Primitive Sacred Harp Style Singing At Noon

Late Afternoon Update:  
The Sacred Harp style predates the Civil War and, though, today, it is often seen as a Southern tradition, it was also influenced by a string of early New England hymn writers, William Billings, Jeremiah Ingalls, Daniel Read, etc.  I believe it is the same tradition that Charles Ives talked about in his famous Essays Before a Sonata, in which Ives' prophetic vision includes the vulgar and common forms of rural striving with high art and philosophy and with the most profound and transcendental forces of the universe.   It is contained in the ultimate universal music.

The man "born down to Babbitt's Corners," may find a deep appeal in the simple but acute "Gospel Hymns of the New England camp meetin'," of a generation or so ago. He finds in them—some of them—a vigor, a depth of feeling, a natural-soil rhythm, a sincerity, emphatic but inartistic, which, in spite of a vociferous sentimentality, carries him nearer the "Christ of the people" than does the Te Deum of the greatest cathedral. These tunes have, for him, a truer ring than many of those groove-made, even-measured, monotonous, non-rhythmed, indoor-smelling, priest-taught, academic, English or neo-English hymns (and anthems)—well-written, well-harmonized things, well-voice-led, well-counterpointed, well-corrected, and well O.K.'d, by well corrected Mus. Bac. R.F.O.G.'s-personified sounds, correct and inevitable to sight and hearing—in a word, those proper forms of stained-glass beauty, which our over-drilled mechanisms-boy-choirs are limited to. But, if the Yankee can reflect the fervency with which "his gospels" were sung—the fervency of "Aunt Sarah," who scrubbed her life away, for her brother's ten orphans, the fervency with which this woman, after a fourteen-hour work day on the farm, would hitch up and drive five miles, through the mud and rain to "prayer meetin'"—her one articulate outlet for the fullness of her unselfish soul—if he can reflect the fervency of such a spirit, he may find there a local color that will do all the world good. If his music can but catch that "spirit" by being a part with itself, it will come somewhere near his ideal—and it will be American, too, perhaps nearer so than that of the devotee of Indian or negro melody. In other words, if local color, national color, any color, is a true pigment of the universal color, it is a divine quality, it is a part of substance in art—not of manner. The preceding illustrations are but attempts to show that whatever excellence an artist sees in life, a community, in a people, or in any valuable object or experience, if sincerely and intuitively reflected in his work, and so he himself, is, in a way, a reflected part of that excellence. Whether he be accepted or rejected, whether his music is always played, or never played—all this has nothing to do with it—it is true or false by his own measure. If we may be permitted to leave out two words, and add a few more, a sentence of Hegel appears to sum up this idea, "The universal need for expression in art lies in man's rational impulse to exalt the inner ... world (i.e., the highest ideals he sees in the inner life of others) together with what he finds in his own life—into a spiritual consciousness for himself." The artist does feel or does not feel that a sympathy has been approved by an artistic intuition and so reflected in his work. Whether he feels this sympathy is true or not in the final analysis, is a thing probably that no one but he (the artist) knows but the truer he feels it, the more substance it has, or as Sturt puts it, "his work is art, so long as he feels in doing it as true artists feel, and so long as his object is akin to the objects that true artists admire."

It's dated aspects aside, it's a pretty good example of how the music of the ultimate modernist composer of the 20th century in North America, perhaps in the west, was fundamentally at odds with modernism as commonly understood.  If there is something that is not modern,  it is the style of singing of which the shape-note tradition in the south is the strongest modern survival, from which it has been reintroduced in places like New England where it had almost entirely died out. From that source came a good part of what informed Ive's Second Sonata, The Concord Sonata and his other music.  A source which he stood up as the equal to any other style or school.   Which is more radical than modernism gets.  You can understand why that other pole star of musical modernism, Arnold Schoenberg, who also found his inspiration in older music, admired Ives so much.