Jesse Pearlman Karlsberg studies and practices Sacred Harp singing, a musical culture based on daylong participatory singings from The Sacred Harp, a tunebook first published in Georgia in 1844. He is a Woodruff Fellow and a student in the PhD program at the Graduate Institute of Liberal Arts at Emory University where he is also working toward a certificate in Digital Scholarship.
Jesse’s work focuses on the experience of being at a Sacred Harp singing and on the composers, compilers, and singers who collaboratively produced editions of The Sacred Harp during the Twentieth Century. His interdisciplinary examination envisions a reciprocal relationship between the singing experience and the revision process, drawing on the writings of Sacred Harp singers as well literatures in cultural anthropology, the history of the book, systems theory, and American regional studies.