Sherburne on Lon Gisland

    I moved out to Long Island a week ago, to go back to school and get my Masters' in Music at Stony Brook.  For someone who had been to New York City on several occasions and loved the place, I was shocked (in a totally unwarranted, city-boy kind of way) to find out that, geez, Long Island is really different from NYC!  Everyone talks with the same brain-dead accent, every home and business is hidden behind an impenetrable moat of trees which you zoom by at 60 mph, sidewalks are as scarce as parking lots are plentiful.  Whereas New York seems to be a microcosm of a contracting universe - more and more buildings, people, money, ideas, and cultures being sucked up and concentrated -  Long Island seems to model a universe whose planets and stars are steadily growing more icy and distant from one another. It is an island made up entirely of smaller islands. 
     I write this from one of the smaller and certainly darker islands, my basement apartment in the suburban hellscape wholesome bedroom community of South Setauket.   I woke up this morning to a vague suggestion of sunlight through the porthole-esque windows above my bed (It was in fact a beautiful day, as I would later discover).  After wasting a good hour or so browsing the Web and neglecting most of my morning tasks, I remembered the above song and decided to indulge my hankering for a little shape-note singing courtesy of the Alabama Sacred Harp Society and one of folk music's eternal BFFs, Alan Lomax.
     There are probably people out there who can tell you more about the sacred harp tradition, but it doesn't need to be processed, enjoyed or participated in in an academic way.  All you need is a copy of the music, a rudimentary ability to read it, some friends and a desire to sing.  Yet the result is totally unique music, with a raw beauty and offhanded power that seems to well up from the ground.  Most composers today would kill to be able to capture sounds like these, but this is a well few will ever learn to draw from.  For me, these sounds help to dispel the sense of isolation which can set in like a fever in this low-roofed Fiji.  To hear that wonderful communion of voices from so long ago is to start to make plans, to get hold of a boat, build a raft, get off the island somehow.