By The Intrepid in Sounds — 02 Nov 2025

The Architecture of the Hollow Square

How Volunteers Make Sacred Harp Singing Possible

When hundreds of singers gathered at the Laurelhurst Club in Southeast Portland for the 34th Pacific Northwest Sacred Harp Singing Convention in mid-October, what visitors saw was striking: a massive hollow square of voices, no conductor, no audience, just people facing each other across an open center, singing 19th-century hymns about death and redemption with startling intensity.

What they didn't see—what the arrangement deliberately obscures—is the intricate organizational infrastructure that makes such apparent spontaneity possible.

The Arrangers' Table

To the right of the hollow square, just outside the frame of most photographs, sits a small table that functions as the event's nerve center. Here, arrangers manage what might be called the world's most democratic playlist.

In Sacred Harp tradition, anyone present can "call" a song by requesting to lead. Over two days of singing, with sessions running from morning through afternoon, this means coordinating potentially hundreds of individual requests. The arrangers' job is to sequence these requests fairly, ensure variety, manage timing, and keep the day flowing without making anyone wait too long for their turn.

It's air traffic control for participatory folk music.

An arranger at a Sacred Harp singing is basically being a DJ, except your audience members are also your performers. Everyone has their favorite song that might get called before their chance to lead, and the arrangers try to balance giving newcomers their first chance to lead with honoring the folks who've been coming for decades.

The work requires diplomacy, memory (who's led what, who's been waiting longest), and the ability to read a room—knowing when energy is flagging and a rousing tune is needed, or when the group needs something contemplative.

The Secretary's Station

Adjacent to the arrangers sits the secretary, documenting every song sung during the convention. This isn't optional record-keeping—it's institutional memory. The Sacred Harp Publishing Company compiles these records from conventions nationwide into annual minutes, creating an archive of the tradition's living practice.

Each entry notes: song number, page number, who led it, where and when. Multiply this by dozens of songs per session, multiple sessions per day, two days of singing, and you begin to understand the clerical precision required.

This documentation serves multiple purposes: it prevents repetition (singers can check what's already been called), it honors leaders (your name appears in the published minutes), and it creates continuity (future singers can look back and see what their community sang).

Without the secretary's quiet diligence, the convention would exist only in memory—powerful for those present, but lost to history.

Registration and Welcome

Before anyone can enter the hollow square, they pass through registration tables on the left side of the room. Here, more volunteers manage the unglamorous but essential work of:

Greeting arrivals (some traveling from across the country)
Providing complimentary COVID tests (a practice numerous conventions have maintained post-pandemic)
Explaining the day's structure to first-timers
Distributing song cards for those who want to lead
Collecting contact information for future events

Registration volunteers are often a newcomer's first contact with the Sacred Harp community. Their warmth and clarity can determine whether someone tentatively trying out this unusual tradition feels welcomed or bewildered.

Attendees have driven or flown cross country or from overseas. Others have wandered in drawn by the sound. Everyone gets the same welcome, the same explanation, the same invitation to participate.

Dinner on the Grounds

The term "dinner on the grounds" comes from the tradition's rural roots, when all-day singings meant eating outside between sessions. At the Laurelhurst Club, "the grounds" meant tables stretching along one wall, groaning under the weight of homemade dishes.

This isn't catered food—it's potluck, with the expectation that everyone contributes. But "contributes" undersells what actually happens. Participants routinely prepare multiple dishes. Dietary restrictions are carefully labeled. Cultural traditions appear: Southern casseroles alongside colorful heirloom vegetable salads, modest meatballs in Crock-Pots and vegan BBQ soy curls.

Managing this abundance requires coordination. Volunteers:

Arrange tables and serving logistics
Ensure food safety (proper temperatures, clear labeling)
Coordinate timing (when to set out dishes, when to encourage eating)
Manage flow (preventing bottlenecks when 200 people need lunch)
Handle cleanup between sessions

And then there's the dessert table—a separate operation entirely, equally extensive, requiring its own coordination.

The Kitchen Crew

Behind the scenes, literally, a kitchen crew works throughout the day:

Heating dishes that arrived cold
Making continuous pots of coffee (essential fuel for hours of singing)
Washing serving utensils
Managing the practical reality of feeding 200+ people in a space not designed as a restaurant

These volunteers miss significant portions of the singing. They're the ones who sacrifice their own participation to ensure everyone else can sing on a full stomach.

The Invisible Infrastructure

Beyond these visible roles, dozens of other tasks make the convention possible:

Venue coordination: Someone negotiated with the Laurelhurst Club, arranged dates, handled contracts, ensured the space would be available and configured correctly.

Setup and teardown: Before the first singer arrived, volunteers arranged chairs in the hollow square configuration—four sections, facing inward, precise spacing. After the last song, they broke it all down.

Songbook management: Sacred Harp conventions use loaner books (some attendees travel without their own copies - those pages add heft to your luggage!). Someone inventoried these, distributed them, collected them, tracked losses.

Communication: Months of emails, social media posts, website updates to announce dates, coordinate potluck contributions, answer questions from potential attendees.

Accessibility: Ensuring the space works for people with varying mobility, hearing, or other needs.

Financial management: The convention isn't free to run. Someone handles budgets, tracks donations, ensures bills get paid.

The Paradox of Infrastructure

Sacred Harp's beauty lies partly in its apparent simplicity: no rehearsal, no auditions, no conductor, no audience. Anyone can call a song. Everyone sings as loudly or softly as they wish. The music emerges from collective commitment rather than imposed coordination.

But this beautiful simplicity rests on deliberate complexity. The freedom to simply show up and sing is made possible by dozens of people ensuring that "simply showing up" leads to coherent experience rather than chaos.

This is constraint as liberation: the organizational infrastructure creates boundaries (registration systems, song coordination, documented records, meal logistics) that paradoxically enable freedom (spontaneous participation, democratic leadership, sustained community).

The hollow square looks empty at its center—a space for leaders to step into, one at a time, offering their choice to the assembled singers. But that empty center is surrounded by structure: the four sections, the arrangers' table, the registration desk, the food tables, the documentation station. The void at the heart of the formation exists because everything else is carefully held in place.

Making It Look Easy

The highest compliment you can give to infrastructure is that it becomes invisible. When registration flows smoothly, when songs are called in satisfying sequence, when food appears at the right moment, when documentation happens silently, it all seems natural—as if these gatherings simply happen through collective goodwill.

They don't. They happen through collective labor, freely given, often by people who could otherwise be singing.

Karen Willard, a Seattle-area singer who was interviewed for media coverage, spoke eloquently about the music's emotional power: "It's like being in a pipe organ. The sound hits your body on all four sides, and you can feel it thump against your body."

She could speak as witness rather than organizer because Portland's volunteers were busy making that experience possible—too busy running the event to explain it to journalists.

The Tradition of Service

Sacred Harp conventions have operated this way for generations: rotating volunteer roles, shared responsibility, the understanding that tradition is maintained not just through singing but through service.

Longtime participants take their turns at the arrangers' table, at registration, in the kitchen. Newcomers are gradually invited into organizational roles, learning the institutional knowledge that makes each gathering work. The tradition perpetuates itself not just through teaching songs but through modeling the work of sustaining community.

This is folk practice in the fullest sense: not just the music (though the music is central) but the organizational forms, the volunteer ethos, the shared commitment to maintaining something larger than any individual participant.

Gratitude and Recognition

The 34th Pacific Northwest Sacred Harp Singing Convention succeeded because dozens of volunteers gave their time and energy to make it work. Many of their names won't appear in minutes or media coverage. Their work was functional rather than performative, essential rather than visible.

But without them:

Singers wouldn't have known when to lead
The day's songs wouldn't be documented
Newcomers would have felt lost
No one would have eaten
Coffee wouldn't have materialized (and chaos ensued)
The hollow square wouldn't have been configured correctly
The event wouldn't have happened at all

They made it look easy. It wasn't.

To everyone who staffed registration tables, coordinated song requests, documented minutes, prepared food, managed kitchens, arranged logistics, and performed the hundred small tasks that transformed "bunch of people who like singing" into "a functioning convention with hundreds of participants over two days":

Thank you.

Your work created the container within which beauty could emerge. The hollow square holds its shape because you held it. The voices could surge freely because you provided structure. The music soared because you built the foundation.

The singing is sacred. So is the service that makes singing possible.

This article honors the volunteer organizers of the 34th Pacific Northwest Sacred Harp Singing Convention, held October 19-20, 2025, at the Laurelhurst Club in Portland, Oregon. If you attended and want to help organize future events, contact your local Sacred Harp group—the tradition needs your hands as much as your voice.