Sound, Sound Your Instruments of Joy!
Saturday 21 March 10.00am-12.30pm
Hallé St Peter’s, 40 Blossom Street, Ancoats, M4 6BF
Tickets: £9.90 adv. (£9 plus £0.90 booking fee)
During Manchester Folk Festival our city is full of people who love community singing, and we’ve been invited to run a workshop for the Sacred-Harp-curious.
If you’d like to get inside the raw, rousing harmonies that have inspired The Watersons, The Young Tradition and Swan Arcade, and form part of the set today for Sam Carter and Brown Wimpenny, this singing school is for you.
We’ll share a bit of the history of the style, how to navigate the song book and read the shape notes. We’ll look at major and minor songs, fugues, anthems and plain tunes. And we’ll sing from the start, so you learn by doing.
Originating in America in the early 1800s, Sacred Harp drew on the hymns and folk tunes of the time. It uses a unique form of musical notation called shapenote, originally used to teach people without musical education to sight-read music. So you don’t need to be able to read music to enjoy singing Sacred Harp. We sing in four-part unaccompanied harmony in natural voice. You can just listen to the voices of the other people singing your part and sing along with them.
We’re not a choir. We don’t practise. We simply sing for pleasure. Someone picks a song, we sing it, and move on to the next.
We’ll be singing from the 2025 edition of The Sacred Harp – loaner books will be available.
Experienced Sacred Harp singers will be needed to make it a great experience for people learning, so if you’d like to help us out, please drop us a line.
Location
The venue for this singing will be the Main Space at Hallé St. Peter’s. It’s a stunning Grade II building in the heart of Ancoats. Once a church, now renovated into a fabulous music venue and rehearsal space for the world-class Hallé orchestra.
Ancoats is on the northern edge of the city centre. In this vibrant area of coffee shops and restaurants, weekend parking is at a premium. So if you can get public transport, it’s very much easier. If you do prefer to drive, allow extra time for parking, and assume you may still be parked 10 minutes’ walk away.
Shudehill tram / bus interchange is closest (13 minutes on foot). It’s about 15 minutes from Manchester Piccadilly Train Station and Piccadilly Gardens, and 18 minutes from Victoria Train Station. More information on getting there is here.
Access
Hallé St Peter’s is an historic building that’s been recently renovated, so access is good.
The main entrance is on the ground floor via Cutting Room Square. A ramp with a shallow incline provides access for wheelchair users.
Each floor has level access. A wheelchair accessible passenger lift runs between floors. We sing seated, on non-fixed high backed chairs.
There is a unisex accessible toilet on each floor. The basement also has an unisex accessible shower room.. Hallé St Peter’s has three floors (Basement, Ground Floor, First Floor).
Food & Drink
There’s no food or drink provided. We recommend you bring a drinking bottle with a lid to keep your voice in good health throughout the workshop. And feel free to bring a flask and snack for the break.
The café will be open to serve drinks.
New to Sacred Harp?
Sacred Harp is a shape note singing tradition that originated in America in the late 1800s, drawing on the hymns and folk tunes of the time. It is sung in four part harmony, with no instruments accompanying the singers.
Sacred Harp is accessible, communal and participatory, not performative. So there’s no ‘choir practice’ – you just turn up and sing.
We sing from a book of hymns called The Sacred Harp. People from all faiths and none are welcome: our focus is purely on the camaraderie of making music together.
Manchester Sacred Harp is a friendly group who get together for the love of singing. We’re a small group – numbers fluctuate each time, depending on who can make it (there’s no expectation to always attend). It’s not a fixed group – it’s open to anybody, so you’re welcome to just come along and try it.
There is a mixture of abilities, and the voices of the most experienced singers help you to follow the tune. You won’t be asked to sing alone, and there’s no audience. It’s all about power of many voices joined in harmony.
Participants sit in an open square, the singers in each of the four sections facing towards each other. Each section sings a different part of the harmony.
First of all, everyone sounds out the tune together using just the four shape notes (fa, so, la, mi). Then we sing it through with the words using the Sacred Harp tune book. Shapenotes were designed to make it easier to follow a tune for people who don’t read music. But there’s no real need to follow the notes – you simply need to listen and join in – you’ll pick it up as you go along.
Go to FAQs for more information, and our page What is Sacred Harp? gives more background on the tradition.
This lovely short video gives a useful explanation of Sacred Harp:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVYYoxSYqIk
Manchester Sacred Harp 