About These Recordings
Nine songs form the core of the Azariah story. The songs are composed in the style of The Sacred Harp with music and poetry written by Jesse Pearlman Karlsberg.
This page presents two recordings of the songs from Azariah. The first is a recording of the premiere of Azariah, featuring all nine songs, as well as the monologues and singing instruction that flushed out the performance. The event is presented in full, both as a set of twenty-one titled fragments and a single, complete recording. Next to the premiere documentation are recordings of the nine songs as sung by an octet of Sacred Harp singers. While the live recording displays the music in context, these nine tracks document the songs themselves.
On both sets of recordings the songs are sung in the style of The Sacred Harp. Singers sing through each song on the solfege shapes (to the syllables: fa, sol, la, and mi) that characterize shape note music before launching into each song's words. Visit the page on Sacred Harp singing for more information about this musical tradition. To hear songs from Azariah without singing on the shapes sample the featured recordings at the top of this page.