Details

Located 14 miles due west of midtown Manhattan, the Montclair Friends Meeting House is just a hop, skip, and jump from the Garden State Parkway; a mere 30 minutes from NYC's Port Authority Terminal by bus; convenient to local public transportation. Its lath-and-plaster interior with vaulted ceiling provides excellent acoustics for singing.

We sing from the 1991 revsion of The Sacred Harp, copies of which are available for loan or for purchase (at cost).

Sacred Harp music is sung a cappella--that is, by voices alone in harmony without instrumental support or accompaniment. We sing in the traditional way, facing each other in a hollow square, taking turns leading the singing from a tunebook that has been in continuous publication with periodic revisions since 1844. The music consists of hymns, fuging tunes, anthems, and other songs of a Christian devotional or (less often) an American patriotic nature. Composers and poets represented include European and American men and women from the 16th to the 20th centuries. The music is powerful, the sound distinctive: modal, open chords, octave doubling, original and unusual harmonies. A system of "shape notes" in our tunebook supplements ordinary musical notation with a system of shaped noteheads that indicate the notes and intervals of the musical scale, making it easier to learn to read the music.

All are welcome. No particular religious, ethnic, or musical background is supposed, and current Sacred Harpers are a proudly diverse lot with respect to all of these.

Directions to Montclair Friends Meetinghouse

Montclair Friends Meeting House is easily reached from all points! For travel directions (by car and by public transportation), please see our directions page.

Call or write us!

Please get in touch if you would like to know more about the Garden State Sacred Harp singings or to be added to our mailing list. Call 973 779-8290 or send e-mail to gssh.singings@verizon.net On the day of any singing (but not otherwise, please!), call the meetinghouse at 973 744-8320.

Links to more information and other singings

The newly revitalized Princeton, New Jersey, area singing meets on second Sundays in Lawrenceville and welcomes new singers.

The web site  of our friends at the Manhattan Sacred Harp Sing  lists the schedules of the THREE monthly singings in New York City: their own (fourth Sundays), the Lower East Side Sing (first Saturdays), and the Joe Beasley Sacred Harp Singing (Brooklyn, second Sundays).

New Jersey singers can usually be found at nearby conventions and all-day singings in Pennsylvania, NewYork State, and New England and the Pioneer Valley.

For other singings in the region and elsewhere, Manhatan Sacred Harp Sing maintains a comprehensive directory of Sacred Harp singings in the Northeast and Warren Steel provides several pages of directory information on singings nationwide from The Sacred Harp and other American books of psalmody.

For more information about Sacred Harp singing in general and pointers to the abundant Sacred Harp resources on the Internet and singings throughout the USA and abroad, we recommend starting with the aforementioned Prof. Steel's Sacred Harp page at the University of Mississippi. Another fine meta-resource is the fasola.org page, which includes links to recent press and media coverage, including a number of radio features that you can listen to online. The meta-resource of all meta-resources in this area is Steven Sabols's Sacred Harp Resource Guide

For more information about our own past and upcoming events:

• Previous conventions and other past events.