Author: Jesse P. Karlsberg

Article on Sacred Harp Composer Raymond C. Hamrick in Georgia Music News

Update (December 7, 2014): Thanks to Mary Leglar for granting me permission to post a copy of this article here in memory of Raymond C. Hamrick, who died last month at age ninety-nine.

Update (January 26, 2015): The Guardian and Georgia Music have recently posted lovely remembrances of Raymond C. Hamrick. Read,

Update (January 5, 2017): A substantially revised and expanded version of my essay on Hamrick appears in the new special issue of the Sacred Harp Publishing Company Newsletter on Hamrick as “Raymond C. Hamrick’s Contributions to Sacred Harp Singing and Scholarship.”

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“Raymond Cooper Hamrick: Sacred Harp Craftsman,” in Georgia Music News.

An article of mine, “Raymond Cooper Hamrick: Sacred Harp Craftsman,” which contains a short biography of Hamrick and an account of his prolific output as a Sacred Harp composer, has been published as the “Historical Profile” in Georgia Music News, Volume 72, Number 2 (Winter 2011).

In addition to his six songs in the Sacred Harp, 1991 Edition, one hundred of Hamrick’s shape-note compositions are collected in the Georgian Harmony (2010). Sacred Harp singers are currently meeting to sing through an even larger selection of Hamrick’s music, in preparation for the publication of a second volume, expected in 2012.

Hamrick has been a gracious friend and mentor since I first met him six years ago. I am glad to have had the opportunity to write about him for this publication. In addition to Hamrick, I would like to thank John Plunkett, who improved my article by offering revisions, contributing research, soliciting materials and obtaining permissions for their use, and writing a first draft of the paragraphs in the article on The Georgian Harmony. He should properly be credited as a co-author. Thank you as well to Stephanie Tingler for soliciting the piece, and for commenting on a draft. My thanks to Mary Leglar and the staff of Georgia Music News for publishing the piece, and for their work in copyediting the manuscript and laying it out beautifully. Thanks to Pat Graham, Justin Levi, Sara Lynch-Thomason, and Jonathon Kelso for allowing me to include photographs and illustrations of theirs with the piece. And finally, thanks to Hugh McGraw and Charlene Wallace for identifying the date and location of a photograph of Raymond Hamrick from the 1970s.

Essay on Sacred Harp Singing in Ireland in Southern Spaces

My essay, “Ireland’s First Sacred Harp Convention: ‘To Meet To Part No More,'” was just published on the online, peer-reviewed journal Southern Spaces. In the essay I detail how the first Ireland Sacred Harp Convention served as a revelatory experience and a catalyst of reciprocal travel among Sacred Harp singers from across Europe and the United States. Alongside its written component, the essay includes eight videos of singers leading at the convention.

Blogging, Research, and Sustainability on ProfHacker

Jason B. Jones as written an interesting post at ProfHacker in response to the conversation on the HASTAC blog about blogging as a scholarly publishing platform that I mentioned in my post below. Jones sees the potential in blogging for scholars to make “their research or their teaching … visible, even if it’s work they either can’t or don’t intend to sustain forever.”

Blogging as Scholarly Publishing?

There’s an interesting conversation on the HASTAC blog about the merits of blogging as a form of scholarly publishing. Needless to say, while many academics blog on their own web sites and contribute to other blogs, blogging is not generally considered a form of scholarship on par with books, journal articles, and conference presentations. As online journals proliferate and publishers of such journals experiment with the form of scholarly publishing, why do blogs lack prestige?

My contention in a recent comment is that the lack of peer review in almost all personal (and most group) blogging contexts is a major reason for this difference. Some authors have experimented with subjecting blog posts to peer review. In certain cases, these experiments have productively challenged the nature of peer review, embracing forms of post-publication peer review, for example.

I would argue that in many cases conventional peer review is undesirable for blogs. Blogs facilitate:

  • Immediate (or at least rapid) publication, which enables authors to respond quickly to timely events,
  • Conversation among authors of different blogs and through commenting, through which scholarly conversation can move along at a much quicker pace than through peer reviewed journal articles, and
  • Reflexive writing, thoughts on process, multimedia, and other forms of thoughtful, academically interesting writing that for various reasons are unlikely to find their way into a number of conventionally peer reviewed publication forums.

This capacity to engage in conversation and respond to current events is one reason Southern Spaces, the multimedia, online, peer reviewed journal at which I am an Editorial Associate, is considering launching a blog in the next couple of months to supplement its conventionally peer reviewed publications. A blog would provide the journal’s staff with a platform for participating in conversations about digital publishing and the U. S. South while also providing our authors with a venue to weigh in on timely current events.

The journal will need to determine what kind of pre-publication review posts will undergo. Ernesto Priego suggests that certain review processes involving a community of non-blind reviewers and blogging tools may be superior to conventional peer review in many respects and “empower authors to become active participants in the publication and promotion of their own articles” in his reply to my comment over at HASTAC.

I am planning to use this blog to publish a short piece to accompany a forthcoming publication. While the conventional peer review process at the journal to which I submitted my piece helped refine and shorten my essay, and rendered it more appropriate for the journal’s audience, this shortening left me wishing for a venue to publish some left out quotes and some writing on my own relationship to the events described in the piece. It is entirely possible that such forms of writing might be welcome in other conventionally peer reviewed spaces. However, I imagine that regardless of the forum, there is often some complementary material that an author may wish to make public and accessible, yet that winds up excluded from a given publication. I am willing to sacrifice the academic credit that might come from the imposition of peer review for the flexibility that I have in this publishing space.

What is emerging in the conversation on HASTAC referenced above is that certain forms of review may preserve the advantages of a blog while improving its scholarship. As online journals slowly proliferate and gain legitimacy, amid continuing exploration of what forms such journals can take, blogging should be thrown into the mix. By doing so, scholars and online journal publishers might also helpfully reconsider the form peer review takes in these spaces.

First Blog Post up at HASTAC.org

I’ve just posted an introduction to my work to the HASTAC web site. The post provides an overview of my background and academic work. It also sketches out some areas where I hope to contribute to the dialog among HASTAC Scholars where I might hope to generate collaborations through the project.

2011–12 HASTAC Scholars Program

I’m happy to report that I’ve been selected as a HASTAC Scholar for 2011–12, joining six other Emory University graduate students (including three others from the ILA).
As I work this year on the digitization and presentation of a selection of books in the English and American Hymnody and Psalmody Collection at the Pitts Theology Library I am eager to interact with others in the HASTAC community interested in the representation of printed texts, musical notation, and other digitized objects online and interfaces for expressing scholarship in relation to such digital objects. Presenting such work digitally has the potential to engage a general public (of Sacred Harp singers in my case) as well as a scholarly audience. I’m hopeful that sharing this work may catalyze collaborations around the comparison and annotation of digitized objects.

In addition to participating in a conversation related to my scholarship, as an Editorial Associate with the interdisciplinary online journal Southern Spaces, I’m looking forward to sharing my experience implementing new web technologies for a multimedia digital academic journal. I’m also excited to be able to offer occasional updates on digital scholarship at Emory, where our new Digital Scholarship Commons (DiSC) is in its first year.

Streaming Video of the United Convention

The 108th session of the United Sacred Harp Musical Association, meeting at Trevecca Nazarene University in Nashville this weekend, will be streamed live over the Internet this weekend. This will be the first attempt at live streaming a Sacred Harp singing convention.

J. S. James, Leading, Composition, and Starting a Singing – Classes at Camp Fasola

I taught several classes this June and July at the two sessions of Camp Fasola, a weeklong summer camp for learning Sacred Harp singing, history, and traditions held in Alabama.
With Aldo Ceresa, I co-taught a class on the music and historical context of the revision of The Sacred Harp by J. S. James in 1911. Our class mixed singing with the telling of stories about James and his collaborators and rivals. The class was timed to mark the hundredth anniversary of the publication of the “James Book.”

I also taught an intermediate class on leading songs at Sacred Harp singings, moderated a discussion on starting, feeding, and maintaining a regular or annual singing, and led a session where singers led and discussed collaborative Sacred Harp composition exercises and new songs they had written in the styles of The Sacred Harp. 

Attendance at Camp was quite high this year and the campers came from across the United States as well as from Canada and several European countries. The campers ranged from singers with over 60 years of experience singing from The Sacred Harp to those who had never attended a singing. As always, teaching such a motivated and diverse group of learners was an enriching and enjoyable experience.