can't tell you how thrilled I am that y'all are here. Our mission is to open hearts to God and open doors to community. And today we are winning. One thing about that that you should definitely know, however, y'all's are not the only community that is that we've opened our doors to today.
We also have a preschool. So there's about 50 kids down on the floor beneath us and we've worked with Jesse and Amy and a bunch of people to coordinate all that. So everything should be fine. But just please do be aware that we've got preschoolers and their safety is of course of primary importance to us. Another group we have a community ministry that has a food pantry and utility assistance and especially you might notice we have a sack lunch ministry. So, we'll be giving out about 75 to 100 sack lunches today and folks will be gathering in that courtyard right out below right out outside this plaza down one level.
And so just be aware of that. And most of the folks who come for those are often unhoused and having a hard time in life. So just you know just be aware of all that. Now to the really important things, the bathrooms and the Wi-Fi. On this floor, there are three bathrooms. They're they're over there. So, if you go back out into the narthex and then into the reception area and then there's a yellow hallway and there's a bathroom on the right by the water fountain.
There's a bathroom on the left on the second third door.
And then there's a secret bathroom that if you go into the nursery, there's a bathroom back in there. Be careful going through the nursery because you know, you'll be walking right through it. Not that there are kids in there right now, but just be careful not to too much stuff in there for the kids when they're crawling around on the rugs. The there's a guest Wi-Fi. You guys will probably, you know, blow it out in just a second if you all go in at the same time.
But if you can get on it, the password is very cleverly 0011223344.
And with that, I'm going to be around most of the day. If there's anything at all we can do, I can do we can do to, to make you feel welcome, to let you just let this be a joyous day. To get to the chapel. Great question. So, there's an elevator right there. Right back there. Go to the second floor and when it opens up it'll point you right to the chapel or in the reception area if you go down the stairs one flight and then hang a right and you'll see it right there.
Welcome to Holy Trinity.
The 2025 revision story
Thank you, Father Greg. This has been a long journey. This time has been highly anticipated for seven years. Thanks to you, the singing's upcoming tomorrow and Sunday may well be the largest gathering of Sacred Harp singers under one roof ever and certainly in the memory of anyone living today. We'll touch a little bit on what we're doing today. You have the agenda in your hand. It is fine to go between sessions even during the session. So if you find yourself in when we start our parallel sessions after this one and you said I've seen this I think I'll go to the next one.
It's okay to do that. The times are defined. The sessions are pretty much 45 minutes each. That's not a lot of time for these topics, but we're putting a lot in today for you.
We will have lunch at noon catered by Bell Street Burritos for an hour 15 and a coffee break this afternoon at 3. From Buell Cobb's landmark book, The Sacred Harp, a tradition and its music, published in 1978, I quote from his chapter on the revisions. Throughout the history of the Sacred Harp, the urge to improve or renew the storehouse of songs has been vital. And where this urge is lacking or where it remains unfulfilled, the song tradition dies. End quote. It has been long maintained by leaders of Sacred Harp that regular updates of our songbook, meaning about every generation, is the reason that Sacred Harp has not only survived for almost 200 years, but has thrived throughout its lifetime.
At this time in explaining the background leading up to the revision, I want to recognize the work and leadership of the late Mr. Samuel Michael Hinton. Mike served as the president of the publishing company from 2002 until his death on July 18th, less than two months ago. He was a fine and proud leader of the publishing company. He was a tireless goodwill ambassador for Sacred Harp singing and for the Sacred Harp songbook. In particular, a book closely linked to his forebears, the Denson's.
The major emphasis of his latter years of leadership was that of shepherding the community to the decision to conduct this revision. I know you can't read this probably, but it's highlighted. Mike started discussions with singers at least as early as 2013 on whether and when to revise. He surveyed 10 singers for their opinions in 2013 with questions such as, "Is it time to revise the 1991 edition?" Is it time to add music from present-day authors to the book? And what should be the target publication date?
Mike had an instinctual feeling that revision time was near. He received responses from all of the 10 singers he pulled. He reported those results to the board in 2014 and there was discussion. Sorry, I lost where I am. The board this the Sacred Harp Publishing Company board took up the question first of revision in October 2015 and the board decided 11 to two to not revise at that time. Then in October 2017 when he understood that the community might be ready for a revision Mike asked the board to consider the topic again.
The result was a resolution that gave the executive committee, those being Mike, Karen Rollins, and John Plunkett of the board of directors, the authority to begin discussions, quote, with a respected member of the Sacred Harp community on what the revision process would look like. That resolution passed with 12 yes votes and one abstension. Mike pointed out with his military precision in this communication that the board did not vote to revise the book. They did authorize the executive committee to begin a process of discovery.
One year later, after the process of discovery was complete, the board approved the revision of the 1991 edition on October 13th, 2018 and named me the chair of the committee. That has now been almost 7 years. I immediately opened communications avenues the following week with invitations to you to submit songs and inputs. A few months later on April 6th, 2019, the full revision music committee was appointed and approved by the Sacred Harp Publishing Company board of directors. And at this time, I would like to recognize the esteemed members of the Revision Music Committee.
If they'll just stand as your name is called and remain standing.
Lauren Bock, Atlanta, Georgia. Helen Brown, Darby, United Kingdom. Richard Ivey, Huntsville, Alabama. Richard is also presently the executive secretary of the publishing company. Jesse P. Karlsberg, Atlanta, Georgia. Jesse is presently the vice president of the publishing company. Nathan Rees, Carolton, Georgia. Nathan is presently the treasurer of the Sacred Harp Publishing Company. Karen Rollins, Bowen, Georgia. Karen is presently a board member of the publishing company. Terry Wootten, Hyder, Alabama. Terry was a member of the music committee for the 1991 revision and is also presently a board member of the Sacred Harp Publishing Company.
David Wright, Seattle, Washington.
Thank you very much. You may be seated. The work of this committee has been comprehensive involving every aspect of the music and songbook. This is reflected in the name given to the committee by the board of directors. Not just music committee but revision music committee. The amount of time invested by the committee members and all of the other team of contributors is surely unprecedented for a revision and is practically uncountable. The committee cheerfully convened in 43 meetings over the course of seven years.
Compare that to about six committee meetings for the 1991 revision. The commitment, care, respect, and love of each member of the committee was evident throughout the revision. These people love Sacred Harp singing and its people. The committee members brought broad and diverse perspectives and backgrounds to the work. We were informed by a combined number of years of Sacred Harp experience that is so large that some of us don't want to number it. Service in leadership positions, knowledge of the songs, study of the history of the songbook in music, and appreciation of the practices and traditions that bring us here today.
The most important decision I made as chair of the committee was selecting the members of the committee. The work and contributions of the committee members along with their incredible respect and care for the book, their knowledge of Sacred Harp singing and their understanding of the community totally validated their selection for the service. The next few statements might be the most important words I say in this session. I can report to you, the Sacred Harp community, that every decision by this committee has been reached by consensus with no rancor or ill will at all.
Not a single committee member got everything they wanted. Of course, there's been a lot of discussion, a lot of listening, a lot of give and take, and a lot of compromise. And when the will of the committee became evident in some of the weighty matters we considered, we came together and agreed as a team and reached consensus in every case. It was not necessary to carefully count votes on any decision. There were no split decisions. But why a committee anyway? The Sacred Harp has long has a long history of revisions.
Revisions conducted by and benefiting from the wisdom of a group of singers, lay musicians, if you will, who generally labor in other career areas than a cappella shape-note music from Dr. Jesse P. Karlsberg's new essay that appears in this book. He observes the production of the second edition of The Sacred Harp by B. F. White pioneered a model of institutional and community ownership. Unique among 19th century shape-note tune books, which still characterizes the relationship between the book and its singers. End quote. This is well documented in our song books as you see here from the cover of the 1870 songbook.
Continuing from Dr.
Karlsberg's essay, White founded the Southern Musical Convention, the first Sacred Harp singing convention in 1845. In 1849, the convention appointed a committee to enlarge the Sacred Harp headed by White and including several other singers, teachers, and tune writers. The collab this collaborative approach helped tie the Sacred Harp book to the musical and social practices of the singing convention while expanding and empowering the tunebook stakeholders. End quote. Now, this is a committee 22 strong. It's the same number of football football players on the field at any given time.
The Sacred Harp Musical Association has a deep association with the revision of the Sacred Harp that makes it a uniquely appropriate venue to launch our new songbook. The convention, this convention, authorized the 1911 revision, the last time a convention held that authority before it was assumed by the Sacred Harp Publishing Company. This historical association made this weekend with the United Convention a natural time for introducing the book. 1936. The practice of using a committee of several members has continued to the present as shown here in the 1936, 1971, and 1991 books.
This is our long history of groups of singers collaborating to produce our songbook, 176 years.
This has served the Sacred Harp well by involving caring revisers who understand and represent their singing brothers and sisters. The first committee meeting for this revision was held on May 11th, 2019, the month after the committee was named at the Sacred Harp Publishing Company headquarters and Museum in Carolton. Following this, the committee met seven more times in-person meetings by February 2020. That's seven. We had seven meetings early in a span of nine months. We hit the ground running. In these first meetings, we organized and established principles of engagement and working together.
In reviewing these early discussions, I can report that our early planning served us well. One of the first committee exercises was to have each member independently provide lists of candidate songs for removal from the 1991 book. And I compiled these inputs and determined that as a committee we had enough common candidates that no more extensive work needed to be done at that time on that in that area. We didn't need to decide what songs to remove until we knew what songs would be available to add.
Then in March 2020, COVID arrived and the pandemic shut us down for a time. We couldn't meet and sing songs, the candidate songs for almost two years. It actually was from the previous session song session to the one after CO was almost three years. Those started back on October in October 2022. By the way, I will point out that the 1991 revision spanned just over five years from beginning of the work until the book was published. If COVID time isn't counted, this was this work was done in a similar amount of time for this revision.
In that intervening time, the world had discovered online meetings and so had the committee. So the most of our remaining com meetings were done by zoom. So what did the committee do? I mentioned organization and considering what songs to remove. We received and compiled, studied, sang and evaluated, 1155 submitted songs. We handled the quant that quantity of songs and down selected to about 15% of those submitted. And then later we down selected to about 10% till we got to the final time to do final selections.
In parallel, a huge job of music engraving, text engraving, page layout, page design and production was done by an adjunct team of highly talented workers.
The music of retained songs was examined and text was examined for edits and corrections. Keys of songs were examined. Scripture citations were considered and all new rudiment section was designed and written. Then late in the process front matter and indexes were developed. When decisions were made on the finally on the songs to enter and to remove the fitting of those songs into the pages was done. Do you think we were finished? Not at all. There's an intensive amount of work was spent in a professional and highly organized proofreading exercise.
The meetings with prospective printers had started in September of 2024 and continued until the selection of Sheridan of Brainard, Minnesota in the spring of 25. Planning for the worldwide distribution of the new song books began in 2024 with the goal of having books available for singings everywhere immediately after the book debut this weekend. And by the way, 576 books arrived in the United Kingdom two days ago.
Now, a few words about the book design and production team and other contributors. Humbly, quietly, industriously, and proudly working behind the scenes throughout the revision process was a group of very talented singers dedicated to getting this book published early. If you'll look just inside your book, you'll see an acknowledgements page to give you a sense of the contributions by so many. In the interest of times, rather than calling the names, I would like to ask all contributors to making this book, please stand and be recognized.
Thank you very much for your work. What did you, the community of singers do? You can be proud. Never before has the community of singers been as involved in a revision of a songbook as you have been. You submitted, 1155 songs. You provided 400 pages of inputs on topics from A to Z on anything. You spoke your mind and listened carefully in dozens of town hall meetings from Fairbanks, Alaska to the United Kingdom. You came and lent your voices and sight reading skills in 16 test singings from Olympia, Washington to Carolton, Georgia to Montreal, Canada to Bristol, UK and beyond.
You served on these teams to support the design and production of the book. You helped with scripture verse citations. You examined the meter designations. You used the results of 10 of many years of research to update the source attributions of the music and words of the songs. Now, a word on your trust. You, the community of singers, trusted this committee to do the work set before them by the publishing company board of directors. You trusted this committee to make the decisions based on precedence of other revisers.
You trusted this committee to make thousands of decisions, always keeping in mind the singers as the users of this new book for decades to come. You gave us the space and the time to do the revision the right way. Your confidence and trust are essential to the success of the revision and I thank you. And finally, your commitment. You have done whatever it has taken to come here this weekend from across North America and Europe and even Australia. We are here to celebrate, as Buell wrote in 1978, we're here to celebrate the renewal of the storehouse of songs.
And we are here to celebrate together the continuation of this tradition of people singing their hearts out in worship to God and for each other. A little about song selection. The heart of the revision process is the selection of new songs to enter the book. The number of songs submitted 1155 was the biggest surprise of the revision process. The size of the work to evaluate songs was daunting and drove our planting planning and time to complete. The identification of the songs submitted was blind to the committee except the chairman until the final steps.
Songs were submitted by composers or other singers, received by the chairman and numbered. The submitter, usually the composer, but not always, was acknowledged. The identifying top matter was removed. The songs were compiled into booklets of PDFs about 100 songs in size. And we had those booklets produced and copied for test singings in which we sang and recorded generally about 80 songs per session. The committee members evaluated songs from the test singings and recordings based on the music. We listened to the recordings and followed along with the music over and over again.
Committee members individually, sorry I forgot to advance this. There is the locations of the test singings. By the way, committee members individually and independently assigned a score of one to three with three the highest score for each song based on the value of adding the song to the book. The committee members were encouraged to evaluate all parts and the song as a whole, but there was no set rubric for breaking down this evaluation by any factors or subcores. The committee members provided the scores to the chairman who compiled these and provided a list of all scores back to the committee but without attribution to the members.
The lists were organized by overall ranking of scores and provided to the committee members for the meeting. Here is an example of a committee meeting worksheet that you can see with songs marked as a result of the committee discussions and decisions of the songs one by one. In the committee meeting, recordings of the songs were played. This was done very effectively over Zoom, by the way. And we all listened together to get the song in our heads. The discussion of each song was held and a consensus was reached to keep the song in contention or to set it aside.
In this way, a song was not finally eliminated from consideration until the end, the very end of the revision process when the final song selection for the book was completed. Any committee member always had the prerogative to request a song be brought back if it had been set aside for consideration. And this did happen. The first this first round of evaluations culminated in communitywide test singings in Bristol, UK and Bremen, Georgia in June last year with large turnouts of singers. The committee followed a similar process for the in-game consideration of selecting songs to the book and to get the number of songs down into the area of 100.
We never had any exact quantities that we were working to.
A second exercise was for considering songs to remove from the book was conducted. Remember the first was done very early in the in the process. A second was done with the committee members independently providing a rating of one for definitely removing the song or two meaning that the committee member would consider it. Again, these were received, compiled, considered, and ordered. And that's we went through a similar process as you might see in a worksheet like this. Working on the songs move in using the data from the minutes app.
I know people are talk about this a fair amount among each other. More than a single ranking or count of songs use was considered. These things we considered were trend of use. The number of top leaders who are deceased or living, the number of leaders figuring in the use of a song. The committee understood that some individual singers would be disappointed with songs removal and that's a tribute to our bond with the 1991 edition and its longlasting endurance. It's a great book.
It also reflects the very large and broad repertoire of songs that are used somewhere in this great worldwide community of music we have today. We think that we didn't remove anyone's favorite song.
But the large number of songs submitted informed the committee that we had to look hard for songs to remove. Just as some of you have expressed a tinge of sadness in losing a song, every committee member had songs they individually wanted to keep that were removed from the book.
In the end, the committee considered the list of songs for addition and songs for removal together. We had to consider, do we keep this song in the book or do we remove it and add this song? And I'm running way behind in time. I will may have to quickly go through some of these things, but I will just present a few numbers. Some of you have seen these, but others may not have. We added 113 new songs to the songbook without adding a single additional sheet to the book.
So that's about 10% of the songs submitted. We had 51% of the songs are major in the major key, 49% are in the minor key. That moved those percentages overall for the 2025 edition book about five percentage points toward minor from where we were before. University there was we did had no criteria by the way for adding major or minor numbers. Truly the composition span more than two centuries and represent 78 different composers and sources including 49 living composers and the 49. Nine living composers are from 18 states and five countries.
The Sacred Harp Publishing Company 13 member board unanimously approved the songs added and songs removed on May 20th, 2025. And at the same meeting, the board also approved the other content design and cover decisions made by the committee. I'm pleased that we could return to the practice of having the last song in the book have a farewell or goodbye theme. This this was started with the first Sacred Harp by BF White continued in his editions in 1850 59 and 70 and was discontinued and was dis and was continued I'm sorry was continued with the Denson revision of 1936.
So the practice is back with a Lisbon a new Lisbon by Harry Chandler. This is from 1854. In revising the book from cover to cover, the committee and our team of adjunct workers fixed dozens of typos and other errors that had happened over multiple revisions. We also made changes to verses, musical parts, and keys in a small number of songs. And I'm not going to step through all of these in the interest of time, but this is we have this documented. Will make be making this and maybe it's already made available online that you can see exactly what changes have been entered into the book in terms of verses part keys throughout.
There are reasons for all of the changes and it would and it would be great fun if we could sit here and had time to go through each one of these which I want which I wanted to do key changes. Yeah, just a quick word on the key changes. That's a pet of mine. You know, our total thinking behind this was what can we do to help people who key music? And if you do this, if you key music, you understand that not all songs are noted the way you might think they would be.
So, we looked at that and made key changes based on if we put them in a different key, might it help the people who key music?
We minimized the number of page changes, but we did have a few. One of the things to note is all of the new songs that entered the book are either one brace long, one page long, or one and a half pages long. Nothing is longer than that. Our engraving team and have slides on this. I don't know if I'm put them up did wonderful work to reduce the size of about a dozen songs. Maybe it was 11, which created new space and some opportunities for us to look at how can we have all of our a song on one opening.
We know it's difficult to turn pages sometimes.
And we had a few changes from bottom and top. So you'll see here in ter terms of page changes, fellowship moved from the bottom of 330 to the top. Southwell moved from 365 to 364. It's on one opening now. We saved a full page, I think, in Southwell. The sermon on the mount moved from 507 to 508. It turns out the sermon on the mount when it entered the Denson book in 1960 was on page 508. It's going back there. Hebron is moved from 566 to 565 top.
And there were introductions though not different locations on pages in top and bottoms. If you know the hill of Zion 565 bottom is on the bottom of that page previously was just 565. I think it's 565B now. So there you'll want to note that attributions of music and text were documented by Dr. Warren Steel for the 1991 edition following his research to verify, update, and correct sources in the 1971 edition. Dr. Steel's book, The Makers of the Sacred Harp, published in 2010, was the first book to expand attributions documentation from what is listed in a songbook for every song in a shape-note book.
Warren, would you please stand? I know you're here.
Warren, we thank you for your hard work to create Makers for us. Since makers was published, Warren has documented updates, many of which were provided to him from independent researchers, and documented those on his website in an agenda and core agenda of corrections. Warren's work, including these updates, serves as the core information for attributions in the 2025 edition. Also, extensive work by Dr. Rachel Hall for sources of the music and Dr. Robert Kelley for sources of texts were incorporated. And in the end, Warren reviewed those for this team and approved the changes before we went to press.
Rachel and Robert, would you stand please for A whole session on attributions is available later today. So by Dr. Hull and Dr. Kelly. All the scriptural citations in the book were reviewed for accuracy and relevance to the hymn text. We brought in singers from a wide range of denominational backgrounds to have multiple perspectives and also incorporated suggestion from inputs that that individuals made during the re revision process. We took the perspective that we would not make changes where the verse selected in previous revisions was a good fit.
But we did make use of the new typesetting to expand the text listed of numerous citations.
The results were 36 errors were corrected. 53 edits were made to the quoted text for length or clarity. 129 scripture verses were replaced with selections that seemed more relevant. 113 scripture citations were added for the new songs of course and 259 were left unedited. This is going to be a very brief tour. So you can open your book if you wish and we will touch on a few things highlight in the in the front matter. I will note on page two the recognitions of the bequest of Miss Rebecca Over of the UK to the Sacred Harp Publishing Company.
On the third page, the identifier branding for the revised songbook is the Sacred Harp 2025 edition. As we know, we added a line under 2025 edition to recognize the legacy of compilers and revisers since 1844. King White King James Denson McGraw. This revision adds the name of Mr. Hugh McGraw in recognition of his lifetime of service to Sacred Harp Music and for his involvement and leadership in revision spanning 1960 to 1991.
I've already highlighted the acknowledgements page. And again I just want to say what amazing talent we have in this community and from people who are willing to give it. So we it has been a wonderful thing to see during this entire process. There is a preface that provides a me a message of reflection, involvement, process, celebration, and invitation from the committee. The beautiful poetry of Psalm 100 is presented in the words of the King James version on page six.
I invited three eminent scholars of Sacred Harp to author essays for the book. Page seven has Buell Cobb's essay, A Perspective, Sacred Harp and Its Traditions. Sadly, this is Buell's last writing on Sacred Harp singing, but I'm so glad we have it. In his last email to me in our exchange about this essay, he asked me to keep it open that he still might want to make some changes before the book went to print. Buell fully supported this revision and was looking forward to its introduction this weekend and we miss him very much.
Page eight. On page eight is the essay by Dr. Warren Steel on the essential things to know about Sacred Harp. And I think this may be useful to you in telling your family and your friends about the music and tradition. Isn't it a hard thing to do? And page nine is an essay by Dr. Jesse P. Karlsberg on the revisions of the Sacred Harp from which I quoted previously. We have an all new rudiment section.
For singing school teachers and I'm speaking I guess maybe personally the previous rudiments which are very good but it's difficult to use those to systematically walk from from the beginning through the pages to teach a singing school and we're challenged today to do that in a lot of cases when we don't have whiteboards and display boards but sometimes we just have the book to teach from. So, one of the goals in our rudiments was to make them better for use in teaching singing schools, but I believe they're equally valuable for individual learners to do that.
Thank you, Lauren, for your work and leading our three new indexes have been added to the book and now content uses all the previously blank unused pages in the back. There were seven unused pages. So we have an index of song titles, first lines, music composers and sources, text authors and sources and meter and then from most used to least consulted.
Most starts at the back of the books. You can just go very to the back look at song titles and so on. So that uses we have a total of 17 pages of indexes. I have a whole talk here on page design and layout and fonts and I'm going that there's going to be a separate section on that. I would be introducing it only and I will have we'll ask you to go to the session covering these things to hear more about that.
Similarly, our text preparation team did yman's work in examining and preparing all of the texts of existing songs as well as the verses of the new songs. They identified many things to bring to the committee for our consideration and their work to start early helped us complete the book on time. Will Fitzger will have stories about text editing in his 11:15 session today. The printing industry in this country continues to go undergo changes and makes the printing of oblong shaped notebooks very challenging.
The requirements for printing our book are actually quite unique. How many books use the horizontal form factor? Then consider that the use of our books is totally different from that of hymnals used in churches that rest comfortably in the back of pews except for weekly use of maybe three or four songs. We give our books tough workouts. They must endure hours and hours of being held, paid, accidentally dropped, and sometimes left in cold and hot cars between singings. We made the decision to use a much larger printing company than the publishing company had recently used.
In fact, we were almost forced to. After several meetings with the two companies, the incumbent printer, previous printer, including the previous printer, the final decision point came when he told us that in March that we would have to make a contract commitment in about a week so that the paper could be ordered to arrive in July.
That was too late for our schedule, of course. But it shows the stress that printers are under in their industry. So we are pleased to select Sheridan of Brainard, Minnesota because it won out in most all of our selection criteria. Sheridan had experience in printing oblong shape notebooks and Sheridan's large size gave us more confidence in its ability to meet our schedule. In our meetings focused on quality control processes, we were shown that it had the processes to ensure a quality physical book.
Sheridan's capability to support order fulfillment after the rollout was also very attractive to the publishing company. Extensive and careful planning for the book distribution started early. Also, as I mentioned earlier, our first focus, as you have seen and are involved with maybe is to get books to singings and conventions coming up in the six weeks ahead. This includes the New York City convention, the UK Sacred Harp convention next both next weekend as well as the Minnesota convention, hope well singing, the New England convention and others later this month and early October.
The second printing of the 2025 edition has already been ordered.
It should be available to us in early to mid October. Correct, Richard? Finally, we were very pleased that the publishing company is able to price books at $20 in the US and 20 pounds in the UK. And we're even more pleased to offer a low price of $1010 for you to replace and recycle your current loaner books. Would the committee members please come to the front? If you'll come to the front and stand here. This means we're almost finished. On behalf of this committee, I want to thank every person who has contributed in any way to the making of this songbook.
The songbook is the central character that binds this amazing worldwide community of singers. Thank you for the honor and privilege to be trusted to do the work and thank you for being here this weekend. May God bless us as we continue our journey of song and worship and fellowship together. Thank you very much.
Break and room conversation
Read captions from this break or transition
Heat up here.
I'm not. I'm just getting there.
I don't know.
Last we don't Yeah. See if I can make the next one happen.
I'm spoiled. I've had people do power me. Well, last few but Lindy Lindy did a beautiful job with this. She did not first. Thank you so much.
Of
Course.
And I know there was discussion
Thank you. Better.
Must find a place.
Everything okay? Size.
[Applause / Music (caption cue).]
Oh, are they populated? That's okay if I can see which one.
Oh, thank you. Thank you. Okay. And I just go through like this.
Well, I'm not This is the Yes, I know I do. Like
I think that's good. Oh, you're at the streaming service.
Oh, okay. I'm Lauren CJ. That's his name. Great to have you here. You can go back.
Sorry.
Sure. It's nice
Yeah. Check it out.
Okay.
Thank you. Hello.
Hello. Hi, Mike.
Fynn, where are you? Fynn.
Hi.
Do you want me to not? It blocks my face.
No, it's okay. It's okay.
Oh, wait. That's right. Let me get on.
It's cool. I should have printed it, but I just didn't.
I can't mess with that because then that'll do that. So, oh, I'm talking into the microphone. Oh, this humble foot. Am I going to fall off it? Am I going to forget that I'm standing?
Okay. And also, if I do it lower, is that okay?
You guys won't believe I'm this tall.
I didn't even But I do want my Okay, while we're waiting for Fynn to come back. I'm going to run to the bathroom. I won't give you any more details, but stay. I'll be back soon. We encourage you to go ahead and read the rudiments while you're waiting. I keep I keep going through and seeing the full bathroom. We saved you.
James over here. 2000 out here. Good to see you.
Sign this thing quickly so I can put it back in my cover.
Someone will ask a question. Sure. Sure. I thought it said you should get started.
Okay.
Okay. This is
Catch me. Is that good? Are we good? Hi.
Rethinking the rudiments
Hello. Welcome. Thank you for coming to rethinking the rudiments process, priorities, and product. I did write that. I swear. I'll introduce my lovely panel here. Rebecca Wright, Fynn Titford-Mock, and Lindy Groening. If you'll look in the acknowledgement section that we saw before, we've got the helpers who worked on the rudiments, these lovely people. Plus David Ivey and David Wright. David Ivey was involved the whole time. And David Wright specifically worked on the harmony and composition section.
So you can thank him for that. So, hello. My name is Lauren Bock. I'm happy to say I know a lot of you already. I live here in Atlanta. So, let's hear it for Atlanta. And I first discovered Sacred Harp in Western Mass in [year unclear; captions say 2023]. Let's hear it for Western Mass. See, this I made this plan so that I would get a lot of applause up front to like, you know, fuel me. And then I moved to New York City, which is my hometown.
Can I move this?
Wait, I justiculate a lot. And I also sang in upstate New York in the Capital Region. Whoop whoop. And I say all of this just because it in recounting my personal Sacred Harp story, I think that having all those different Sacred Harp homes within the first five or six years of becoming a real singer, getting hooked, really just cemented for me how much the people love this. How much the Sacred Harp people love the Sacred Harp. And different kinds of people. And just, you know, then when I started traveling, then all bets were off because I didn't realize when I started what what really lives inside of this book.
And so with that, I just want to say how incredibly grateful I am and humbled and I wore my clear mascara.
It's it's just an amazing privilege and honor to have worked on this project. And I'll thank everyone again who contributed. The team was incredible. David, I can I can second his statement that we worked well together. We never had any fights. We came to consensus on everything. It was awesome. So, I just wanted to say how amazing that was and just just to come kind of full circle and be able to work on this project that serves the more widespread community which is so much bigger than it was when I started, you know, 20 or so years ago.
So, thank you for entrusting me, for entrusting us. And I'll take just one more minute to particularly give thanks to David Ivey.
Firstly for letting me take the lead on this project, which seems still like an impossibly sacred task to make the rudiments as usable and informative and respectful as possible. But also just that David was the one who really laid the groundwork for me to be a singing master, a singing school teacher through Camp FaSoLa. And so, with that, I'm going to go to this next slide. Not because I want you to know that I'm a total lunatic, which I might be. I mean, I do look wild.
Can you see this? Can you see that? Who's calling?
I just wanted to kind of show you how much I adore this work and how much joy it brings me to teach kids and adults. After a few years of teaching the kids and doing all sorts of goofy interactive things to keep them engaged, hopefully long enough that they realize how amazing this is and stick with it and become real singers. Then I started doing it with the adults. I remember David saying, "You should we should just do that at adult camp, too."
And I had as much fun with the adults, too, because I got them out of their shells. It was great. So I just have always felt so blessed and lucky to teach rudiments when I can to teach singing schools. And it was in 2011 that I first got to teach rudiments at camp with David's son Stewart, aka Studiments with [nickname unclear in captions].
Okay. So yeah, let's that's that was all just thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I still can't believe it. Thank you. It's like I'm accepting an award. This does feel like the biggest reward just being here looking at all of you. All right. Now I think I might just be looking at this. Oh god, don't unhook. Don't do. Okay, sorry. So, as we talked about, we started the process in 2018 into 2019.
So, it was late 2019 when I decided to do a little bit of a survey and ask some people who I knew to be singing teachers, singing school teachers, some professors who did semesterl long classes on Sacred Harp or other people who had made you know materials for teaching Sacred Harp, just just what they thought about teaching about the rudiments we have we had in the in the 91 about what materials they used, what materials they felt they had to use because of whatever was lacking.
And then the world, you know, closed down. But during our hiatus, David and I started kind of pouring over all the past rudiments. Both in the Sacred Harp lineage, Ancestors, Cousins, and also other books like Christian Harmony, Southern Harmony, Union Harp, a bunch of other ones. Fynn sent me some amazing more esoteric ones. I should put some of those pictures up here. So and then, Lindy Lindy came on board to kind of help us get started and figure out where to start. And that was super helpful.
It was kind of talking about what we thought our goals were and how we could make it happen in terms of the layout.
So I've tried to split it up into some categories of what we're aiming for. So there's clarity and legibility. So basically just looking at it and receiving the information kind of on a page by page or paragraph by paragraph basis. And then kind of the organization of the greater document. What order made sense to go in. And then we wanted to make sure that we gave some thought to the tone we were using, the language, how we were presenting it. So we decide that other mic works.
Anyone Anyone know if that mic works? Yeah. Test test. So, some of these decisions were made kind of holistically, with the design and production team. There's a whole style guide where decisions were made. I have Apple Care. Decisions were made about which fonts we were going to use. And just all the all the rules we were going to follow. Because we took the time to make their own rules to suit us. They weren't just going to follow Chicago or whatever the things are. So I didn't know.
Do you want to say anything about about Miller or like why I don't know if I've heard you talk about like why you why why that came to be.
Okay, then just come over here for like one second really quick about Miller and the typeface. Miller is a serif typeface. You might notice in your 91 edition, there's also a do a little a serif is a little foot at the bottom of that letter. Miller has a taller X height. So, if you look at like the E and key, that is the X height of a letter. The bigger that that is, the easier it is theoretically for you to read a word in that font.
So Miller was the font that we chose for poetry that's in the song pages and then also for rudiments. It works. It was originally designed for a newspaper. So it was basically made specifically to be legible in really dense situations which we have in songs with lots of notes and then in rudiments where there's a lot of content.
That's enough.
Yes, that's perfect. Thank you. And I'll go back. So yeah we Mike thank you so that that was a kind of bigger decision but it's going to serve you know the song pages the rudiments the indices and then other kind of layout decisions about letting which is the you know spacing between lines we chose to have some some space between paragraphs. All just things in service of your eyeballs flowing more easily over the page. We knew we wanted to have some clearer diagrams. And I think at this point we can start looking at page 10.
Think about how many times you'll tell people turn to page 10. So I always felt surprised that we didn't have a diagram of the hollow square because it seems so critical to what we do and to have that kind of format bird’s-eye view of sorry I'll show myself out so we knew we wanted to have that we knew we wanted to have some pretty clear shape notes right there the four of them and I also you know, wanted wanted that to be laid out so that I'm I'm really into the memorization of these shape notes as soon as possible.
That's something I drill into my students. So you can take a handy dandy bookmark or whatever you have and you can cover the words fa, sol, la and just see the shapes and try to commit it to memory. Which I know some people who were working with with us on this, you know, thought it was a bold decision to not say fa, sol, la near the shapes on the scale on the facing page. And I did that somewhat intentionally and I don't know if you will like that or not, but the my goal there is to kind of have people really work on committing it to memory by the time we're singing up and down the scale.
Speaking of scale, that's another thing that we knew we wanted was just a good major scale that's clear, spaced well. You'll probably remember from the 91 that we've got a bunch of them kind of stacked together, and it's kind of hard to see, and it was illustrating that it can move around to different keys, which is an important point, but we knew we wanted to have this be pretty bold and clear. We also, you know, decided that the diagrams should either be labeled themselves with what they are or in just a few cases, it's pretty clear what they are from what section they're in and there's a heading nearby.
And then that kind of leads me to, you know, we were just looking to have things to really catch your eye.
So we have headings that are descriptive and don't say, you know, chapter XI. Which I hope is more helpful for people as they're flipping through and want to get to a certain spot. And in terms of the font choice with Miller Daily [variant unclear in captions], the bold, it's really nice and bold. So, we do have terms bolded in the 91 edition rudiments, but they're not as bold. So, we hope that that helps and just kind of break up the page.
We also, you know, we're trying to think in the now, but also in the next 25 years. And you know, I hope we all keep reading, but I also want to be realistic about a big dense chunk of text and who's going to lose interest in that. So, we just tried to make it kind of dynamic and have a lot going on to move you through. We did that one. So in terms of the organization of the entire thing, we knew we wanted to retain some important aspects.
We knew we wanted to retain the departments of music because that's always been around being melodics, rhythmics, and dynamics. And hopefully you can find them pretty easy. You'll see melodics on page 10. And that's our other font.
That's Optima, which is also here. So, basically, Optima, oh, sorry, Optima Nova LT Pro. There we go. There's differences in all these fonts. So that's our that's our title font and it's there's you know, you can hear in a later talk today how how that came about and why that was an excellent choice. It's also on the camp 2012 t-shirt if you have one of those. So you know we wanted to retain those departments and we wanted to keep the format the same that there are exercises but that they come at the end and we really wanted to just put a lot of really crucial stuff up front.
You know what does someone need? There were some aspects that we thought, you know, this is going to be important when the person has been singing for a couple weeks, months, but at the very beginning, what do you need? And we kind of thought, how much of this can we pack into the first open spread and the second open spread? And then it's kind of after that that it starts to move more. It's really kind of I mean accent is important but that's kind of where you know where it gets to dynamics and the other characters where we kind of circle back into more notation and characters that are melodic rhythmic about song structure around there 14 15 is where it kind of gets more into reference material and less into like you need to know this now to learn how to do this.
So that was kind of our goal to just see how much we could pack, but also as we said before, we want it to be clear. We want it to be open. We want it to breathe. We want it to be legible, but we were trying to be as efficient as possible. And just make the topics kind of flow and make sense and build on each other. And then, you know, the exercises are at the way way back and before that are kind of the, you know, deep cut geekery stuff.
If you're learning how to put on a singing, how to key music, how to write music, those are there. You don't need those right at the beginning, but they I hope will be very helpful to a lot of you who've been singing a while. And David Ivey took the lead on that keying section if I didn't say that before. And David right with the harmony and composition.
Did you want to say anything about Becky? Rebecca, just don't call her late for dinner. She did an amazing job reading what I wrote and just just making it so clear and yet shorter. Like, how do you take out words and make something clearer? She's just so good at it. She's just great. So, I don't know. Yeah, we can. There are some things that I noted that I
Yeah. So in my non-s singing professional life I'm a writer and editor and my I my specialty is in plain language and clear communication. So I thought the rudiments could use a little more of that. We, you know, wanted to keep a kind of author, you know, a trustworthy and authoritative tone, but also make the rudiments a little more approachable, make the rudiments a little easier to understand. Both so that they are kind of accessible to as many singers as possible. And also because even if you even if you're a person who can dig in and get really dense, you know, read really dense pros, I've never had anyone read a read a piece of writing and say, you know, I wish that that had been longer and more complicated.
So, yeah. So, throughout when I was editing, the focus is really on how to pull out the author's intent and communicate it as clearly as possible, as succinctly as possible using as few unnecessarily big and complicated words as possible. And yeah, we I think we did it.
Yeah, I think we did it. I think we did it. And just thank you. Thank you so much. I don't know if I'll retell this well, but I went to the Western Mass singing this year, and when I was hanging out with Becky and her housemates, she was telling me that where she works, there's a term to Rebecca something means to give it that treatment. So, there's, you know, people at the water cooler saying like, I think it's almost done, but it still needs to get Rebecca or still, you know, something along those lines.
And that's that's just what she did for us and I hope that it I know it's going to serve us very well. So I really appreciate her talent. So yeah, all of these things we made very specific kind of decisions about like do we want to have contractions? You know, there were these little decisions about how far do we want to go in terms of formality, informality, tradition, new and we just tried to strike a balance there.
So we can let's just kind of keep flipping through. What page are you on? Are we still on 10 in your book? So, we can just take a look at generally what we've got on that first spread. We make it all the way through the major scale. I'm proud of that. And then on the second open spread, 12 and 13, we get into minor. We show the major and minor kind of in relative to each other. I think I first saw Ted Mercer do that, put them over overlay them to show the relationship and it definitely opened my mind up and I always show that to the people I'm teaching.
So then we have you know getting into rhythmic stuff, the durations, some of the equivalencies, what a measure is.
You got to have the measure first before you go into the modes of time. There were some of these things where I was like, can't we move this over here? And realized, you know, it does have to scaffold in that way. So, you gota you gota know what a measure is. So, then we get into the modes and as we flip over Oh, and you'll notice that we don't have the da I will miss that and I know a lot of people will. My goal here was just to make this kind of dead simple so that if people who were like really really new were in a 2hour or multi-ight singing school they'd be able to sing something easy while keeping time, while thinking about how the measure works, while thinking about what a mo what a measure in that mode feels like, sounds like, what the accent is like.
Without having to learn a little melody because there's a lot of melodies later and a little I don't know if it's an Easter egg, but in those exercises, the ones on the bottom of 13 and then when you flip over to 14, the down always has the tonic and then it's the five soul on the up.
Make of that what you will. I don't know. I just wanted to get that in people's heads too. Kind of have the important beats of the measure, the important tones of the scale. So then we have some information on accent. We go into dynamics and dynamics has always contained like actual dynamic marking information even though that's not huge in our book. And in a way, I think of the way that we accent notes in each measure as kind of our dynamics, but we stuck with with what it was.
They're near each other.
And then, like I said, we kind of we kind of roll back into some some more almost reference type material. If you need to know what these letters are on the staff, they're here. You don't because you're singing shape notes, but you might if you learned key or if you learned to write music or if it helps you, it's there. Then we have Oh, should I make them sing the since we devoted so much time? Make them sing the chromatic scale. That would be amazing. Should we do it?
Okay, we're going to sing the chromatic scale. This is so random.
All right, we're going in half steps. You can do this. Feel free me. Follow me. La. Say far le say fa. That was insane. That was awesome. That was great. You guys, you rock. And now I feel okay. We had we there's so much information to put there with all the accidental marks that we struggled to know how much page to use up. But that is we recorded that and we can go back and look at it. So now it feels worth it. So then let's flip to 16.
We decided to put in some information about different keys that's presented in a little bit of a different way. That includes detailing the relative keys major and minor. And kind of talk about that a little bit and relate it back to the two the major and minor scale overlaid with each other and how they relate and why they have the same key signature. And just also laid out like some some common tonic notes in those keys.
You know, there's more than one. So, sometimes hard to choose, but for people keying or trying to find the first note or whatever, we hope to that that might be helpful just to see where they live or for someone who doesn't read bass clef and wants to know where something lives. And then we get into these rhythmic notations and these are very important. You do you do need these to really sing. But you can see all of those that kind of make our rhythms happen. Okay.
Then we'll keep flipping. Then we get into the geekery more on Sacred Harp singing. We try to give people a lot of information about leading, keying, front bench singing, who the officers are, who the committees are, memorial lessons, you know, just all all that kind of stuff that we do. And then it goes into so that section was more on Sacred Harp singing and this section is more on Sacred Harp music. So then we get into that kind of thing. Different kinds of tunes, keying, more on keying, more on keying.
Text meters.
Then we get into the harmony and composition. We've got a little interval chart there that I like that shows you that's what we just sang. All the all the intervals all the way up to an octave. And now you know what they're called if you didn't know before. And then you know then on the on 22 we've got some some good stuff chords built on the different scale degrees stuff about composition again. Thank you David Wright. And then we are at the exercises. So now I wanted to invite Fynn to come talk about that with me.
I mean Fynn also was the one. So Lindy is the is the design mastermind as we heard and so she helped lay this all out. Fynn was making every single note that you see in these rudiments or symbol. Fynn made that because he had Sibelius and because he's talented.
But that was just it was amazing to work with this team. There was a lot of can you make me this but a little smaller, you know, just trying to fit everything and make everything look great. And then Fynn and I also kind of worked on what these exercises would be. Come say something. You got to stand next to me because it's gonna not look like I'm shorter than you. I'm gonna get down here. This is And I'm wearing heels, so it's really more like this.
Yeah. So, we added we looked at a lot of the older editions and added some we wanted to have some scale practice exercises. And these ones actually come from the Sacred Harp, the old book. And what yeah, what I really wanted to talk about actually is the two exercises at the very bottom.
Please do
Because that relates a lot to the way that we were typesetting the music as well. We're working on making the music the way that the music is written more consistent throughout the book. The way that repeats and dapos and the ending bar lines are notated and these little exercises really demonstrate that.
Should we sing? I want to sing some of them. But let me say one more thing just that we tried. I'm proud of first of all I'm proud that that everything on these two pages 24 25 has some some sort of 1800s date near it. I think that's cool just because it shows our effort to do this kind of balance of old and new. Kind of infusing some new stuff making it useful for us but also making sure to seek those old paths. So, so yeah, and just this is up there for you to look at, but we tried to hit all these modes and accent and scales, intervals.
And then, you know, examples of SEO and DC and multiple endings and just exercises to help keep time. Again, hopefully a great tool for singing teachers. I don't know.
Should we try and sing something? What should we sing? Which one? Do you want to sing those or you want to sing?
I don't know.
Do you want to tell them that?
We should sing that one.
Oh, yeah. We had thought about how are we going to do rounds? What time is it? Oh, no. It's time.
Oh, I forgot that this was here. Oh, I'm so dumb. Yeah. Okay. So, you want to do that one or Yeah. Okay. All right. We're gonna try on 25. Bring the songbook. Okay.
Okay. So, we need four groups of people. So
[Group singing of a rudiments exercise, “Bring the Song”; the captions do not provide reliable lyrics.]
All right, I guess we have to go to our next thing. But again, I thank you. Thank you so much for letting me work on this. And I hope that you love it. Bye. And thank you to this team and all the teams. Thank you.
Break and room conversation
Read captions from this break or transition
But it's 15 minutes.
So team
I went over Oh, yeah. I decided
I mean, honestly, yeah. And I was like
I like congratulations.
And I'm really excited about people enjoy teaching that they make anymore.
Oh, he's
Hello.
He's trying to Yeah. Come on. Come on. Here we go.
Sure.
Actually, you moved it.
Yeah.
Yeah. I'm wondering if I can do that.
That's great. Yeah, that's good. Yeah.
Text editing announcements
We're going to start in about 2 minutes.
One minute warning. We'll want to start on time because I'm between you and lunch.
Editing the texts
Hello, my name is Will Fitzgerald and we're about to start this session. I'm going to be talking about text editing for the 2025 edition. Sometimes when you go to a singing, some old worthy will stand up and say, "Pay attention to these words." This reminds us that we are not just singing. We're not just a singing tradition, but also a tradition of words and thoughts and ideas about very important things. Death, sin, salvation, creation, God. This book is not made up just of the tunes, but also poetry written over hundreds or even thousands of years.
As the people charged with preparing the texts of poetry for our book. Texts that our community have sung for over 180 years. We editors have wanted to make these words easier to understand, easier to sing, easier to enter into our hearts and souls. It's been a daunting task, but we too have had to pay close attention to these words. In my talk, I'm going to give a little bit of history about how our group came together and the work it did. I'm going to talk about our general process we used.
We're going to do some deep dives.
I'm going to go into the weeds with some examples of editing decisions we made. And if you're like you're my fellow nerds here, we're going to we're going to get into it. And I'm a data guy, so I'm going to do some statistics and at the end I have a special digital present for you. So starting out you've seen this attribution slide before of course the revision music committee did the overall care and production of our book divided up into these two teams. One of the teams was the book production and design committee book design and production sorry and a group of that was the text preparation team.
So that's what I'm going to talk about today is what our text preparation team did.
I was very interested to think about what happened in the 1991 edition. We've seen some discussions about history already about previous editions. And in the acknowledgements page, which notice is a little shorter than the current one, there are three people who are credited with some kind of work with words. And those people are Don Bowen and Marylu Reynolds and Dr. Steel is is Warren, are you in the audience now? Well, I'm going to just say nice things about him because I asked Warren last week about who actually got the words together for the book and he said that he and William Reynolds got got those together.
So, they did the work those two people did the work of our relatively large committee in ' 91. The committee, the text preparation group basically got its start as a result of a decision in November 2023 where Jesse P. Karlsberg who was the lead for the text preparation of course for the whole book production brought a style guide a draft style guide to the to the revision music committee and said I think this would be helpful in getting us to make decisions about what to do.
Another decision was made that we David mentioned this earlier that we needed to do get the text ready before we should start doing the engraving. It's sort of makes sense but you can imagine doing it in parallel. The text preparation committee, the one I'm on really was not in charge of making any changes to words. We were kind of like the comma and semicolon people. And so any Yay! Aren't you glad you came to this one?
The revision music committee, especially David, u were the people who kind of looking at changes to verses and words. And so David's talked about that a little bit earlier, but that was not our job. The initial team, of course, was Jesse as a lead. Three of us had volunteered and Dr. Snow was also volunteered. I'm so pleased I finally got to meet Dr. Snow this morning in person. Of course, we met over Zoom. The goals of the text preparation was to be consistent, practical, readable to avoid affecting singing practice.
So, we wanted to have this sort of light touch over the book, although you'll see we made lots of small changes.
In December, we got started right away in and in through the first quarter. The first thing we did is Jesse gave us a set of texts to work on and each of us as individual editors sort of just did that. We reflected on the process and that helped us to both develop make decisions about tools and processes. The tools we used were Google documents, not too surprising these days, but also using something called GitHub, which is a place where programmers usually keep their code, but we found it a convenient place to store the individual files of our texts and all the changes that were being made that we could track and we could have discussions online about those changes and kind of keep track of those discussions in a careful way.
The process decisions I'll talk about in just a minute what kind of how we went about the process of editing. And I'm a programmer. I started working on we wanted to automate the hyphenation as much as possible. There are lots of hyphens in our book. And we wanted to automate that. I think I volunteered because I thought it would be relatively easy to do. A typical programmer mistake. And we did lots of analyses and basically began updating the style guide in the second quarter. So we started the work yeah so we started the work we realized we needed more help I think actually in the from the beginning we knew that we would not be enough.
Yeah, Jesse's nodding his head and we invited Eric Schwab, Thomas Ward and Becky Wright. And music engraving of course had begun and I just want to acknowledge that Rachel and Fynn were very helpful in bringing up things that they would see as the thing was actually on the page. Some should this comma be here type questions. That was really great. So let me just talk about doing the work. Oh, I think I must have missed the slide. I apologize. Yeah, I did. Things went I want to talk about the process.
So let me just jump back to there. So basically we ended up working in batches and what would what we do is that Jesse would select a collection of songs something like eight to 10 songs per person and then he would pair us up as as editors. There'd be one editor in charge of the editing for those for their songs and one person reviewing them. Which was sorry my daughter is calling I thought I had do not disturb turned on. Okay. I think I also have my daughter could call me at any time, which is a good thing for a daughter, I think.
So anyway, so we would pair up as editor reviewer. We would do the work, edit the songs, the reviewer would review the work, we'd basically engage in a discussion. And in fact, it often was the case that other editors wanted to review the work too because we cared a lot about the final product. So there would be a long a long or short discussion over changes. Finally there'd be some decision and usually that was by consensus, but sometimes Jesse was the backup. He would say, "Okay, it's time to call the question.
This is what we're going to do." And we're really actually very grateful for that because we knew there would be an end to the discussions. For a particular batch all the decisions would be made then I would kind of run the hyphenation algorithm over them. Jesse would do a final review document some changes and merge them into the ongoing updated version on GitHub. And we did that 19 times. So we had 19 batches of that sort.
That's for the text preparation stuff. I want to mention that there was also a pro kind of a process for text changes. David mentioned earlier that there were lots of recommendations for changes of various kinds as we as on a team on our text preparation team were working closely with the text. Sometimes we would make a suggestion and that would go to first Jesse to kind of say probably not going to do anything with that. But also eventually the revision music committee would make a decision.
It would kind of again they kind of worked in batches of these changes as well and then once it was decided on it would come to us and we would make the changes in the final text.
Okay. So I talked about the second chord. Let's let's actually do some work. Okay. So this is I'm going to just walk through one piece of looking at Cambridge 287 and looking at the just the first verse. Okay. So this is a poem from William Cooper in his only hymns and it goes the Lord will happiness divine on contrite hearts bestow colon then tell me comma gracious god comma is mine a contrite heart or no looking at the text history in the Sacred Harp this song has been in our book from the beginning we notice that there's a there are two small changes made from that at least from that printing.
I'm not sure where they got their original printing, but we see that the colon has been changed to a semicolon and the second comma has been changed to an exclamation point. Okay, so it's just these slight changes of what's going on here.
Interestingly, the semicolon to semicolon is kind of a general punctuation change that's happening. So this the colon was sort of doing what a semicolon does today. Welcome nerds. Thank you very much for that's the way the text stayed until the James revision in 1911 which used the 1860 version text but they removed the commas between or the comma and the exclamation point from gracious God. And then in the 1991 edition which is where we start our work a comma is added at the third line.
Okay, now that's where we start. And this is I was the editor on this text. I chose it because, you know, it was mine. But there's a we had a really great conversation about it. So I ended up saying, "Okay, well here's the 91 edition. It has this comma, but that comma kind of interrupts the flow of the of the song."
like tell me gracious God is mine a contrite heart or no like that's a question that this the singer is asking it's a very deep and important question to have that comma there kind of interrupts the flow and so I recommended that we remove the comma hey and in fact the reviewer said oh I finally understand this song like he's asking this question is my heart contrite or not and then He said, "But I think you should also add commas around gracious God because our style guide says that we should, you know, have this sort of apposition here, commas around these appositions."
And I said, "Oh, yeah, of course it is. You're of course right."
And I made that change. So, here's just an example of, you know, my recommendation, the reviewer saying, "Oh, this is great. But maybe it should also have this." And then we came to this conclusion. And I think it's really interesting that we essentially came back to what William only had in his original with that little punctuation change. And that's the way it shows up in the book. In the third and fourth quarter of 2024, we started working on the new songs I think in June and at that point Jenna Stysis joined us to review the texts of new songs as sort of a general editor.
We were mostly complete with our work by the end of the year and I just want to talk about the process statistics like how much work was it or something like that. We as I said earlier we did 19 batches. Each song is a file in GitHub and every time we make a significant change to that file we commit it and I counted the number of commits and there were 2100 of those.
So those were you know decisions we had made to make some kind of change that detects sometimes that change was changing it from something in the 91 to something else or you know no we don't want to do that so you know reverting changes as well and these discussions we have over batches so you know I would work on eight my eight to 10 songs there'd be re reviewers we have this discussion I counted those there about 318 of those. So again, we had sort of these nice long conversations about things.
I think because of my slides before I didn't mention something that's feels important to me is that that we did work from the 1991 text that was our base text, but we needed a clean text of that as well. And so Micah Walter from our group he entered every single one of those texts and did an amazing job. So now we not only have the text for the 2025 but the text for the 1991 in a very clean format.
Let me talk about some changes like let's do some counting up of the changes we made. So, in the, new book, we have 590 songs and 477 of them were retained from the 1991 edition. That's a statistic we've already seen, but that's sort of the basis I'm going to talk about where like how many changes were made to the songs we kept. And we actually made some kind of change to 85% of them, which surprised me quite a bit in the end. That's some textual change, a comma, semicolon, a word.
I'm including here the verse changes and things like that as well.
So, sort of major changes that we weren't in charge of, but major changes of some kind. And in fact, David's already mentioned this in one regard is that, at least there are 14 songs in the book according to my count. I hope it's the same as David's, that have at least one verse change. And so, for example, 78 Stafford has an entirely new set of words. There were, verses that were dropped for some songs and verses that were added to other songs. So, 14 of those.
So, I'm counting that in my in my changes.
78% of the songs that were retained have at least one punctuation change. So these are the commas and semicolon things. So not surprising that's what the majority or the vast majority of the changes would be. 126 songs which is kind of large. 26% have at least one word change where the word oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh sorry sorry I was jumping ahead a little bit. So the these were changes that were called word normalization and all this means is that we were using the current spelling of moldering.
M o l der not m o l der. Sorry UK people. Sorry. Sorry. The current US spelling of moldering. Somewhat controversial decision. But also we noticed one big thing was blessed and blessed show up a lot in our book. It's not surprising. And when it's a single syllable, it's spelled sometimes in the book bl in the 91 book and sometimes bl and sometimes both this in the same song. It's a really it's quite interesting that that's the case and that would be kind of a normalization.
So we t we normalize the blessed with a t for single syllable bless. I think I think we did that really consistently. Consistency was important but not the most important thing. There were 50 songs. So this is a smaller number where there's a word change but that's a semantically different song different word. I you know we're not just normalizing it. That's a change that was made and recommend. You know the revision committee said we should have well I'll give you a good example.
I wonder if you can guess what the example is. Sound and sound and found. Very good. Give that person a prize. So in assurance 91 in the olden days they had a different S which was called the long S for and it looks a lot like a modern F. And so a lot of times these long S's have were transcribed as as Fs. And so it has appeared in our book from the beginning. But now in 2025, our songs of joy and victory will sound within the temple.
So So thank you revision music committee. So I had I mentioned like 85% of the songs have some kind of change. 50% of those changes are just punct are yeah just punctuation changes. So again most are just punctuation changes songs is punctuation or normalization changes only. Again most of this is mostly the case. So mostly it should be simpler easier kind of invisible I we hope because that's what editors like to do is just sort of not get in the way. We're trying to remove bumpiness to how you're singing.
And finally, oh, not finally, but I do want to say there are 475 pages of songs in the book, in our new book. 474 have at least one hyphen.
So, when you look at your book and you see a hyphen, you say, "Oh, will put that hyphen there." 19 I needed to tell you because otherwise you were going to look 195. I do want to I do want to talk about one song that has five word changes in it. And that is again this is driven by work from the revision music committee. But I gave a talk on this in at camp and I think it is an example where kind of carefully working with our texts makes makes us understand our words a little better.
So this is sacred throne 5 569 on the bottom. It's a poem by John Kent from his original gospel hymns. And the third verse is sort of famously hard to understand in the 1991 book. It says the sacred flood from Jesus veins was free to make a way. What does that you know make there's is it make away? I mean it's just very confusing the way it was. Not only do we typically not know who Mary and Manasseh are, you know, famous sinners in the Bible who repented.
But what's the it's like there's an and there and it's there's no sentence, there's no verb. It's really unclear and it's because somehow in the text we've received and got into the 91 book they there were some changes made.
I in this case it's unusual to say this but I think it's kind of corrupted the text. So it's it is the sacred flood from Jesus's veins which was free to take away a Mary or Manassain or sins more vile than they. So Jesus's you know his blood his sacrifice could remove the stains from anyone even people like Mary or Manasseh or like us. So suddenly the sentence or this verse very meaningful verse makes sense to us and we can sing it with meaning. I was surprised in kind of looking at this that there are other interesting changes that needed to be made too in the first and second verses.
Beneath the sacred throne of God, I saw a river rise. The streams wear peace. Well, it's in Kent's original, it's were peace and pardoning bun and they are descending from the skies. And I love this image because it has this image of the sacred throne has this river rising beneath it and it's flowing down. It's descending. And what's descending is these is the peace and pardoning blood of Jesus. You know, so suddenly with these changes, it's a lot clearer what's going on. And there's a there's another sort of grammatical correction in the second verse where in the 1991 verse, it says the o ocean is wafting salvation, which means carrying salvation to man, his traitors and his foes.
But his traitors and his foes, that's plural, but man is singular. And it really is a weird change that was made. It's men in John John Ken's original. And so now the you know the bump of the grammar is removed and it's a little bit easier and clearer to read. So I'm very pleased with this change these changes to this song.
Sorry. I can't really hear you from here. I'm sorry.
Oh, his is God's the traitors of God and God's foes, right? So, even that God's love is flowing even to his traitors and his foes, which is humanity as a whole. Yes. Thank you. I also just want to note that Robert Vaughn and Chris Brown have been kind of me noticing this for some time and I'm glad that I'm glad that we could see these changes come to come come to fruition. Okay. I've been talking a lot about the things I've worked on. I asked my fellow editors like what else should I talk about?
And I'm going to tell you what they said.
One was let me read it. We have deeper than expected conversations that punctuation inspires. Hello fellow nerds. We weren't making corrections but interpretations made more complex by changing uses of punctuation since most of the texts were first written. So again as we saw in the Cambridge example the change of colon to a semicolon in you know in the history of punctuation but also that that comma which was introduced in the ' 91 edition kind of changed the meaning or took away the meaning and so interpreting say well what does what could this actually mean?
Oh it is something about asking about our contrite hearts. Another reviewer said, "The collaboration process ensured that no one individual responsible for any particular change.
We really did, I think, lean into a decision-making process that emphasized consensus. Unlike the revision music committee, we didn't always agree, but we had a backup, which is, you know, we knew we were listening to each other even when it wasn't my preferred reading." this reverse said that made it in. I felt confident that the best arguments had been made around been made all around and there was a solid rationale for the selected choice. So as I said Jesse would eventually call the question and I'm going to give an example of one of the controversial ones which is a little bit scary because you might not agree with what we did and Kedran.
So first verse of Kedran 42 on the bottom the 91 edition says thou man of grief comma remember me comma who never can thyself forget thy last expiring agony comma thy fainting pangs and bloody sweat and this raises some questions who or what is never being forgotten and by whom is it the man of grief never forgetting himself? Is it the man of grief never forgetting his own agony?
Is it the speaker, the poet, never forgetting the man of grief in his agony? It's a little bit unclear the way the punctuation is. Actually, it's not a little bit unclear. I think it's very unclear. We had a month-long discussion about this. It involved reviewing early printings of Charles Wesley's poem, which by the way has man of griefs, not man of grief. That is an example where, you know, we're not just trying to put things back the way they were. We're we're singing the songs we have.
We reviewed various text changes over the centuries of this of this text, both within the Sacred Harp world, but also in the Christian harmony. We did grammatical analysis and I guess I'd even say a little bit of theological analysis and finally a decision by Jesse. And so after this month-long discussion, what did we do? We removed a period.
But look, it's a little clear, right? Thou man of grief, remember me. Who never can thyself forget thy last expiring agony, thy fainting pangs and bloody sweat. So we clarify what's being not forgotten which is the agony and the fainting pangs and the bloody sweat and I think it still remains open who is not who is doing not doing the forgetting is it the man of grief or whatever. I think I'd be glad to talk about things afterwards if you don't mind. So as I said this might be controversial.
So another example from a reviewer was or one of the other sorry was that 1991 printing of 83b the dying minister has really bad punctuation in the first verse. The comma at the end of the first line changes the sense of the text from the time when I must faint and die is swiftly rolling on to when I must faint and die. The time is swiftly rolling on which kind of doesn't make sense. So let's actually look at this.
The difference here the 91 edition the time is swiftly rolling on when I must faint and die. Semicolon my body to the dust return and therefore but look what happens when we remove the comma from the first line. We have a comma in the second line instead. The time is swiftly rolling on when I must faint and die. My body to the dust return and their forgotten lie. So the time is swiftly rolling on. Time is coming and three things are going to happen. You know, I'm going to faint and die.
My body is going to go to the dust and it's going to lie there forgotten. Like that makes sense. That's that's the that's the sense of this poem. So, so again, if you kind of look at the 91, it's it there's a bump there. You can understand that's what it's saying. Like, it's not like you can't understand it, but with this change, it really brings out the meaning.
One of the most interesting aspects of our works as another editor was deciding how much to standardize among songs versus preserving the ways these texts have historically appeared. For example, the O versus the O debate. Welcome fellow nerds. So O versus O. We did an analysis. I'm going to tell you the analysis. So what happened in 91 book? So one way O is used both O and O is as an exclamation. So you say O for a thousand tongues to sing or oh glory hallelujah.
And it turns out about half the time in the 91 book that's o and about half the time it's oh comma. There's a second way O is used and that is as a vocative. And a vocative is when I'm talking to you. Okay? So if I'm talking to you, I'm using the vocative. But we don't really have this in English. So but it's anyway and I'm addressing you. So if you if I my wife is here, I could say, "Oh, Bess," this is vocative to my wife.
Or I if death were here, I could say, "Oh, death." or oh Lord remember me, mercy, oh thou son of David. So I'm I'm addressing I'm naming the person to whom I'm speaking. So the vocative plus the addressee happens a fair amount in our book and every time in the 91 book it's an O just you know the letter O no oh H but there's this other squishy thing which is vocative and just sort of expressing some kind of hope or wish and for example oh receive it congregation or the people I'm I'm singing to or praise the mount oh fix me on it God but I'm not mentioning mentioning God's name.
O revive us Holy Spirit, but I'm not mentioning the spirit's name. And it turns out about twothirds of the time it follows the vocative pattern, the just the O. And a third of the time it goes the O. So that's the data. That's what happens in the 91 book. What do we want to do? Do we want to make all the vocatives O? Do we want and all the exclamations O? That was my original thought.
I'm big on consistency. But what we ca what the style guide guidance we ended up with was well that certainly makes sense and vocative with addressee because it's always o of course and but half and half exclamations. Why do we really need to have just one way to have an exclamation? Let's pay attention to how the text came to us. Let's make as few changes as we that are necessary. “O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing” shows up is it four or five times in our book, the 2025 book, we want them to all be the same, especially if if it's in a first line index.
We want it to be the same. And if it's [O/Oh examples unclear in captions] o glory hallelujah in sort of a consistent way, it's okay to have it either way. So basically if there was no reason to make a change, we made no change. We just left it what the way it was. And that's fine. We just wanted to be consistent within the same use of a verse. And similarly with the vocative plus the hope or wish again we left it as is that there's some reason to kind of to make the change one way or the other.
We would tend to want to move move to the vocative O just a plain O. But again you know consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds like mine I suppose. And it's okay. We want to keep things we want to have lighter touches than heavy touches.
We had so many questions. So many discussions, you know, what do we do with so-called discretionary commas? Like commas that could be there but not, you know, what do we do? Do we always follow? We have Oxford comma fans in the Yeah. Whoa. You're all wrong. I'm just being controversial. That is a little bit weird weirder or kind not quite as necessary in as we kind of do the song text. So, sometimes it made sense, sometimes not. It wasn't super you know, super important that we do it one way or the other.
You'll we tended to do the Oxford comma though or so-called serial commas. How do you hyphenate suffering?
Don't talk to me. Come talk to me. Is antichrist a person and so should it be capitalized? The answer is yes. That's what we did. Anyway, I mentioned blessed and blessed. In our style guide, it says if if we have a word in the text and it refers to the Bible, we capitalize it. We have a we have a word in the Bible and it refers to God, we capitalize it. So, what do we do with the word word?
You know, sometimes it's really clear that it's the word, that it's the Bible, and sometimes it's really clear that it's, Jesus and we capitalize it, but sometimes it's not so clear whether this word of God or this word from God is a word from God rather than and so we, you know, again, we had to have these discussions even sort of kind of theological discussions about whether, you know, what is the reference to this thing and I we already did moldering. So again, I apologize to the UK people.
So in review, we want these songs to bring you great joy, sadness, sorrow, delight, whatever moves you. And we really tried hard to remove obstacles from that. It was quite a privilege to be able to work on this to kind of pay attention to these words really carefully. And I hope this gives you a little bit of an insight into the into the work we did. I have a couple more things to say. Special announcement. Remember I told you about the gift.
Fasola.org has been redone. That was Chris Thorman's work and he used our new texts. So there is now the 2025 text is available online. Not only that, if you want to use work with the text from the 2025 edition or the 1991 edition, I said we have these like clean versions of the 1991 edition. They're now available on the Sacred Harp Publishing Company's GitHub page with a fairly open license. So, it's available to you. So, that's really nerdy if you if you get excited about that.
But the website is great. It's already live. You can go to it and, it's looking quite good, I think.
Chris, are you here? Let's do three cheers for Chris. Hipip hip hooray. Hip hip hooray. Hip hip hooray. Because that site has been up for a long time and has provided a lot of value and so I'm really grateful for the for the updates as well. Okay, my final thoughts. We made some mistakes. I don't know what they are otherwise we wouldn't have made them. Is it one in a 100 lines? I don't know. Forgive us. Be nice to us. On a scale from 1 to 10, how grateful I am.
I was very grateful to work on this.
And I want to talk about one complaint I have about the 2025 book. And David previewed this earlier like why don't we have a picture like this? Don't you really wish that you had a picture of the revision music committee that looked like this?
So, I did the next best thing.
This is the revision music committee. I'm sorry, the text preparation team, not the revision music committee. So, Jesse, our lead, who was really great. And let me just read the names. Dr. Robert Kelley, Eric Schwab, Dr. Melinda Snow, the Reverend Jenna Stryzac, Becky C. Wright, Dr. Thomas Ward, Micah John Walter, and myself were on the committee with special guests. Kudos to Fynn Titford-Mock and Dr. Rachel Wells Hall. So, thank you for letting us work on this. We're grateful to had the opportunity to pay attention to these words on your behalf.
I guess if you're in the committee, you should stand up. Maybe I forgot to do that sort of thing. Dr. Snow, Jesse, Eric, Robert. So, Lauren just showed me that there's such a thing that exists. So, at this time, David asked me, Jesse, did you want to say something? Oh, at this time, Jesse asked me, to find somebody to, pray for our lunch from this room. And so, I've asked [name unclear in captions] if she wouldn't, would would pray for us.
Prayer before lunch
The Lord be with you. Let us pray. Gracious God, we thank you for the many blessings of this life, this day, this community, and for all the gifts you so freely give. For life, health, and safety, for energy, and peace, and for that is beautiful. We give thanks. We thank you for the gift of fellowship, for the joy of gathering with kindred spirits and for the deep connections formed in shared song and purpose. We thank you for the gift of this music, for the way it stirs our souls, lifts our voices, and draws us closer to you and to one another.
Let us be mindful that the gift of food is not only a gift from you, but also a gift of the work of many hands. We are grateful for this opportunity to and be in fellowship. May this time together be a source of renewal and joy. We are blessed to receive these gifts and we ask your guidance to live our lives in such a way that reflects humble gratitude. We ask that you bless this food to the nourishment of our bodies and bless our bodies, minds, and hearts to your service through song, through fellowship, and through love.
In Jesus name we pray. Amen.
Amen.
Lunch announcements
So, I guess we're I have no idea what's happening for lunch is I don't really know what's happening for lunch, like what the logistics are. So, maybe Jesse's going to say something. Jesse's going to say something.
So lunch will be in Tisdale Hall. Tisdale Hall is the room where we've actually moved the second track. If you go down the elevator or down one flight of stairs, it's opposite the chapel. And your food should be ready for you there. So, be dismissed for lunch. And we'll be we have an hour and 15 for lunch. So, we'll be back at 1:15.
Lunch break and room conversation
Read captions from this break or transition
That was wonderful. That was great. That was so fun. I love the energy, you know? I mean, it's like the energy about these. It's great. It's great. It's just great. Really made a wonderful Sure. Happy to. Yeah. Here you can use my There you go. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No
Good. Yeah, it's been great. It's good to see the reaended rewatch.
Oh yeah. Yeah. We're you know it's we can't do we couldn't do that while we're doing all this you know but we it's it was never our intention for it to even stay dormant for that long and honestly it was combination of just the core group working on the revision and then you know our website relaunch took forever but it's it's yeah it'll be back in 2026. And I think you know when we were running it there was a lot of there was there were a lot of topics like that people had and once we had it as a vehicle there was a steady stream I think of really great
Writing for it and I think you know we're
Yeah I kind of felt like that our community was craving a vehicle for kind of more extended writing about singing and that like with the with the decline there's been a decline in the use of email list serves for a long time now. There's a decline in the use of social media
And it's and a fragmentation.
Yes. And so our audience is is as fragmented as it's ever been in terms of the way that we're able to receive information. And we can't fill that gap, but we can contribute something
That provides a really useful place for discourse about, you know
You know, and it's just
You know, and it's also newsletter and it's kind of a thing. It's a thing and it's it's a thing and it's a thing that it's just interesting to me that it arose really in the 60s. Yeah.
You know, with the there was this Harpath Valley News. Okay.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, and then the publishing company got in on it once, you know, it's like really like it was what
The list of replaced
You know what I mean? So there were these regional news which you've seen, I'm sure many of them, but you know, seven or eight or nine or 10 of these regional newsletters.
It and it's a different environment now, right? It's a totally different environment. So it will serve a different role and everything. Was really like the way that local communities got their news out. But it was also how as the singing world expanded, it was how different communities kept in touch. They subscribed to each other's news. So I just thought, you know, it was that's why we called it what we called it. But we also like, you know, we weren't going to be the national newsletter. We were going to be the art publishing company newsletter.
All we that's all we were.
But you know, but honestly, you know, and if you look at the first issues, they're like three paragraph essays.
Yeah. Yeah.
Not too long before they're 4,000 words. I know. So that's why we're now shape notes and calling it a journal because it really is more of a long form periodical. It's like what people were writing.
There's a lot of
So we'll have room for both of those sorts of things and it'll be it'll be fun. So
Yeah, you know, I'm going to try to get some rest and then we'll, you know, maybe like middle of 2026 we'll get going with that. Hey David. Oh yeah, I haven't
Wor until now. All the decisions as they come out.
Yeah. That's awesome. I'm gonna I'm grabb I wonder. Yes. Come to me.
Oh my Excuse me.
Yeah. Okay. Not at all. I'm going to But it really was It's not going to change. You're wrong.
Absolutely. I'm so excited.
I didn't see You are fine. Amen. Amen. Amen. She knows. Oh yes.
Is a very We almost everybody I like smart at all. Let's relax. So So there's to whatever it is amazing. Hallelujah. That's problem. Yes. All the people calls and talking to themselves. If we are viewers, if we are listening to 30 especially Yes. So much without Well, you know, research. I see a lot of are But some are I want to I was like this social media This is whether And that's But I mean that's That's going to be the end.
Okay, that's awesome. I don't want Let me see here. Amen.
Yeah. Be okay.
Mr. Camera guy is like this. Is that okay? I don't know. They're not doing anything upstairs. It doesn't matter.
Ready? I can take this.
Okay, that's great.
The only other thing I'm think sends
People's dozen coffee shops.
We have coffee break
Hard. How's it going?
So, I think that it actually makes the most sense because I'm kind of turning it over to
The other the other speaker.
Great. Okay. Well, that that works better for me. It's hard to see back here.
Great. Yeah, we'll stay. We I love it. Let me know.
Afternoon announcements
Good afternoon. Let's get seated. We'll start in about 20 seconds. Welcome All
Book design and production
Right. All right. Good afternoon. My name is Jesse P. Karlsberg. I'm a member of the Revision Music Committee and I'm also our lead for what we call book design and production. So, a You all excited about book design and production? I think you are. I think you are. I think you're not just saying that. I'm excited. So alongside the revision music committee's work evaluating songs, making editorial decisions, a team that we called book design and production helped the committee realize its vision. This was an effort by dozens of singers to ensure that the book's design was of the highest quality and to ensure that it met our needs as a singing community.
This was a multi-year process. It was a commitment of thousands of hours of effort. It is a testament to the wide-ranging expertise of members of our singing community and of the care and dedication and love that so many of us have for Sacred Harp singing. We have never in the history of our tradition had the opportunity to have this level of control over the design of our songbook. And we seized that opportunity in every respect. This is you've already seen this page. It's in your book.
I've seen it up on that screen. This is a crop of our acknowledgements page that shows the various roles and responsibilities that we group under what we called book design and production. There are 33 individuals who were involved in this book design and production effort. Many of them took on multiple roles.
They brought people have spoken to this already but I just want to reiterate they brought a tremendous range of skills to this project. So our team included professional proofreaders, writers and editors. It included scholars, world experts in early English himnity. It included some of the most experienced music engravers of shape-note music. It included designers, project managers, computer scientists, a music typographer.
Our team spanned nine time zones. So, I want you to just think about meetings for a second. Our team span nine time zones. And we had members just on this book design and production team from a dozen states and three different countries. So this really just as a kind of microcosm it represented some of the breath of our community of Sacred Harp singers. I want to tell you a little bit about our process. So in I don't know if you can see the difference between the two colors.
You can sort of the top row is a nice cream color that looks kind of like your pages in the Sacred Harp. But anyway, that top row represents the kind of stages of book design and production work. So, early on we did a whole lot of planning.
We had all kinds of planning activities. I'll talk about these stages in a little bit, but I'm just going to give you an overview to start. The next large phase in our kind of workflow for a given song was text preparation. Again, Will covered this in his excellent talk. I'm not going to talk much about text preparation in this session. Text preparation along with some of the other areas on your acknowledgements page that really were not part of our book design and production workflow but fed into subsequent steps.
So for us to bring a song into music engraving which is when we set the notes set the appearance of notes and underlay the text we needed that text from text preparation. We also needed to know if there was a key change, which generally there wasn't, but we needed that information and we needed any editing decisions that took place to the music of a song. Those were all inputs to the next step, which was music engraving.
Alongside that, there was work on the attributions, which you'll hear about this afternoon. On the scriptures, which if you're bored, you could step out. I think the scriptures talk is happening right now. Is that right? Don't have my schedule. Yep. And meters plus for other parts of the book there was a whole separate process of work on the rudiments of music. You heard about that this morning also on the different components of the front matter on the indexes. All of those different things fed into page design.
When you're taking the music, you're taking all those different elements that show up on the top of our page and in the case of a copyright notice sometimes on the bottom of the page. Or the content for the non-sung pages, right? And putting those together in the layout program that then fed into the proofreading process. And then finally, once the whole book was designed, we moved into printing into I guess production. So that's just an overview of our process. I'm gonna tell you I'm not g, you know, I'm just not going to tell you everything that we did for each of these steps.
Right. So, you enjoyed your dinner. That was like an I enjoyed my dinner applause. You're feeling a little spicy. Okay. So I'm I'm kind of going to give you some examples. So, I'm going to talk in a little bit of depth about certain of the elements of this process as a way to give you insight into just what it was to design and produce this book. And we're going to start with planning. So, we undertook a number of different planning activities. Some of these were at the very beginning of our work on book design and production.
Even as we were constituting a group to do some of the this work. But some of these planning activities also unfolded at later times in our process.
We developed what we call a creative brief early on in the process and this was a document that tried to kind of like take the perspective of you all. Even thinking about the variety in our singing community and articulate that as needs and translate that into priorities and a vision so that in all the decisions that we made, we could make sure that we weren't just relying on our personal preferences, some of which we have very strong personal preferences. I have a lot of very strong personal preferences about the design of the book.
Lauren can attest to that, you know, but we but we really wanted to make sure that every decision that we made was driven by our understanding of priorities driven by the needs of singers. So, in our creative brief, we emphasized a book that serves our current singing population, right? That meets the expectations and the needs, whatever those may be, right, of our current singing population. A book that also though is inviting to newcomers.
A book that is accessible. We hear all the time about the difficulty of reading small texts in low light situations, right? So, there were all kinds of considerations where that desire to make a book that we can use, right? The that our population in its variety with singers of different ages and of different abilities can use. A book that is traditional, right? A book that is in keeping with the many expectations that we have, large and small, some of which we would, I think, struggle to even articulate, right?
But that we have because of our investment in Sacred Harp singing as this traditional practice that it is and a book that is beautiful.
As a couple of people have mentioned, we developed a style guide. I had meetings with editors of denominational hymnals of the Baptist himnil of Methodist hymnals of other hymnals. We scoured the internet right for this and requested from these individuals style guides of projects that we saw as likely to have something useful for us to learn from. And we had informational conversations with folks like this. You can't probably read much of this. This is a document that we're still not calling finished. It was a working document that evolved across our process.
Sometimes someone would say to me, what does the style guide say about X? And I would look and it would say, consult with so and so, the person who's asking me, right? You know, so it was a working document that we developed to serve our own needs, right? But it wound up giving our giving us so much grounding, you know, and information and to facilitate the application of decisions that we wanted to make whenever we needed access to those decisions. It was a very useful document.
And just as one example, I've highlighted here of something that we spelled out. Where do you put the words underneath or in between the parts of the song, right? And what what does that depend on? Well, it could depend on how many verses there are, right? It if we just have one verse, we might do something different. In fact, we will do something different than if we have three or four.
It may also depend on things about the form of the song. Is it a fuging tune where there's passages where the different musical parts are singing the text at different times? What if it's what we sometimes call an AABA song? Okay, if you have a standard a standard plain tune and it has one verse, all you need is one line of text to cover that verse. If it's an AABA song, you actually need three lines of text, right? Because you have to think about that a b a okay you know so you can see just a little excerpt here where it shows how many stanzas how many parts is it a three-part song or a four-part song special features of that song such as a dicapo or an aaba or fug or what it is and then the locations of the underlaid verses.
So, that's just one example of something covered in our style guide.
Something that if you look in your 1991 edition, we generally can find our music and find our words, right? We're able it meets our needs. And yet, you'll see that here and there there's a song where the under the way in which the verse is underlaid may not be what you expect. It may not be consistent with other songs of that nature. It may not be the choice that makes the text the easiest to find. So that's just one example of about a hundred of something that the style guide covered.
Alongside that is what we call our house style.
So the style guide tells us many things about text, about music and so on and so forth. It doesn't tell us or control things like exactly how much space is there between a measure bar and the first note of music in a measure. Okay. And is that it? Maybe we could capture something like that in our style guide, but it wound up being house helpful to have what we called a house style to have all kinds of rules about music engraving, rules about the sequence of eighth notes and you know just you know hundred more than hundred several hundred things embedded into the files that the music engravers worked.
So, in parallel with their development of a house style, of a style guide, we were working on this thing called a house style. Later this afternoon, we're going to talk all about the music typeface that the Sacred Harp Publishing Company commissioned expressly for the 2025 edition. This is a big part of our effort to meet these goals that I talked about in the creative brief and to get the book to look as as beautiful and be as accessible as possible. So, I'm just not going to cover that now.
I do want to Oh, yeah. Great.
Touch briefly on our work on text typefaces. This is another thing that Lindy helped us with. We got a great picture of Colin of excuse me, Miller Daily in the rudiments class, the font that we wound up using for our underlay for text all throughout the book and the rudiments and so on and so forth. That's a modern font that's a an expression of a style in the history of typography called Scotch Roman. And the 19th century editions of the Sacred Harp, they used this Scotch Roman face.
It was a very popular text face in American printing in the mid-9th century. So, we were able to use a typeface that hearkened back to our book's specific history, but as Lindy expressed, we used this style of it called Miller Daily rooted in this a part of this typeface family, but a style of it used for newspaper initially, so that it had this high X height that we heard about this morning, making it especially easy to read at small sizes. We also had to choose a display typeface, a typeface that we could use for the headings of songs, the headings in the rudiments, the headings of the essays.
You see it on the cover of the book. And this is just, you know, a picture of some of the work that our book design and production team reviewed that Lindy did for us in considering a wide variety of typefaces. Meeting our needs in various ways relating to our book's history. That led us ultimately to a typeface that isn't even up there, but a version of this Optima typeface called Optima Nova.
Finally, one other piece of planning I'll tell you about. Will mentioned that when the text preparation group started, they worked with a set of sample texts. The music engravers did something similar when we started out working on music engraving. We selected what we called our sample song corpus. So we tried to come up with a set of songs that would help us answer but even sus out the questions that we had to ask ourselves to make the books the music's design look the way we wanted it to look.
So, you know, just a few of the kinds of songs that we selected.
A typical halfpage plane tune. A song that is sparse vertically but tight horizontally. Okay. A song with four or five verses in AAB format where there's a repeat over the A section. You know, doesn't come back. Yeah, this is just a list. I'm not showing you the songs. I'm just showing you the list. This is this isn't this is book design and production. We're just looking at spreadsheets and, you know, very, you know, it's not this isn't Yeah. No. You'll get to look at some pictures soon, I promise.
I'm just I'm literally just reading you from a spreadsheet. Read. I'm reading at you from a script. Yeah. I should have been telling you the numbers at least of the songs I'm mentioning. 144 was the song that had a whole lot of verses, but in AAB form. 178 was a song that we thought could be a candidate for condensing. We ultimately did condense that song from a full page to half brace. So, we wanted a song like that in our sample song, Corpus, to test out the notion that that was something that we could do.
And I'll give you just one other example. 360, the Royal Band, a song that has a whole lot of flags, eighth note flags. Okay? So, in other words, coming up with a sample song corpus, a list of songs that if we engraved them, we would encounter almost all of the challenges, but also one where it wasn't just extremes, right?
But it was also songs that were kind of typical or average, if you will. We didn't want to make decisions that were skewed to meet the unusual circumstances of a song or two at expense at the expense of a decision that could look great on the 90% of songs in the middle. So, I've talked to you about planning. I'm going to skip over text preparation. I'm going to talk just a little bit about music engraving. We could and perhaps someday we will have a chance to talk in depth about music engraving because the work of this team was tremendous.
We had three engravers, Rachel Wells Hall, Fineian Titford Mock, and Michael Spencer. Like the text preparation process that will told us about we had an iterative review process for our work on music engraving.
So after all of this work which stretched on for months on our sample song corpus to get where we had answered enough questions that we felt confident started starting also where these three engravers who had different preferences even different styles could create work that looked consistent. We even had a few songs in the sample song corpus where all three engravers worked on each song. Okay. Once we moved on to that, we had a system like text preparation where each song had an engraver and each song had a reviewer.
I had to give you just one screenshot of what we called the tracker. I don't know what it feels like as a member of our book design and production team to look at this spreadsheet. Now, you know, we spend a lot of time in this spreadsheet. I learned a lot about spreadsheets, I think.
But you know, if you can see that at all, you can see a column where if there's a change to the music, you can see there's a spreadsheet tagged there, and there's a link to the cell that describes the change to a note, right? So that that's accessible. And then it says who is the assigne, who is the reviewer, does it need we learned after a while that we needed a flag needs JPK. Does it need is there a is there a discussion that's hinging on my input before it can proceed?
And once there were 40 or 50. I think the highest it ever got up to was in the 80s. You know, I would feel real good if I got it down to like, you know, so I keep going and just get it under under, you know, out of the 40s and into the 30s or out of the 30s and into the 20s. By the time I wake up, there's another 12, you know, on my list. But, you know, we so we needed a flag. And then you can see the status.
So you know for each song it's not yet started it's in progress that first version is complete the review is in progress the review is finished it's approved by me and then later on there's revision needed or not and it's finally complete. So we tracked this and we had at any time it really helped us when we were talking about text preparation being a driver of our timeline, music engraving being a driver of our timeline, having these statuses, having the ability to see at a glance at a glance what percentage of our songs are review complete or further in the process.
It really helped us have some prediction, helped us make decisions like whether to add more text preparation folks because we use a similar tracking process for that. So, I don't have I well, yeah, I just have one I don't have great examples. I felt like Will had such great examples of what came from text preparation discussions and I have like entirely one entirely inconsequential example of what our music editing process and music engraving process looked like. Which is that we used Google documents.
So, we had these PDFs up there and people would comment on them. So, a song would be ready for review. The reviewer would come in, they would say, "I'd rather have both of these stems down." And the engraver would look at that and say, "Oh, yeah, you're right." Or, "I don't know about that." gather those feed, you know, pieces of feedback. Make another version. Yeah. This is 38 on the top. So, we're looking at winter. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, why doesn't it have a title?
Because it's still in music engraving. It's still in music engraving. It hasn't gotten to page design yet. It's just the music and the text. Right? So, this is what these songs looked like for most of the time we were working on them. Fynn says text could move a little left for one word. Right? One word isn't quite under underllay in the way that our style guide suggests that it should be centered on the note that it's above or that it's it's paired with. So, you know, another version.
This is one of Mike's songs that we're looking at. Finally, it's past review. It's ready for my check. And I just happen to notice this one line. It looks like it's not exactly centered vertically between the two verses. Sure enough. Okay.
That's better. You know, and those are just a handful, right? Those are just four of the states of this song. Some of our songs, we hit it on the first try. The reviewer takes a look, it's great. I take a look, it's great. Those were mostly in the second half or the third of our process, right? Many of these earlier songs went through 8 10 a dozen iterations on their way to the version that you see in the book. So we worked hard to find a common style as I said you know in our planning work and then when we were even in the work of engraving songs we were making decisions hundreds of decisions to get consistency from song to song.
So there's a whole lot of making and following rules. At the same time, engraving music is a craft and it's a practice that really shows the eye and the artistry of our engravers. And as I flip through this book, I am aed by the care and the artistry that our music engravers brought to their work.
And I could give you a thousand examples of that. I'm going to give you two slurs. Have you ever thought about slurs? A slur, a slur is not a glyph. So, our music typeface has glyphs. It has characters like letters. A slur is defined within our music engraving software. Almost no two slurs are exactly the same. And we create rules within the software almost like math that sets how they look. And then there's a lot of work for some of these longer slurs that connect notes that have different pitch values into getting that arc to look just right.
This is a style that Fynn took the lead in developing that is inspired by our 19th century tunebook which has a rather flat slur and that was in part due to a technological limitation and we weren't going to have that flat slur between notes that are up here and down here. But we loved as opposed to a long smooth rainbow, we loved that kind of like largely flatish look. I think it's just beautiful and on a song like Malro, you can really see not just the beauty of that rule, but the artistry of applying it in a specific case.
And these engravers put, you know, place that level of attention into every song.
Another example is eighth note flags in tight songs. Okay. Who's heard of the term kerning? Okay. And when we what nerds I love you. I no I Okay. Really? That's great. So you know in kerning when you've heard of the term kerning you've heard it applied to letters right? Having that capital T and then a lowercase letter right next to it. And it doesn't need to be all the way over here. It can be right in there. Right in there. Okay. We kerned our eighth note flags in tight songs, right?
That's exactly the reaction I wanted. So on and I don't expect to stay much longer here in the tenor. Look at the kerning. How that soul sneaks in under the flag of that law, right? O, that's some good music engraving. All right. Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. So Charles Biata and Lindy Groing were our two designers who worked on the page layout process. Charles is on his way, but he had a travel challenge. He sent me an image of a person caught in a spiderweb that he told me to put in the powerpoint.
I haven't done that. So you can just visualize that. And Charles sent me I was going to ask Charles to speak for a little bit about page design. And so I'm going to read to you what he wrote. So Charles said, "Setting type involves more than just picking a font and point size and placing the content of a page.
The default settings built into a typeface are not always appropriate for refined typesetting. Fortunately, Adobe Inesign, which is the program that we used, not for the underlay of text that was done in music engraving. Once we have that block to set all of the top matter, the title, the scripture, the attributions, and certainly for the front matter, we use this program. Adobe in design allows for a level of control over how type appears that you don't get in most other software. Below are some of the primary elements of typography that were considered.
Can we say leading or letting
Letting the vertical spacing between lines of type because it's lead? Yeah.
Right. Back in the day. Little lines of lead between the lines of type. Word spacing, the horizontal space between words across a block of text. Tracking, the horizontal space between glyphs across a block of text. Generally, all caps and small caps should be set with wider tracking to allow the glyphs room to breathe and to avoid collisions between glyphs. And these adjustments are reflected in the song titles. Kerning. Kerning. All right. Okay. The horizontal space between individual glyphs, in our case, the meters and initial pairs in the attributions required extensive custom kerning.
So any SM Denson or EJ king or SM for short meter, right? Or PM required custom kerning. Proper attention to these elements can create subtle or not so subtle improvements to legibility and user experience. Page layout for the Sacred Harp poses a particular challenge in that its traditional organization does not necessarily reflect each element's individual importance.
For example, the meter of the tune is treated second in importance only to the title and arguably this is the least important bit of information on the page. Similarly, we are thrilled by our updated and expanded attributions, which we'll hear about later. But these provided design challenges as well. How to fit in that extra text without colliding with high notes in the treble or lengthier scriptural attributions. Early along, Lindy created default settings for the top matter for loose and tight settings. These maintain a consistent placement for the title, page number, and scriptural attributions while allowing the drop height of the music and position of the key and other attributions to vary based on context.
So, we thought a lot about that top of the page and how to handle all the different elements in there and their spacing. If we were designing a book from scratch without centuries of precedent, we might be tempted to organize the page differently. And then Charles says, "I'm so grateful to have had the opportunity to work with Jesse and Lindy on this project. Hopefully, we succeeded in creating an elegant and readable book." thank you, Charles. All right. So, and I'm now going to invite Lindy to say a word about our cover design.
This is the cover. I'm going to talk about two things. One is the material that the cover is made from. What's really interesting is Jesse's talked about all of the contents of this book and I think you can tell every single page while we are trying to create consistency is its own unique situation of things that has to be sort of wrangled from a design perspective. And obviously it took a giant team of people to make that happen. The book becomes an object when we put a cover on it.
So it's sort of an interesting it was just wild to see this book in person I have to say because it's been like this imaginary thing in my head forever and now it's a physical thing that we all get to look at and it's a thing that we all have a really special close relationship with because it goes through all these singings with us. So, it's a real honor to know that you all will have this book and be able to look at it and look at this cover, which is also a lot of pressure.
But to get to the nitty-gritty, this material, we got like a sample book, like three sample books from Sheridan. And as David said, it's hard to make a book that's like this these days. And so, we got a sample book of the few materials that we could find in the quantity that we needed that met these requirements, and we put them through a tension test. Like we smooshed them up and got them all wet. And like David said, we put our books through a lot of sort of stress.
And so if you feel this book, you will notice that it feels sturdy and it feels like it will resist the elements or maybe a little sweat because it was designed for that.
I'll talk a little bit about color and that this same sampling of colors was what we had to choose from. So, while you might have thought that this design exercise was an infinite amount of colors that you could choose from, it was in fact finite. And we obviously did the exercise of wanting this book to be distinguished from other singing books and from the 91 revision. But also to make it feel at home for you all as you look at it. It should feel hopefully familiar even if you never saw it before.
And hopefully we were successful with that that choice.
So nice. Now I'm going to talk about fonts because you all said you know what kerning is. So the front of the book is probably like the easiest thing to design because there's not anything on it except for the title, but that actually makes it the hardest thing to design because you have to be really fussy about the kerning. But also the space of where this title sits on this book, what the spine looks like. Our old revision didn't have a spine. And then maybe that frame kind of element.
Do we want a frame? Do we want a frame that's big? Do we want it to have lots of stuff in it? And so we made decisions about really being spare with our design so that the cover would stand the test of time. I won't talk too much about the frame, but the frame is inspired by the music typeface. You can see a little little me in there in the center. There's sort of a hint of a staff and also a little bit of a square element, maybe a little nod to a hollow square.
So, it's all intentional and I love that all of you are design nerds so that you appreciate that it's this intentional. And I just want to reemphasize what Charles had said that it was really an honor to work on this project. It's a project of a lifetime. Thank you.
Thank you, Lindy. So I'm going to tell you a little bit about proofreading in the time that we have left and then I have some closing closing words. Proofreading was our biggest team. We had 20 proof readers. The work on proofreading was a sprint. In our initial plan, we had about four weeks for proofreading. And in our first conversations, we with the proof readers, we went back to the revision music committee and we said, "Can you give us two more weeks?"
Okay? And we did. We ultimately extended that out. We had enough confidence in our printers ability to meet our schedule that we expanded it to six weeks. Six weeks is not a lot of time. So, this was a sprint. The other thing after that initial meeting that I did was get was about double the number of proof readers. Okay. And even though this was a sprint, it was a fine grained a thorough and I'm going to say even a tedious process. We split our proof reading into three rounds where the first round was easily the most intensive.
For that first round we divided proof readers into four categories that proofread different elements of the page. We wanted people when they were proofreading to be able to focus on certain elements and ignore the rest so that they would catch the errors in those elements. And so we called those four ele those those four elements top matter, text, music and design. Oh well I haven't given you. So I just want to show you we have these instructions which we're you know we have to firm them up a little bit but we actually we would love to share these instructions because we developed them.
We found them to be helpful for ourselves and if other folks would be interested in you know having access to something like this. I think we'd love to make them public. But we had instructions and a checklist for each of these sets of tasks. And so top matter meant you know we have this sheet that draws on all of the different work that went into keys, all the different work that went into meters, all the different work that went into attributions and just gives it in one cell per element per song.
First to the page designers, then to the proof readers to check what's on the page against that. In certain cases to check against other things. For the scripture citations, for example, not just checking that it matches what's in the top matter, but that the verse attri the verse excuse me, that the book abbreviation is correct according to our style guide and that the scripture matches the text of the King James version, right, for that verse, right?
So, so in each case, it wasn't just about checking that we, you know, because you can make a copy paste error. There's all kinds of ways in which errors can creep in. Checking those, but also sometimes checking the fidelity beneath that. For text we and music people proof read in teams of two. So, a lot of our work was coming up with groups of two and three people in the same time zone who could work together. Some folks met up in person, sometimes they met up on Zoom.
And you would often have one person reading aloud the text and naming the punctuation as they did so while another person checks against a source to compare it to. Right? We had that as a best practice that we learned from other folks. We had to be creative in thinking of our best practices for music type type setup in particular for shape note music proof reading where the shape has to be correct right the duration has to be correct the position on the staff line has to be correct and there's all these other glyphs and figures.
So we experimented with reading aloud with singing aloud with scanning with your eye. And we gave even the team some leeway to find what worked best for them. And then design had to do with checking the spreads, checking for any errors, but also we work so much on a page in isolation. In our book, we encounter openings and it was actually really important to see how those two pages work together. So there was that round one of proofreading. There was a second round that was more of a holistic check.
This was also an opportunity for us to open up our work as a book design and production team to the revision music committee to the Sacred Harp Publishing Company board of directors. And we had folks volunteer from those teams, including David, who had eyes on every page to check our work. And then finally, a third round that was focused especially on did we implement the changes as intended. You can introduce errors when you're trying to correct errors, right? Okay.
So I'm going to say a word about future plans. We're not done. You have your book, so we're done, right? We're not done. You know, it's been our goal from the beginning. People have been asking about this quite a bit to have a digital edition of the book. And we will. It's going to take a little while. But we're already we've already done a lot of the preliminary work that will make that possible. There's still some more to do there. Work is already underway to create additions of the text as well as of the music and text together for use in braille readers.
And we've had conversations with a number of singers. I want to single out Peter Rmmer who's a singer in Australia and Tristan Gordon in Texas who've been helping us work on that. And we hope to have have that available very soon.
You know, and we're going to ideally be printing this book repeatedly as singers continue to want copies for years and decades to come, and that will be work. We lost track of our digital files pretty early on after the 1991 edition. The programs used to engrave the 1991 edition, those were early music typesetting programs. At a certain point, the book had to be scanned in order for us to continue to print it. It we will we will not ever be done maintaining our ability to print our book.
So, we'll have to maintain these files, right? And so, that is work and coming up with our systems and our people and how we'll do that is work that we have yet to do. Will showed you the frontest piece and David also showed you the frontest piece from the James book from the 1911 edition. One of my favorite pages from the James book is what James called a summary statement, which is a list of statistics of dubious reliability from the 1911 original Sacred Harp. Including total number of words or parts of words, which I think is an acknowledgement of the challenge of hyphenation.
Not entirely sure. Anyway, so here's here's your very abbreviated summary statement.
David said that we had 43 revision music committee meetings. I was able to document yesterday 87 book design and production meetings. That includes 23 of the kind of core initial book design and production team of seven. 23 solely on page layout with Lindy and Charles and me. 15 for text preparation. Jeff and I think that we met at least 12 times to talk about the music typeface. Six with printing personnel. Five with the proofreading team. You can only fit so many meetings into six weeks, right?
In at least four info gathering meetings. Once we finished a whole lot of early preparatory work of preparing kind of base level files to import into music editing, which was by itself an incredibly arduous set of tasks that Rachel Hall took the lead on. After all of that, when we got into that core work of engraving and review, we produced 6,140 music engraving files. And those are your drafts, your iterative drafts of songs. Cheating a little bit because there's a there's a Selius file and a PDF most of the time.
So maybe you can divide that in half. You know, we know we have 590 songs on 592 pages with 550 song pages and then these other pages of index rudiment and front matter material. So that's one summary statement.
And my other summary statement is that you know working with this team I working with the revision music committee was incredibly rewarding and a great privilege of my life. Working with this book design and production team was one of the great privileges of my life. I learned so much. I can't believe how much I learned about spreadsheets. I think I've already mentioned that, but I learned so much about grammar. I learned I really I learned so much. I'm marveled at your care and expertise.
I am so proud of the work of our team. The team and our whole community should feel proud of this book, not just of its contents, but of its designs. It is an outcome of thousands of hours of work. As I said at the top of this talk and it is an expression of our singer's love for our shared tradition. So I appreciate each and every one of you for your support and I want to give just a deep and heartfelt appreciation to this team that worked on our book design and production.
I want to invite everyone who's here who was on that team to please stand.
Thank you. Thank you. All right, let's be dismissed for 15 minutes. Take care.
Break and room conversation
Read captions from this break or transition
They move back to the chapel or videographer. And so we need to find out where the next session is going to be and help the videographer get to the right place. That's what we should do right now. Talk to you. Nice.
There you go.
It's just interesting.
112.
Let's just come back. Brotherhood.
Yeah. Yeah. Something.
Well, it's just so much do that. I think I've got I'm just trying to remember what are the songs. Oh, hopefully
I'm not going to do this. I want to see what Sure. He Cheers. That's beautiful. Here we are.
Attributions session announcements
It's 2:15. 15. So, let's take our seats. We'll begin in just 30 seconds or so.
Researching the text attributions
While you're getting the handouts arranged, I'll introduce myself. I'm Robert Kelley and, this is Rachel Hall. We were charged with preparing the text attributions and the music attributions for the new Sacred Harp edition. The top left and top right of each Sacred Harp song have the text attributions which are small. The text attributions are a small window into the stories behind the people who made the music we love to sing. The name and date on the left tells you where the text came from and from the on the right tells you where the music came from.
Rachel was responsible for the music attributions and I was responsible for the text attributions. But in many instances, we worked together on to hash out a solution or one of us ended up finding an original source for an attribution that the other was responsible for. We would wouldn't have been able to do it all if the 1991 book attributions hadn't already been pretty well researched by Warren Steel and others.
And of course, our starting point was the work that Warren Steel did did with Dick Hulin in the 2010, Makers of the Sacred Harp book. They they where they do updated and documented all of the 1991 book attributions to give to complete the picture so that we could actually find the sources where they came from. Even then there were question marks about how many songs and some really and there were there were question marks about some songs and also some interesting rabbit holes that we went down to fi to find some like the actual or earliest source for a song or the real person who actually created the text or music.
So, here are some trivia questions and stories about the origins of Sacred Harp songs, most of which have new attributions for the 2025 revision.
So, your first trivia question is which song has the oldest text in the book? This is not counting, of course, the Bible verses for the anthems and things. So, this is a big enough group we can't probably have you do some sort of game show thing. So it's actually a little bit of a trick question, but technically the oldest song in the book is 291 Majesty 1561 is the was the origin of that text. Here's how the text of Majesty appeared in the 1565 edition of Sternholds Psalter, which is the oldest one that oldest copy of that book, version of that book that's been digitized and put online.
We know that this psalm paraphrase wasn't written by someone else because of the initials TS to the right of the title.
The text 2235, long sought home, has its origins in a Latin poem from the 11th century. But the Virgin in the Sacred Harp is an English poem loosely based on that Latin text rather than a translation and it dates from the 1590s with significant changes and additions made in the 1790s. So that's why you could argue that that's an older text, but you know, technically it's 291. Here's your second trivia question. The research for the text of what song resulted in the addition of an important historical himnil to archive.org online.
So it might not be the most obscure text or something in there is actually minister's farewell. Makers of the Sacred Harp had the first publication of this text as in Joshua Smith's divine hymns 8th edition 1797 as modified in the Baltimore collection in 1803. But I found a reference online to this text also appearing in the broadest and broadest collection of sacred ballads in 1790. But there were no digitized ver versions of this himnil online that I could use to con confirm this this attribution. So I made an inter library loan request.
Libraries with original copies of an antique book like this would probably not let the book outside their doors, but the library listed on WorldCat actually only had a photocopy of the book which they scanned and emailed to me. The index was missing from their copy. So I had to scan through the whole book to see if this text was in it and I found it. So the version now appears on archive.org of the broadest and broadest collection of sacred ballads is a scan of a photocopy of that original book.
Here's your next trivia question. Which authors andor composers have had their name consistently misspelled from when their song was first published until now in the 2025 revision? It's actually only two of these. The answer is Andrew Grahamling and Furbia Dunigan. Andrew Grahamling is the composer of 204 Mission and Furbia Dunigan is the author of 169 God's Helping Hand, which is new in the 2025 edition. Just a fun fact, there was three different spellings of Samuel Stennett's name in the 1991 edition. Two of them were typos, so I didn't count him here.
So, here is Andrew Grahamling's song, first printed in the Southern Harmony, and is printed in the new edition of the Sacred Harp. It's probably too small to read the difference in spelling, but it might be a little hard to see his name on his tombstone here, but it gives the spelling that we went with. And his parents were immigrants from Germany and they came over to South Carolina and settled in the Orangeberg area before moving to Spartanberg where he worked with William Walker. And their name, before it was anglicized was originally Grom Leash.
So, I don't know where William Walker got the B to insert in the name, but it's been spelled that way until now.
The other one is Furia Dunigan. A typo in the 1954 spelling of Dunigan's name has never been corrected until now. Furbia Dunigan's name is spelled differently in the Christian Harmony from her find a grave listing from her actual tombstone. And of course, we went with the spelling on her tombstone. And it was very hard to find her tombstone because of the spelling discrepancy. This is just one of the many times that Rachel and I both had to do genealogical research in order to find a source or confirm a name spelling.
So, Dunigan wrote the second verse of OA Paris's song God's Helping Hand on page 169. But verse one is an altered version of Philip Dodridge text called thanksgiving for national deliverance and improvement of it. OA Parishist use a ver used a version of this Doddridge text that altered the first two lines. So this shows that like sometimes it's really hard to hunt down the origin of a text when like the first line of the text gets changed. You have to find some other way into finding where it was printed earlier.
Your next trivia question. Which author's name appears above the most songs? Yes. Well, this is a smart crowd. Of course, it's Watts. But what do you think about the other three names? What's the order of them? All right, let's see if you were right. Isaac Watts is a is responsible for at least part of the text of 176 songs followed by Charles Wesley, John Newton, and Anne Steel, which I am glad to see her name on that list. The other text source with more than 50 songs in the Sacred Harp is the large body of revival chorus lyrics, many of which originate in African-American spirituals.
Your next question, which songs still have their 1991 book text attribution despite updates being made in Makers of the Sacred Harp? Just a few cases where we found problems in the updates that makers made to the 1991 attributions. You might be surprised about the answer to this one. Is all but one of those. So, let's go through each of them. The first one is Liverpool and Newtopia. The Arada page for makers of the Sacred Harp has the 1803 selection of hymns and spiritual songs as containing this text, but I went through the whole himnel and couldn't find it in there.
So the text attribution is the same in both the 1991 and 2025 editions. In the case of 45 on the bottom, the 1991 book had Thomas Cleland as the text author, but makers of the Sacred Harp dropped Cleland's name and just listed the poem's first printing in ME's general selection 1807. But when Cleveland published his evangelical hymns in 1828, he included this text and put his own name on it. So we put Cleveland back into the attribution in the new revision with that 1807 date of its first publication and needs general selection.
Now this was a fun one. This one, this particular text, Pilgrim's Farewell on page 185. Since we started our work on the attributions with information from makers of the Sacred Harp that was actually scan, a scanned copy of s of makers of the Sacred Harp. I didn't actually bother to look back at the 1991 book attribution for this song, and that turned out to be a costly mistake. Makers had that the original publication of Jacob French's setting of this text was the earliest printing of the text.
And I spent many hours searching for earlier versions of this text. It seemed to me like French got the text from an earlier source that had all of the verses in it, which I couldn't find. Well, I was a little bit wrong about that, but that's okay. Eventually, I learned where it originally came from from the helpful himnology archive website. I would have been saved many hours of fruitless research if I had just looked at the 1991 book attribution. I never found the earlier source myself because of the alterations made to the original 1664 Samuel Crossman text where Samuel Crossman had farewell po poor world I must be gone and Jacob's French's version has farewell my friends I must be gone and that's the version we have in the Sacred Harp the second and third verses weren't original to Samuel Crossman's 1664 text.
And we aren't actually sure that if Crossman is the actual author or if it was just a book in his book a text by another author. So the attribution in 2025 is just a more nuanced version of the 1991 book attribution, but still essentially the same. And of course the text to 208 traveling on is also an arrangement of this text albeit a much looser one. So it doesn't have this Samuel Crossman reference on it. Page 288, White had in the 1991 book. It was the listing of the song was as coming from the 1810 edition of Dogel's New Selection, but makers moved this back to the 1806 edition and added that this book attributes the text to a composer or an author named Farwell.
Well, here are those two editions of Doble's new selection. It is an anonymous text with the title Farewell. I don't know where that error cropped in. It probably wasn't Warren. But we so we ended up with basically the same attribution as in the 1991 book, just an earlier edition of Doble's new selection and no author named Farwell. Your next trivia question. Which song in the Sacred Harp is arranged directly from an African-American spiritual first published in the book Hampton and its students with 50 C and plantation songs in 1874.
A is not the correct answer. It's 294 exactly. Rocky road JC Brown and Denson clearly made an arrangement of both the words and the tune of this spiritual, although I don't know if they were reading it from this original publication of it. Your next trivia question, which of the following composers with new songs in the 2025 revision wrote the poetry to one of their own songs? All right. Yeah, a lot of you know that. Great. It's actually Tom George and Raymond Ham.
So, here is Tom George's song and Raymond Ham's song. Also, for a long time, we thought that Stanley Smith wrote the words to his song Chaki on page 514, but Rachel found where he got them. It's they came from an early gospel song by John B. Matias called Deliverance Will Come. Your next trivia question, which song's text was originally a song about banding together to support the cause of liberty, published in the September 30th, 1775 edition of the Philadelphia Ledger.
It was not Chester. Surprisingly, it's the song Dull Care on page 98. So, just an aside about page 219, he hath saved us. That actually does have a 1776 text by John Adams, but it's not that John Adams. So, we were struggling to figure out how to site the text to dull care since it seemed like it seemed to both of us like it was a folk song text. But at the very last second before the book went to press, Rachel managed to uncover the real origins of this text.
This was originally a song published in the Philadelphia Ledger on September 30th, 1775 about friendship and banding together to support the cause of liberty. And the last few lines of this the text there were, "For while we're here, my friends so dear will fight for liberty." The author used a pseudonym. The name was Polydor. So, we'll never probably never be able to find the real name of the author of this text. In most early sources where this song this song's text were printed, it didn't have the revolutionary bent to it.
It was usually printed as but since we're here with friends so dear, we'll drive dull care away. So, that's where the name of the tune comes from. But in the Sacred Harp, EJ King spiritualized the words to s then since we have a savior dear, let's drive all care away. And we lose the dull care line in the song, but it's preserved in the name of the song. Okay, I think we have time for one or two more trivia questions.
How many different musical settings of Psalm 19 are in the 2025 revision? One of them is heavenly anthem, which is the King James version. Well, the number has gone up since the 1991 revision. It's six. So three were from Watts's Psalm 19 part one, one was from Psalm 19 part two by Watts. One was from the 1650 Scottish psalter and of course one is from the King James version of the Bible. Let let's look at those versions of this psalm, all six of them. So the text for 518 Heavenly Anthem is on the bottom right and is of course the unedited psalm text.
The most literal metrical setting is the one from the Scottish psalter right above it. And the settings by Watts are the most poetic, creating imagery that reflects the sense of the psalm text rather than just the literal translation.
All right, this last trivia question is one that I'm embarrassed to admit. Which text remains misattributed in the new book due to an oversight that I didn't catch until I was preparing for today's symposium? So it's C new Agatite verse two verse two of that is not part of the parinet all hail the power of Jesus name hymn text. So these are the printings of the two first verses of 485 the original first printings. The second verse is the first two lines of Watts's Psalm 33 part one verse two.
And when I when I was assigned this song when I was in the on the text preparation committee and I noted down that the second verse was from a different hymn and I found where it came from and then I just forgot that fact when I was putting I was working on the text attributions. So maybe you can write it in your book. It's just two lines that are misattributed. It's not the end of the world. And I wouldn't be surprised if we find more things over the coming years.
All right. So the next time you find a tune or some poetry that you like in the Sacred Harp, just take a second to Google the attribution because knowing the context in which the song was written will add so much richness to your relationship with it. Now I'm going to turn it over to Rachel. I think her fun thing that she's going to do with you is make you sing some things.
Researching the music attributions
While we're in the habit of clapping, I saw Warren Steel enter the room and I would just like to acknowledge what an enormous amount of work you did for the field of Sacred Harp scholarship and for all your attributions and the makers of the Sacred Harp. So, thank you so much. Skip that one. Okay. Well, I like to think of this as the Sacred Harp who done it. And attributions are something that I care very much about. So, I wanted to tell you a little bit about why you should care about them.
I think Robert has done a great job of giving you some of the subtleties that you can gain from the text, knowing who wrote them, and then now having the ability to go and find that original text and really take the meaning from it. And of course with Will, what what you're doing as well, you're you're trying to find the senses of the words. My job has been different. So, I've been concerned with the music, the notes, and historically when you looked at attributions, there were very few songs had composer attributions.
Just the mostly the new ones did. You can see in this one for 163 on the top we've got just the name of the book where you could go find the words in the psalmist.
And then that's the original that 1844 1850 or something. And then we have the 1911 version below it. And you can see that it has more information. Now we've got a bit about an author. That is not the correct author. It says Henry K. Oliver. Their actual author author is Amos Pillsbury. And we have the Alto by SM Denson which we will also correct in this edition. Oops, I had that. Okay. In 91 we have now the beginnings of corrections.
Oh, I should have said just a minute in that previous slide in the bottom you see it's got the title that says morning and then below that there's a lot of text that appeared at the bottom of the page. Those were the cheese notes. So the little anecdotes that you some of you remember from the earlier books.
That gave a lot of background and of course now you know we have makers of the Sacred Harp and eventually we'll have an up updated version of that where you can find out all about the composers and much more backgrounds about the songs but in 1991 they created this clean look by getting rid of that and of course also vastly updating the attribution so now we have Amos Pillsbury and you can see in 2025 five, we've built on what Warren did in ' 91 and added alto attributions and also added more detail with the text.
As Robert was saying, sometimes we have verse one, verse two, etc. So, what I wanted to talk about today really is the altos because for one thing, I want us to sing a little and come on, there's altos in the room, right? So, we should know we should know this stuff. So there are an a good number of composers whose names are coming into the book not because they wrote new songs. It's because they wrote parts for the book that were always there and those people's names were not in the book.
So this is being corrected. And I'm really glad to see that.
There is there are handouts and you can see I hope you have one. You've got a new index which you can fold up and put in your book. It's an index of parts. They're almost all alto parts. So, we've got all the alto authors and then a few others. And so I wanted to say a little bit about those authors because their names are now in our book. Oh, just a little bit about the makers of makers of the Sacred Harp which we have mentioned. And also here's some of the just a summary of what I kind of just said.
So, I'll go through it. We know this now. Okay. But let's talk about altos. So, in 1870, the end of the 19th century books, there were 75% of the songs were only in three parts.
In 1911, they added a lot of altos. So 242 songs that were previously in three parts had added altos and that got the number of three-part songs down to 14%. Since then more altos have been added and also the newer songs that come into the book have almost all been four-part songs. So, at this point, there are only 22 three-part songs in the book, and that is only 3.7% of the book. So, that tells us that we have a lot of songs that have altos that were written at separate times.
And so, we've added in those attributions, 229.
And then there's a few other parts, a treble here and there. And most of them came in 1911. Now just because they entered the book in 1911 doesn't mean that they were written in 1911. So SM Denson was the music editor of the James revision and in the preface to that book it credits him with writing 327 alto parts which was about more or less the number of alto parts that were added to songs as far as I can tell. But he definitely didn't write all of those on the pages.
Sometimes it has his name when there's an alto added. Sometimes it doesn't have his name. Sometimes it has his name and it seems pretty clear that he did write the part. Sometimes he doesn't have his name and it seems like he wrote the part. Sometimes it has his name and he definitely did not write the part. And sometimes it does not have his name and he definitely did not write write the part. So after looking at this and looking at this, I decided that there was no pattern about whether his name was on it was just maybe up to the type setter.
You know it that my feeling that his name was meant to be on all the alto parts and that's what the preface says that he wrote them all. So when you eliminate song parts that he drew on from other books namely the Cooper revision of the Sacred Harp and the Christian harmony and then there's a few other books he used a little bit. So he would find these parts to Sacred Harp songs in other books and he would copy those alto parts into the Sacred Harp.
Sometimes he modified them but other times he just note fornotee copied them in and never never attributed that. In fact, there was even a lawsuit about claiming that he had stolen these these parts, but then they said, "Oh, well, the outdoor part's not so important." So, he didn't they lost the lawsuit. Anyway, in if if we eliminate all the parts that we can find in other books, there's a body of alto parts that are left that are really stylistically unified. And so I wanted to show you what I think of I call it the SM Denson special.
And if you've been looking at your part index and if you know the numbers pretty well, you might get a sense of what these parts are. Here is the SM Den special. So, these are alto parts that we cannot find another attribution for.
And so, we're going to assume that SM Denson either he wrote it or he was it's possible he was working with a few other people too and they may have written it together, but he's certainly been credited with them. Here we are in the key of B flat. Alto part. This is just the alto part. Here we are in the key of A. You might, some of you know the songs. Here we are in the key of G.
Here we are in the key of key of F. A song that has been eliminated. Anyone recognize this song? Sister's Farewell. Here we are in the key of E flat. Here we are in the key of F, key of G, sorry. This song's key has been changed. And here's another song that's been eliminated. This is in the key of C. Anyone recognize this one? That's the loved ones. Anyway, but you can you get the picture. Okay, this is the SM Denson special. So, I wanted to do I have some songs to sing and Sam Kleinman is going to come up and lead this one.
I wanted to give you an example of a song that has an alto part and we're going to turn, please turn to page 387.
This is an alto part which we assume was written by SM Denson. And for the musical examples, we're going to sing this in a very special way. So, how many altos do we have here? Okay. Are there other people here who sometimes sing alto? Maybe some of your high treles and your Okay. Or maybe some of your Yeah. So if you sing alto at all, please be an alto for this session because we need lots of altos. The way we're going to do it is we're going to sing the notes with no alto part.
Altos, you can sing something else or just sit out or whatever. And then the altos are going to come in strong on the words.
And so I want us to hear even though this alto part, it looks pretty basic, but it really adds a lot to the song. And this is a really classic SM Denson alto. All right. Do we have somebody who Let's see. Somebody want a key? I'm not a keyer. Should have asked somebody to keep. Thank you.
[Singing demonstration, first without the alto part and then with it; the captions do not provide reliable lyrics.]
Thank you, Sam. This is not an easy room to sing in, is it? But thank you, everybody. So you hear how that alto really changed the song and yet it's it's really quite a minimalist sort of alto. I like it very much. The second most frequent composer of alto parts in the book is William Cooper Wilson ah Wilson Marian Cooper who was the originator of the Cooper revision and he wrote 38 of the added altos that appear in the Sacred Harp 2025 edition. He wrote many many more in the Cooper book and his alto parts were also you know are also lovely.
I didn't bring an example. I feel like he and his daughter Anna Blackshshire Cooper wrote very in a very similar style but it doesn't sound at all like SM Denson. It's really not that sort of faso and law and both of them wrote many more parts in the minor mode.
Just a just one little note here as I mentioned when SM Denson appropriated these altos he often changed them. It's actually kind of difficult to give one name for some of these parts. So sometimes I say, "Okay, Wilson Cooper wrote this part, but then SM Denson changed it at the end." And so I kind of wanted to put both names on there. And I think once there's an updated Makers of the Sacred Harp, that information will be there. But we wanted to just give a cleaner picture.
So did not have multiple authors except for one, which we'll do if we have time. So I'm going to move on to Anna Blackshere and she wrote 26 of the added alto parts that appear in the 2012 edition and these were also published originally in 1902.
I wanted to sing one of my favorite Anna Blackshere altos 383. Scyive is going to lead it. And Scythe, what if you stood up where I'm standing? I think that might help. This is going to be a hard one to sing in this kind of room, but we'll do the best we can.
Yeah, certainly anything people can do to move closer to each other would would probably help. So we're going to do it again with notes with no alto and then words with the alto.
[Singing demonstration following the announcement of page 383; the captions do not provide reliable lyrics.]
All right, I have got another example and this is my favorite example of an added alto that yeah, it's one of my favorite parts and it's also sort of my favorite example. So William Walker wrote many many altos for the Christian harmony and many of these altos were appropriated by SM Denson for the 1911 Sacred Harp. But SM Denson also appropriated altos from other Christian harmony songs that were not written by William Walker. So some of the authors that you see in your part index are people who wrote for the Christian harmony and one of them is EP Burroughs who wrote a song called Solemn Warning.
So if you turn your handout over you'll see that there's a Christian harmony song called Solemn Warning. And this song was actually written after Arnold. So if you open your book you're going to do two things at once. So 285 top in your Sacred Harp and you're going to hold that solemn warning in your other hand because we're going to sing both of these.
So LP Breedlove wrote Arnold in 1850 and I have to do this too, don't I? Let's see. 815. Okay. And then EP Burroughs came along. And if you take a look at Solemn Warning, how is it different from Arnold in the most major respect? Haha. So, it's it's minor. Yes. Wasn't pun pun pun intended, I guess. But yes, it is minor and Arnold is is major. So the difference is in every part except the alto. So the alto for those two songs are the same. Everybody else changes.
And because the alto part was written for that minor song, it has these wonderful minor core minor sort of notes in it. And when you take that minor alto and you put it in a major song, you get these glorious sort of new tonality, which you know, modern composers would do well to imitate, I think. But it's sort of historical accident. I don't know, but I love it. So, we're going to do this. Dick is going to lead it. And we're going to just do notes for both songs, but we're going to go kind of right in from one to the next.
Bases.
This is going to be a real challenge for you because you're in charge of changing that key. But the like fos the law lafa law or a faso laws whatever they are not going to change. So when you see a B flat that becomes a B flat in the other song. So they the how do I say it? The shapes don't change. So Robert Rich Dick is not going to re key the song. In other words, we're just going to go right in.
Does that make sense? You got it. Okay. So, and we want lots of alto for both songs. We're not doing it without the alto. We can't do this without the alto. So, what's the Sorry.
So, we're going to do Solemn Warning first. Just the shapes and then we're going to go right into Arnold. Just this just the shapes. Lots of alto.
[Singing demonstration of “Solemn Warning” followed by “Arnold”; the captions do not provide reliable lyrics.]
Thank you. Karen, you have a question.
Yeah. Okay. It's not exactly the same. Close though.
To avoid a clash.
Yes, it's to avoid a clash. But on the other hand, they don't avoid a clash in other notes. So, it was just considered an important That's an important one. Oh, Warren, you had a Yes. Yes. Yeah. He said that that that minor version is almost the same as Never Turn Back. You can really hear that that relationship. Yeah. Yeah. So do we have a minute for me to say one more thing? One more thing. No, we don't. Oh, I'll say it anyway. So, the one song I'll leave you with that's got the most complicated attribution for the altos is 112.
So, take a look at 112.
So Jesse P. Karlsberg wrote an entire article on this alto part. Most for the most part we have not been giving really complicated alto citations. We just sort of decided to give it to one person or another. But this one it seemed like it's such an iconic part and there's such an interesting history of it that we decided we needed to have all of those names associated with that part. So, I hope you think of that next time you get to sing it. And I think that's all we have time for.
So, thank you.
Break and room conversation
Read captions from this break or transition
About the text. Correct. Incorrect. He certainly deserves credit for much of the work. I think that one I was too ambitious to ask for time.
That's great.
I enjoyed both those very much.
The last one worked really well. Great. I really enjoyed that.
Oh, I'm glad.
I really enjoy. Thank you.
I noticed how much you avoided a lot of mentioning a lot of the things that we did. You mentioned only the one report that you did on several other so many like Yeah, I know. I tried to give a hint of that in that last thing, but it's like
Because Rachel kind of came out of also I mean Becky sort of saying oh yeah this is it's interesting how we made the decision.
Yeah. So much Now I do that.
Hey direct United States.
I suggest that I'll come So, you know, I carved out the time for questions. I realized nobody's doing questions.
So, do you want to have the mic up front?
Oh, if we have time for questions, we'll take questions. I mean, we just took a bunch downstairs.
Okay.
And it's totally fine.
Yeah.
Yeah, let's do it. And if we have time
Because that way the people online can hear it and people in here can hear it.
Yep. I love that.
Sweet.
Yep.
Because I was like, "Fuck."
Yeah. I mean, we mostly have it, but it would be great, too. I think there's no problem in taking
Okay. Yeah.
Sweet.
How you doing?
Doing okay.
Good.
I think we had abstracts right at right before me at the camp, too.
Oh, did we? That's so funny.
And I was because I started sitting. I'm like, "Nope, I can't. I need to go out." So, I half watched my lunch. Check, check, check, check, check, check, check.
Do you remember what session that was discussed in?
Oh, the proof reading things. Those aren't we they're not out yet. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
Oh, cool. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know.
Yeah. Where do you want me?
Yeah.
Is this here for a reason?
Oh, for the laptop. Got it.
Oh, I see. I see. How do you Do you need the l Do you want the laptop down? Tell me tell me what you need.
I can be here. Wait, let me let me move this out of the way first. Tell Tell me how's this?
So if you want Yeah, if you want me to adjust, I can adjust.
Jesse, the cur curly hair. He is a little shorter. It's just
Yep. Yep. I got that. So you can do this.
Yeah. I think the ch I'm guessing the challenge people had is you know they're looking they're they're looking. They have to keep looking here, right?
I didn't even bring it anyway.
Oh
We'll have to make it available at the weekend.
So tell us tell them to come find us.
Yeah, come find us if you're interested on this.
Okay. Oh, that's dangerous.
Yeah.
Okay. Yeah, because I mean that that's the biggest challenges, right? Is
This how is that?
Yeah, let's see.
Yeah
You can even bring it closer.
Yeah. Yeah. Let's see. I mean, it Okay, so you're you're here. Let's see. Okay. Yeah. I mean, the I mean, that's the biggest challenge, right? You always wanted in your peripheral and it's now out of your peripheral. But that's
Honestly better.
Oh, is that getting in your way now?
Okay.
Okay. Well, why don't you lower it to where you think it needs to be and so you don't so somebody else doesn't put it there. And here
I see because you're right there. Yeah, I see. Because you're so you're getting this all the time, right?
Yeah. Right. So it's in is you're okay with that.
Okay. And sorry. What's the guy in the back? What's his name? What's the guy's name in the back? Do you Oh, okay. No, no, no. I can see him. He's just talking to somebody right now. So, I just want to make sure he has the mic in the right spot. Oh, interesting. It is going out, isn't it? Is Okay. They're They're far enough forward I can almost not hear it, which is interesting. Yeah, because usually I can hear enough to know that I'm right on.
Okay. So, people will have to yell at me if I talk too loud because I project if I don't hear the speakers, even with the mask. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And That'll
Well, no. I'm I'm just I'm I'm thinking for Jesse afterwards, but we can always tilt it down.
Oh
Jesse, where are you?
I wasn't paying attention. It's past 3:15. We will start in a little bit, but I'm looking for Jesse. He was going to be here and I feel like he should be here
But it's okay. I built in time for questions, so I can run as long as I want and then you just don't get to ask questions. When Jesse reappears, we will get started. Oh, now I can hear it. Okay, I see. Here's Jesse. Thanks for closing the doors. I looked at the comment. I was like, "Oh, okay."
Designing a new shape-note typeface
Well, welcome everybody.
Are you here for me? I see. And you can hear me, too. Feel free to yell at me if I get too loud because if I don't hear myself, I'll project even with the mask. But now I actually hear myself. So, anyways, I'm Jeff Kellem. I'm Do you even know why I'm here? Oh, wait, you do. Well, I'm the type designer, as you know, of the new shape-note music typeface. I think everyone seems to know Jesse. I think I knew that beforehand and here I've sound, but Jesse P. Karlsberg, he he led, you know, he, as you've been hearing all day, he he's led a lot of this project.
He was my primary contact and the artistic, you know, sort of artistic designer throughout this the you know, giving creative direction throughout the project. It's been wonderful to collaborate with Jesse and the entire team here. I couldn't have asked for, you know, I have to say a better client because, you know, the publishing company was a client, but a better community and a better team to work with. They they understood what they wanted to achieve, what they liked, what they didn't like, and how to articulate those details.
Like when I gave them to the sign, it's like, Jeff, god, I don't think that's the wrong direction, which I think there were a couple of those.
But to be able to tell me why they didn't like it. These things are unheard of from a if you're a designer, you know, this doesn't matter if you're type design or art, graphic, what web, whatever. Your client often just goes, I don't like it. You know, it's it's like a m it's like a director in a film saying to the composer, I need it more blue. They know what blue means in their head, but the composer doesn't. They have to interpret. So, in this case, that was all very clear.
So that's been it's just been an honor and I'm going to try to move forward and not jump ahead. So, I am going to try to make time for questions. So, we got a mic up front. I know we haven't been doing a lot of questions today, but I built it in and I figured you might have some. And if you don't, that's okay. We get done early.
You get a longer break. So let's take a look. So, we wanted to go back in time a little bit. This is a specimen book from Mckeler Smith and Jordan. They were one of the early type designers, part of the nice history of how we got here and connected to the Collins printer too in a way. So we said, let's go back into history, see what we could do. So we thought space savings, how can we get there? Let's go back to the tonic selfish system.
I'm kidding, of course, because you've already seen the book. This joke doesn't work when the book comes out.
But look, no staff lines. Lots of tiny fit lots of things in there. But anyways, let's let's move on. So, one of the things we want to un you to understand is designing a custom typeface for this songbook is unprecedented and it's unprecedented even in today's world of you know books that you read other song books. One of the conversations I was just having was about how even for music publishers, they will, you know, they will design, they might have a custom typeface design for their all of their books, but then it's just used across and they don't change it again for decades.
And so to design something that's very key for this use is unheard of. And so I think it's an honor for me to be involved and do that design, but I think you're also really lucky to be able to have this team do that work and have that care. Because in the past you just you said, "What do you got?" Oh, well, we got lots we got these we got several hundred pounds of metal type that we're going to sell you. And it was lots of pounds.
It's measured by the pound. I have a version of this talk that actually shows how much that costs back in 1878 or something. But it's, you know, it's funny. I threw this talk together and I said, "Well, let's move on and show what the typeface looks like." But you know what the typeface looks like? You have it in your hands. So this seems silly to show you now on the screen, except for the people that are online right now that don't have a copy of the book yet.
So they get to see, you know, how this difference how how different this looks like. They would I believe if I remember right I think page 50 does have devotion and cananan in the 1991 edition but I forgot to double check that when I pulled this example out so my apologies. Some of them I did compare this when I realized I forgot. So like to share about some of the you know motivations that went into this and where we were trying to pull our inspiration. So I'd like to have Jesse talk a little bit about that even though I can talk about it.
He really knows this in and out and he's where I drove from.
So I'll just speak very briefly about from the vantage point of the revision music committee and then also the Sacred Harp Publishing Company which accepted and was thrilled to go forward with our vision of hiring Jeff to design this new music typeface expressly for the book. And I mentioned in my talk earlier this creative brief that was an early part of our planning work on book design and production. And when we approached partnering with Jeff, we were driven by these priorities that we'd already established drawing on or really thinking about how to serve our singers.
And so we came up with this line of wanting to create a practical, legible, exquisitly designed and historically informed for shape-note typeface. So practical, a workhorse, right? A music typeface that we could put to practical use to the very stringent demands of creating a book like the Sacred Harp that fits so many songs into such little space that has tremendous variety and so on and so forth. Just asks a whole lot. That would be easy to read, that would be beautiful, that would be informed by our history, and of course that would make use of our four shape system, right?
Yeah. Not the tonic sulfa or the swan shapes or something. Anyway, funk shapes. Thank you. Funk shapes. Good.
And I just realized Oh, yeah. That that that joke was did actually come from the research I did at the letter form archive which I didn't get to use anything else though.
Well, so yeah, so we want Jeff to use the re. Okay, so anyway, just to speak briefly about kind of a little more depth about what that means and what our goals were and our motivations. You know the work that we did, it's a contemporary typeface, but it is deeply inspired by the type in 19th and early 20th century tune books by additions of the Sacred Harp and by some other books. We care a lot about our shape notes. We care a lot about these glyphs that are 80% even of what we're looking at.
But we wanted to carefully consider every glyph, right? From the eighth and 16th note flags to things that maybe even only show up in a song or two like the staccato marking which shows up in two songs or the segno which shows up in one. We wanted consistency across the entire design. So we wanted these different glyphs to all speak to each other to all speak the same language if you will. We wanted each glyph to be clear, legible, easy to distinguish at small sizes, at a distance.
There's work that we can do to ensure that each shaped note is very clearly what it is and not a different shape. You know that some of our songs are very tight, others are loose, some of them are tight vertically. We wanted to make sure that our typeface accommodated that. And then, you know, we're at a time now, where we can do things that we just couldn't do with metal type, also that we couldn't do in the early 90s. And we wanted to make sure that our design that our work with Jeff, enabled us to take full advantage of the world that we live in terms of digital type design.
Yeah. So, continue. Do I? Yeah. This is the limitations of examples. Awesome. Don't just go.
All right. Great. So, you know, when I say the affordances of temporary digital type design, we can talk a little bit about what that means and how that differs from the environment that the people that designed and produced our book in years past encountered. So, this is a page from the 1911 James book. They found some errors on the bottom half of Pisga in their first printing. They made some, you know, inadvertent or, you know, you know, had to had to make some changes to it.
They weren't able to go back and make those changes using the same musical type that they'd used for the top half of the page. There are a number of pages in the James book where if you look at the metal plates, a number of which have survived. Some some of you have copies in your homes, they were sold to singers to help finance the 1991 edition, as many of you know. Sometimes you'll see a little punch through where just one note was replaced by a different note to correct a typo.
Here had to use a whole different set of music of medical of metal type for the bottom half of the page. And it might be hard to see, but if you look closely, the shape notes in the bottom half are a little bigger and the staff lines are quite a bit lighter.
By 1960, even the access that James and his collaborators had to type foundaries to cash shape type to you know book production facilities that could set music. This was increasingly marginal by the mid-20th century. And in preparing for the 1960 Denson edition, the makers of the book, the best that they could do was find people in their networks who had experience using a combination of stencils and handdrawing and typewriters to set music. They tried valiantly, but there are shortcomings. You know, a lot of we looking back at the songs that we've condensed by a half brace or so, a number of those date from this 1960 book.
And a lot of why they took up more space at that time was because you could only squeeze notes so close together with this method. You know, the work in 1960 was rough enough that six years later, this is from 1971, but this, music engraving that you're looking at actually dates to 1966, they redid it.
They still had to use stencils, but they were maybe a little more carefully restled. And then by 1991 there was a tremendous opportunity you know in 1960 and 1936 you know that 1911 book it was the first time that the whole book was retyp set from scratch right that wasn't done again until 1991 and it was the advent of desktop publishing right and digital musical and music engraving software that even made it possible for David and Terry and the rest of the 1991 committee to work with Charles Toller, an engraver who worked a lot in the gospel music world, to re-engrave the music for just the second time in our history.
And he did that on his own with very little feedback from the music revision committee except to try to make things look like they had looked before from what I understand. And also using tools for the Sacred Harp that were developed with gospel music in mind. And so where you really see this on in the 1991 edition, which is a major departure from the 19th and early 20th century editions, is in the shape of the shape notes. If you've seen a gospel music book, you'll see that it uses what we would call, you know, a more condensed scoring, right?
Where there's four vocal parts, but they appear on two staffs. And there's often five of these braces on a page. And the challenge is to squeeze that music vertically, but keep it legible.
And to do that, you need to have a certain volume of your shape notes. So what do you do? You can't stretch them out vertically. You stretch them out horizontally. And so many of us are accustomed because of the 1991 edition to these laws that we call squares. We still call them squares, but they're fairly clearly rectangles, right? They're long, long rectangles. And all of the shapes have that kind of stretched out notion. And that's an adaptation for the scoring of gospel song books.
And as Jeff said, we used the tools that were available to us and it was tremendous that these digital tools were available to us. They made it possible to retype set their book. But in doing this again in 2025, we didn't have that limitation.
Yeah. Yeah. So you know, as you see in your book now, you get something that's nicer. And actually, we were just was just having a conversation about about that rectangle versus square and how we, you know, we did try to compress it partially to go back to it, but also because we're trying to figure out how to save space, have things more equal toward each other. But also still represent that that rectangle in there. And because there is still that that common thread, even though yes, it's a square, but it's a rectangle.
Even even today, it's a rectangle. Ah, that's funny.
I forgot that I was I forgot that I was continue on for you for one more page. Do you want to talk about the page design? No, we already talked about this, right?
We've already talked about it.
Yeah. So, the but the coolest thing about this is just by the change in the design of the font and allowing the engravers, those three wonderful engravers, they've done fabulous work. This is also part of my world. I'm a I'm a musician, a copist, a orchestrator, a composer and all of that. They just Rachel and Ben and Michael Spencer, thank you. Just I love the work you've done. But just from the font and those that that adjustments engraving, they save 13 pages.
So, you got to add 13 pages worth of new songs without taking any away. And I thought that was amazing. So a little bit about the backstory here. We, you know, as you've learned that this project got started even before they talked to me. And that was in November 2019. I had done some work with Philip Rothman, who runs scoring notes, a really great music production service called NYC Music Services in New York, producing scores for lots of orchestras.
And I've done some font work for him designing fonts for Sibelius which I don't think you knew at the time but we've and he recommended he's like oh I got this query do you want to talk to him yeah pass my name we've done work he highly recommended me we got to talking and finally after you know a couple months of going through that we signed an agreement in February 2020 and in March oh actually wait let me talk before I get back to that I forgot to give you a little bit about my backstory too I think Rachel, you might have been the one that mentioned this this idea of like I have a background in performing vintage dance, historical dance, early 1800s through the 1940s.
And I think that came up during our discussions at one point and I love the research that we do in involve involved in recreating those dances and diving into the details. And Rachel, am I am I remembering right that you brought this? Okay. And I think one of the things she said during to me or during one of the meetings like I think this is why Jeff is the person to be connected here because he understands this community and how we think and love this history and that connection about growing it continuing and I sort of felt I've like felt that camaraderie there too and so I kind of liked hearing that.
I've already told you about how I love the level of detail they gave back and research does drive me in everything I do. Like throughout my life, I love any project I get to do new research on. I love I have an archivist brain, a researcher brain. And one of the best things is you all have the primary sources. Usually I have to go dig them up. Find find the archives. Go talk to the archivist there. Find my way in to the li through the librarians.
This was just, hey Jesse, I need this this period, this page number there. He's like, here's the digitized copy. Thank you. And usually he's telling me which page number to look at. So so then we come into March and go through and just sketch, you know, this is, you know, within a month of us starting the project and we said, okay, let's draw some of the designs you're looking for, a few variants. Some of them are already labeled of like, oh, the one coming from the Methodist looks like that.
And so just sort of to give an idea of which directions we wanted to go and it's just to sort of show a variety of how we got started. And note this is still over this is five and a half years ago almost and then I went through I think this exploration if I remember right was not just looking at historical sources. I think this was me saying don't tell me anything let me just draw. I vaguely remember this and I said because I wanted to say let me I understand where you're coming from.
Let me try to see let me try some different ways of thinking through how to make these shapes feel coherent which ways you want to go. And even though some of them may look the same there's subtle differences in all of them.
And so then of course the pandemic happens right at that point. It caused a you know a bit of an eb and flow because we all had our lives to deal with and what was going on in the world and not going on and but it allowed us to really dive deep and even when we're stepping even when we're think we're not thinking about projects we're often like our brains are still processing. I've in my in my music work, in my design work, I'm always rethinking through a new line or a new way to process this and so I think if we had finished I think our goal was to finish this in 2020, right?
I feel like it I know it's all but the font.
Yeah. No, I think the goal was to have me finish the font in 2020. Maybe it was another year for you all to finish the book. And I think you would have had a really great book then. I think because of the pandemic, you have an amazing book now because it just allowed that space. And again, when you were busy not working on it, you still were working on it and still thinking about it and it gave you that time to really explore and to have something now that I'm I'm quite proud of what you all did.
I'm I'm honored to be involved as part of this community now and just happy to have something that'll hopefully you'll enjoy for the next generation. And you know the other thing you talked about how looking through the history of these books is you know the problem of having to reprint something every 30 years is the technology for printing has changed.
The tools we use today even though we're designing them to be saved for the future they're not going to exist in 30 years you know so there we've already I think that was already talked about one of the other talks about how part of this process is going to be making sure we keep track of what's those changes are happening so when they do happen that the archival of that data is getting is part of that is transferring that data to the new technology and that'll be with the font too because that will happen I mean We can use fonts that were designed 20 or 30 years ago, but you really want to rework them.
So I'm going to have you come up to talk a little bit about the historical references and then we'll go back to
Yeah. So I'll just say a couple of words about specifically where we looked in the history of shape-note music printing for inspiration. And we cast a broad net, but we found that certain sources were particularly inspiring. And you know, maybe this is not surprising, but at the top of that list is the Sacred Harp. Right. So, you know, but specifically, the first three printings of the Sacred Harp were printed with one set of music type. In 1870, a new set was used. And then we've already spoken a little bit about 1911, where there were two different sets used, but that first one was pretty good.
So that 1911 book, that 1870 book especially, and then also the you know 1844 through 59 books. And so you can see there note heads in the Sacred Harp 1870. And we love that fa. We love the kind of crispness. We love the square law. Another book, Contemporaneous, from 1848, printed by the same firm in Philadelphia, the Collins firm, was the Hesperian Harp, also from a Georgia editor. And that was a beautifully made book, not exactly the same in its shape-notes.
Both the 1870 Sacred Harp and the 1848 Hesperian Harp solved a real problem that Jeff will talk about with the MI, which is how can this diamond note take up enough space for you to see it? And they tilted it ever so slightly on its axis and that adds volume. It's also really handsome. It's a great look. And so those were two sources that helped us with inspiration for how to navigate that problem with legibility. And the flags and beams you can see at the bottom there in original Sacred Harp, the 1911 edition, not as chunky.
Those 1870 beams are really chunky. These 1911 ones, they don't take up a lot of space. They enable that kerning that we talked about earlier. So that was another inspiration. Just some other books. There's editions of the Southern Harmony that were were touchstones for us. The Methodist Harmonist, another American tune book from the 1830s. We really looked far and wide. We knew or I knew that we loved these cliffs, these bass clef that showed up in the Sacred Harp and the Hesperian Harp and some of these other early work works.
We had a hard time finding a treble clef that we felt like paired that we felt like had some inspiration in American sacred music books. There's kind of a different look to the European books from that time period. So, we looked around quite a lot. Ultimately drew on a couple of different sources, but this Methodist Harmonist one was was really a lovely one. And you know, I'm not going to talk through all of these, but you can see a bunch of these other, you know, do our holds need to take up a whole lot of vertical space?
Well, they certainly didn't in the Hesperian Harp, you know. So, we kind of found this middle ground, but we were able to find really great inspiration in a bunch of historical books. Toughest one, probably the least important shape was that segno ultimately found a great one in a primitive Baptist book from 1913 called Good Old Songs.
Yeah. And you know, and it was, you know, it wasn't just these sources. There was a lot more. And that was also one of the things that was great is that you all presented a, you know, a whole set of here here are the things that were here's what we like about each one of these and how can we use that as inspiration to design something totally new. So, like even the cliffs that we saw earlier, the cliffs in the end might look like something that you've seen before, but it's it's the it's Collins.
It's now a new thing. And like like the upcliff that you loved.
And I was going to wait to say something about the segno until the segno appears later, but you know that this this glyph that appears on one page, one song, we spent a lot of time designing back and forth.
Too much time.
No. No. Are you happy with it? Then we did not spend too much time. There's no there's no never too much time. I mean, unless it unless I'm like billing per the hour, which I don't. I build by the project so they get lucky. And also because I really believe, you know, as I told you long time ago that I really believed deeply in this project that I was going to do everything to make sure that you all got what you wanted in the end. And so we're still working toward that in some of the ways.
So you know, one of the challenges here is these shapes, they're not really from a designer's perspective, these are not good shapes to put together and try to make feel like they're the same size.
Or you know just take up the same space because if you want the diamond to take up the same space as the square, well that's not too bad. You just got to make the points on should go outside those realms. But then the triangle is a different piece altogether than how far does that extend and optically they may look the same but then you have staff lines that limit where you can go. So now you can't really go extra high. So now you got to expand wide, which goes into a little bit of the MI of how we did the, you know, we started tilting it to find the right tilt.
And we did a lot of MI's. And so we worked hard to figure out how to deal with the fact that we want to make them a similar feel and shape and size, but also so they're distinguishable, right? You still need need to be able to glance at it and go, "Right, that's a me. That's, you know, that's a fa that's well actually me and Paw pretty easy to tell, but like, you know, a me and a so or you know, even the law sometimes at small sizes and at Camp FaSoLa, Rachel said something that was really great to hear as a result.
She had been looking at it in large scales and was like, "Yes, it's very easy to see large." And she glanced at her phone to look up something and said, "It's readable on my phone." And I was like, "Yes." So, when there's a future digital copy that you can have on your phone, according to Rachel, you may be able to read it. I might not be able to. I'd need better glasses. But so, you know, so this is, you know, one of the things you do in terms of type design is you deal with the idea of o overshoots.
And so if you have flat flat tops, shapes that have a flat top, and then you have shapes that have a point or a curve, well, if you make them the same size at like that top image, well, that diamond now looks smaller than the square. Now, reality is a diamond is smaller than the square. In this case, I didn't make them much bigger, but heightwise it feels smaller, even though mathematically it's the same. And so what you do is, you know, I might have exaggerated a tiny bit on the bottom.
So I might not do that in an actual design, but you know, I extended it a little bit above and a little bit below. And so what I didn't show is the overlap of what that would be, but it helps make you feel like vertically it's feels like the same amount of space. So that's one of the things we think of as a as a type designer when we're designing glyphs. So if you look at your fonts and you see a T and then you see an S, well that curve of the S will be above that flat top of the T. If it's not, there's something wrong with the design or they were doing something crazy intentionally and wanted it to be wrong, but it's wrong.
And so I don't now this this crowd seems to know more about design than I thought. Are you familiar with how how type design is drawn? Like the idea of Bézier curves?
I heard I like the volume. No, but I also saw shaking heads, which was kind of fun to see. I'm still going to explain it, so don't worry. So and I won't go into the real nitty-gritty but at a high level that the these Bézier curves that we use you have four four nodes that specify a segment and a curved segment. If you if you're just doing a line you only got two nodes you draw between the lines it's a line you understand that but in there's some mathematics that Bézier came up with that allows you to have what we call two on curve nodes.
So if you look you know look at the drawing on the left actually either drawing really but and then you have two offcurve nodes and that draws that you know that lower left curve there and if you then go to the drawing on the right it's the same oncurve nodes but now I've extended those off curve nodes to be closer together and now it becomes gets more like you know almost like a corner and so the shallower they are the shallower the curve the long closer they are together you know, it becomes more of that that that L-shape there.
And so everything we do is within like every curve segment has those four notes on it. So the simplest version of describing how we do type design.
It's so much more than that. Because we could get into the if you draw actually as an aside, if you draw Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Illustrator will make it so you can have one of those nodes be a zero length and the other one will be extra long. Don't do that. Zero length offcurve nodes. Bad idea. Okay, that's all I'm gonna say. It's it's how I can tell a design was done in Adobe Illustrator. I' I've cleaned the logo for an organization I'm involved with had that done and I redrew it.
Anyway, so to get back to how we've sort of talked about shapes of things, these are some of the variety of flags that we drew. Not all of them, but the I sort of went through my my my various layers of what I looked at. And this is almost probably almost in order from 2020 to 2024, the one on the far right is what we ended up with. And we do do we did do the long flag. So, if you looked at 360 in the in the new book and then you go back to 360 in your 1991 book, the 1991 has these ridiculously long flags that overlap everything and it's this looks much nicer and cleaner.
And then you've seen the cliffs. This is what the GNF cliffs look like. You didn't notice that I had it say F and G-clef when I sent you the outline. It said F and G-cluff instead of G and F-clef. It was backwards. I noticed that before I sent it to Will. And so we had fun like these feel like they're old and new. And I think that's one of the things I like about the design is it feels like it has history.
It feels contemporary. It feels like it was by hand, but it was but it's on a computer and some of that I'll we'll be able to hopefully show a little bit of you know, you know what the shape notes look like. These are the variants. What you what's maybe hard to see in this image actually I'm gonna have to say I still I love the quarter rest. It's it's old it's old style. Even I sometimes have to get used to seeing it, but I kept getting worried you were going to want a contemporary quarter rest.
And I realized luckily the reason they never asked for it is because it wouldn't look right. It wouldn't fit with this. And this and I spent a lot of time drawing that and I really love how it came out. Yes.
And Jeff applied a shape inspired by that swoosh to the quarter rest. So the quarter rest that you see in the historical books is more of a ball. This is an example of taking historical inspiration but finding ways to connect the glyphs to have them speak the same language. I think it's just a beautiful illustration of that as this quarter rest. Yeah. So that's
I'm glad we both like it. But you know one of the subtle things you may not even notice because it is so subtle and you can see in this picture is the you know eighth 16th and quarter note black notes are one size. The half notes are slightly bigger. And then the whole notes are even slightly bigger. And you know, I think the easiest one to see is is the soul, but and me. Yeah, it's Yeah, that's it's so slight, but it's it's there. So we worked on that.
Right that you know, this is where I sort of just showing you some of the other glyphs that that are in there.
I you know I did duplicate the quarter rest because I liked it and also but also wanted to show at a big size of what we did with it. It's like it has the curve of the eighth rest but it also you know it has a little pocket in there that allows which I think I do include on the eighth rest come to think of it but it you know it allows you to feel like there's a bit of little bit of an ink bleed when it's done at a small size but it's not.
And there are things like that where we did sharp corners, but the sharp quarter at small starts to feel rounded. And then other cases like the edge of the edge of that that that tip there on on both of the where the balls would be of that quarter rest is actually a minor curve.
And it was just silly things that that we wanted to do there. And it was just, yeah, it was just a lot of fun to design. I'm glad to get to work together on this. I'm trying to think if there was anything I wanted to say because otherwise we got next steps, which is there's more. We're going to make the Collins shape music typeface available to you all.
Unfortunately, this is only the announcement of that, not the availability of that. You'll see there's a 2026 going across the back. Actually, can you see the 2026?
Yes.
Okay. I mean, not the type in the bottom, but the like the big letters. And that's actually the background letters, if you could see them, the like h slight overlays. Those are all from the Collins font if it's not if it wasn't obvious. And that these are the time signatures. And we have zero through nine and C and cut common and cut cut common in there even though we don't use most of those. And but we're going to we'll try to support what we can. Dorico, Sibelius, LilyPond, Muses, MuseScore 4.6.
Afterwards, we'll finally be able to support thirdparty fonts. They haven't been able to up until the next version of that. We'll hopefully have basic styles and recommendations for each. So you can have a basic style guide to set things lay out things well. Note that for the songbook we had at least four or five basic styles that were used across different songs based on how they were laid out. So we'll provide you with one to start with maybe. I don't know. We'll talk about that later.
Rachel, thanks for the house styles by the way. If you care about encoding details I could tell you but this is silly to us. There's a layout encoding called SMuFL, the Standard Music Font Layout encoding standard. So we don't have to have eight to 10 individual fonts representing a single music font. We can have a single music font do it. In this case you had four or five different font files that repres thanks to the Sacred Harp publishing company board for supporting this project.
And thanks to the members of the revision committee. I know they're on the screen, but I still want to call them out. Actually, and if you're here, feel free to stand up. Well, Jesse co who was the co-designer of this project. And then and then on the on the second or the third line, you can see design contributions by by Rachel Hall, Michael Spencer, Fynn Titford-Mock, and Lindy Groening. And of course we had input and project support through David Ivey, Lauren Bock, Kate Coxin, Will Fitzgerald, and Terry Wootten, who I think, Huh?
Wooten. Sorry, Wooten. Sorry. And my See, this is where I need better glasses. I think I've no I still haven't met everybody on the team yet in person. But we have like a handful of minutes to ask questions. If you have questions and want to come up to the mic, feel free. You've seen the postcard hopefully that you got that we designed for this to show off the font.
And so, thank you and feel free to come up if you have questions. We have a few minutes left. Oh, I see one coming up. Yeah, come on up. Come on up. They can clap while you're coming up.
Were there instances where trying to be historical was at odds with trying to make it legible?
Huh.
Yes. And we went with legibility.
Yeah, that's it.
Yeah. But a very nice but bold move to use the inverted F-clef. Was there something that particularly inspired that?
Go go go go for it. These are these are Jesse questions.
I mean it showed up in the early Sacred Harp editions was one thing that it was there in our history. We wanted this typeface to look like itself and not to look generic. We wanted you to notice it and this is something that immediately sticks out and it's something that perhaps is one of a few glyphs that might make people think something when they're looking at it. And I just have to say that it was like it was a non-negotiable for me. Like nobody tried to talk me out of it, but man, I love it.
So, so that's the that's the honest answer.
Thank you.
And you know, now that I've seen it, I anytime I see a modern cleft with it, it doesn't feel right.
Yeah, it's awful. The regular one is No. Okay.
That's wrong. It is not awful. But I would have had to work hard on that design to make it feel like it fit. Well, we could do it. I think this looks better.
Comment on the law versus me. And this is someone that's being a little more mathy. The law definitely you I take it you were trying to get an actual square instead of a flat rectangle more or less. Although I because I was looking at music. I said, "Wait a minute. Your half note and your your half note your hell note laws are a little bit wider. Yeah, you confirm that. But then I thought it was interesting your me you think of me as a diamond but really you didn't do a diamond.
You did a rotated rectangle
In a way in a way.
Well now well really it does. It's a smaller rectangle. You rotated it.
Yeah. Yeah. And what it did and it was just a little but making that rectangle instead of a square. It's a little bit wider and so it does look a little bit more
Right and
Visible in because it does take up more space than a square would
Right because
You know one of the things I think I didn't say is you know even though as a musician I'm I'm familiar with I was familiar with shape notes and Sacred Harp singing I've not experienced it until a few months ago. So yes see that's unexpected.
You know because they you know you brought me in for the type design world they they're the ones that have all the knowledge I get to take that knowledge and I can design like I've I designed Hebrew I've designed Greek I've designed cerillic I don't necessarily I mean I read some of those but I don't have to and so you know when I was site reading the 91 I would keep missing the meat the mis would they just they were hard for me to read and so I was kind of happy with what we came up with I find it easier anyways Go ahead.
Hello. When you make it available, like you said, it would be available for doing your own compositions. Yep. I do design for like products and surface pattern and I've created shape note pattern designs where I just traced from the book digitally. Would these be available in any way that you could just kind of put them on things and move them and turn them?
Oh, okay. I'll let you answer.
Make them bigger and smaller.
I was going to answer technically, but you can answer the other way.
Yeah. No, there's that there's a technical question about that which is a yes. And in terms of the license under which we'll make these freely available, we haven't decided yet. You know, whether it's a non-commercial license or there's things to work out there that we just don't have a final decision on, but
Yeah. And yeah, did you
Thank you.
Yeah. Thank you. We Okay, we'll take we got to take two very quick questions and that'll be it because we're short on time. Yeah.
So I'm not really up on the all the details of the design like you said and the notes look fine to me, but what I noticed in the book to me seems printing is lighter like it was in the older book was darker and crisper and I could see it better whereas when I'm looking at it now I'm have a little trouble seeing it and partly that's because I need glasses but partly but I think there's a difference there even if I still had glasses on because I'm this book kind of hard to read and especially in the front you put the teeny tiny tiny print but even in the music it's it's looking difficult to me and with better glasses it would be better but I think it still would be a little harder is that actually lighter or is it just me that
So yeah it's hard hard to you know the in terms of the text itself the letters are a little bigger than in 1991 and I do think that in some copies of the book, you'll find that some of the pages are probably a little underprinted, some of them may be a little overprinted, and that may not even be the case in all the copies, but it's certainly something that we'll continue to work with on future printings.
Right.
Yeah. In an image of all of the characters that are part of the font, there are a couple of characters that we don't use in our book, like some time signatures perhaps, and that is great. Have you considered making an alto clef in the Collins font?
Well, that that was not requested. We I did specifically asked that early on and it was not a request. It is something we can talk about.
Let's let's let's talk later.
Okay.
Let's talk later because figuring out that design will be interesting.
Yeah. Well, thank thank you so much. You know, as I've said, it is an honor and a privilege to be here. It's to get to be part of this community, and I feel like I am part of this community now. And hopefully you all feel the same. I'm you will see me appear at places. I've already started saying I'm appearing at places to if you have questions, feel free to reach me out. I'll be here all weekend. I might be in New Mexico at their convention.
I try to decide if I'm going to travel after that. But anyways, I know we're over time, so thank you so much. This has been a wonderful pleasure.
Closing announcements
So we have a short break and I do want to say that we've decided to move the singing, which is the next session, to Tisdale Hall, which is where the tables were set up for lunch. So that is a smaller space. We will not have enough chairs for everyone, but I think we will find the acoustics there a whole lot better. So, I'll just invite folks who are comfortable standing. It's about 40 minutes of singing. Folks who are comfortable standing, maybe wait and let folks who need a chair get their space first because we won't have enough seats down there, but I think we'll be glad we moved down there.
Yeah.
Departure and room conversation
Read captions from this break or transition
Great. Yeah, that was great. Thank you, Jeff.
Yeah, that was awesome. That was
Yeah
I should have I should have like I was going through times and going, "Yeah, that I was like, "Wait, you and I like to talk."
I know it always is.
Oh
I don't have any objections to this
But here Absolutely. After that. So much. Yeah. Good time. I've got no Just go right Yeah. Thank you. Hallelujah. That's not Glad everybody. Awesome. Awesome.
Unique and Oh, cool.
That's cool. Sure.
That's so cool.
We'll be in touch.