sacred-harp-harmony · jackson1933-white-spirituals

The person of standardized urban-musical background who hears casually his first Sacred Harp music is apt to judge it harshly. He will be impressed unfavorably ... by the harmonic effects (he will call them “discords”) that are strangely different from those to which his ear has been accustomed ... And it is, I am convinced, this same unique distribution of parts—men “sopranos” and women “tenors”—that is largely at the root of what strikes the novice-listener as “peculiar harmonic effects.” ... My attention has been called also to the “successive fifths” in Sacred Harp songs as a factor in their harmonic character. Whit Denson, a Sacred Harp composer, doubts the importance of the “successive fifths” feature and calls attention to the frugality in the use of different chords. He points out that the Sacred Harp songs tend to specialize on the tonic and dominant chords and to neglect the subdominant and practically all others. ... many of them show pentatonic melodies, that very many of the songs are in minor keys