A Day of Festivals

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Local, Photography

Greek Festival in Greenville

Saturday was an absolutely stunning day. The air was dry and clear, and the sky was so blue that even cerulean doesn’t do it justice. There was no way that I was going to waste this on the huge stack of chores and yard work I had waiting for me at home. So, I decided a photo drive was needed. Several communities in the Upstate were having festivals this weekend, so I decided to check out a couple of them. I was actually able to hit four festivals – the Issaqueena Festival in Six Mile, the Banjo Bonanza at Hagood Mill in Pickens, the Strawberry Festival in Slater, and finally the Greek Festival at St. George Orthodox in Greenville.

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Seero – Geospatially Aware Video

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Geocaching and Maps

In my discussions about geotagging, one of the questions that always arises is the issue what location should be tagged. If you’re tagging photographs, should you tag the location where you took the shot, or should you tag the location of the subject. For example, if you were standing on an overlook on the Blue … Read More “Seero – Geospatially Aware Video” »

Shape Note Singing at Furman

Posted on By Tom 1 Comment on Shape Note Singing at Furman
Local, Music

Open Square Formation

Saturday morning I skipped out on a bunch of gardening chores that Laura had lined up for me and went to a shape note singing at Furman. When I arrived, there were about thirty singers already in their open square configuration, singing away.

Unlike the William Walker Memorial Singing at Wofford a couple of months ago, this event was held in a room designed for singing. The sound in Herring Hall (where the Greenville Chorale rehearses) was much more resonant, and the tunes sounded much better than they did in the dead room at Wofford.

The group started singing from the Southern Harmony, which has the more traditional do-re-mi scale. Even so, I struggled with the note names on the initial sing-through, and wound up singing “la” for most of the notes. For the second hour of the morning, they switched to the Sacred Harp, which uses the four-shape fa-so-la scale. It was much harder, and I never really got the hang of the note names. There was a break when we switched from one tune book to the other, and I had a chance to talk with several of the singers. I was told that Southern Harmony tends to be a bit more subdued, whereas Sacred Harp singing is always more raucous. Even though the notes were more difficult for me, I was up for high-energy raucous singing.

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