Sunday is usually a time for rest. To recuperate from a crazy week, be thankful for what life has given you, celebrate in any faith you may follow, and prepare for the days to come. Having grown up with Christian parents, I have experienced the traditional Sunday mass and religious hymnals that come engrained in every service. However, these songs never had much effect on me. I never felt connected to any supreme being or holy spirit by singing the Catholic hymns I was raised on. Of course with every faith and even each individual church there comes a different type of worship music. For example, a rather large Christian church a mile away from my own church had a live rock band play every Sunday in their services. This Christian rock genre has become very popular for inspiring deep emotions in people and allowing them to access a personal connection to their spirituality. However, this music has consistently just made me feel even more alienated from my spirituality for not having the same ethereal emotions that are summoned in others around me.

I say all this as a means to premise what I experienced while singing in the shape note tradition this last weekend. Taking excerpts solely form The Sacred Harp, we sang tune after tune of powerful, open-chorded, hymnal-type music. The Sacred Harp tradition, having been based in religious practice, has a firm foundation in wanting to evoke feelings of grandeur and connect every singer in the room to some sense of divinity. However, in modern day, Sacred Harp singing has taken on a traditionally secular role. Yet people keep coming back, no matter what their personal faith is, to sing this music because it has a way of giving every participant in the room goosebumps. Technically speaking, the music is all written in parallel lines of fifths and octaves with open chords that spread a wide vocal range. What this means is that it is different from classical western art music in that it purposefully wants to sound clear and open, whereas traditional composers in the European music tradition would attempt a more balanced harmonic structure in their melodies. But it is this openness that reverberates through you when you are singing Sacred Harp music. For me, this music evoked a deeper spiritual connection than the music I grew up singing in church, all while I was surrounded by people of various faiths and backgrounds. This unique experience makes Sacred Harp singing very appealing to those who enjoy powerful music without needing a specific context to participate. Thus were born the various shape note groups that scatter the country, gathering in venues such as The Ark to give up a few hours of their lives in hopes of feeling the inherent zeal present in Sacred Harp music.

‘Wondrous Love’-An excerpt from The Sacred Harp by Benjamin Franklin White and Elisha J. King 

Art Spiegelman came to EMU on Thursday to reflect on the history, state, and future of comics. It was part of a tour he was on, and I was afraid the talk would be clearly practiced or tired or reluctant, or all in the service of a new book. It wasn’t. What surprised me most was that from the start he seemed to genuinely care about his subject. He talked about how comics affected him in his childhood, some of their history, how methods developed. He started with comics — at the time I think sequential woodcuts — popularized in the late 18th century by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, on to a popular book of woodcuts published in the US in 1929, and then onto the underground comix movement that was just developing when Spiegelman was a child. He told us about his father buying him lurid comics as a child because they were cheaper than the nicer ones and how the moral panic around comics at the time shaped the development of comics in his life.

He was well-spoken, friendly, and engaging throughout, and there was never a time when it seemed like he was doing anything other than talking about what he wanted to talk about. At the end of his talk (he went overtime) he said he had a few minutes for a question and answer session. A small line formed behind a microphone, but he took his time to answer each question, and it went on for probably over half an hour. He went off on tangents and matters on interesting in the way only a really interested person can. Finally it came time for the book signing. “By this point an unsigned copy of Maus must be worth more than a signed one,” he said. “I think that’s my penance, to sign every copy of Maus, and when I sign the last one I’ll die.”

In fairness, he was selling a book called Metamaus, a book of reflections on Maus and how it had affected his life, and he was selling the book there, but he was clearly talking about stuff he liked talking about, and his interest and enjoyment were what really made the event.

What: Sacred Harp/FaSoLa Singing!

How Much: Free!!

When: Every second Sunday from 2-5pm

Where: The Ark

Every second Sunday of the month, FaSoLaMichigan puts on Sacred Harp Singing at the Ark in Ann Arbor. If you have never heard of it before, you should come out! If you have been doing it since you were three years old, you should come out! Sacred Harp Singing has been an American tradition since the mid 19th century where a group of people get together and sing selections from various Sacred Harp books published over the years. Originated by Elisha J. King and Benjamin Franklin White’s publication of The Sacred Harp in 1844, Sacred Harp singing has since grown to be a community of people. So come see what it’s all about!