Sacred Nine Project reconsiders and reimagines music, verse, theatre, and events from an earlier America in order to help shape a future one.

The results are “Amerimusicals,” site-specific hybrids of research and vocal musical performance that can:

• revive or refresh earlier compositions.

• indict problematic worldviews.

• unearth almost forgotten genres, and even create new genres.

• wield textual themes as present-day parables.

• reclaim systems of oppression for the oppressed.

• foster introspection, healing, and action. 

  We have old ‘scores’ to settle.

Sacred Nine Project is becoming a kind of nerve center in this very specific American “music with a message” space. As so much new music is emerging from the projects, it is natural that Sacred Nine Press will emerge in one to three years. There, select pieces from our concert repertoire as well as other innovative and mission-specific selections can be purchased and widely performed.

Central to this repertoire will be a yearly “call for scores,” in which African American composers are encouraged to create new Spirituals and submit them for consideration. The winning composer will receive an honorarium, have the work performed by Sacred Nine Singers at one of our concerts, with the option of having the piece published by Sacred Nine Press.

The richest mine for the projects is early American hymnody.  Other genres of interest are American theater, folk ballads, protest songs, reform songs, minstrelsy and its implications, the music of the Enslaved.  Often music of other countries (namely England, for obvious reasons) is featured prominently, but that is only when the music in question has enjoyed a strong tradition in the United States. 

In 2017 I needed to create an arrangement of “Brethren, We Have Met to Worship” to compliment a sermon. Trying to avoid copyright issues, I sought out an original source for the tune, HOLY MANNA, finding a facsimile of Southern Harmony. There I saw the usual and welcomed suspects like “Amazing Grace” and “Wondrous Love.” However, I was alarmed to find many tunes that not-so-subtly advanced the shame-based theology of the time. I decided to arrange 14 Southern Harmony hymns and songs, including some that contained the troubling and seemingly obsolete texts.

However, if those disturbing musical and poetic pieces did not survive the natural selection, why revive them now? A modern listener’s first reaction might be to condescend to our forebears. However, Sacred Nine advances the belief that just because we know what is proper to sing and say in polite society does not mean that we do not harbor primitive sentiments; the more austere and primitive texts we sing are dead and buried, but the sentiments they represent are alive and well.

C. Leonard Raybon, Founder and Pharisee

Raybon is Associate Professor, the Director of Choirs, the Virginia Beer Professor in Singing, Artistic Director of Summer Lyric Theatre at Tulane University, and the Director of Music at Rayne Memorial United Methodist Church. He earned a DMA at Louisiana State University under the mentorship of Dr. Kenneth Fulton and Dr. Sara Lynn Baird. Raybon enjoys creating helpful methodologies for his students, including his "Vowels in Hand" system, which aims to take the mystique out of choral vowel unification, and which was published in Voice and Speech Review in 2017. He has shared his vowel method in ten states and three countries. Sacred Nine Project is the vehicle for his current research: finding the darker parts of music history and seeing what lessons can be learned from them. The “Regret, Repent, Rejoice” was released on the Centaur Records label in March 2021. The article, an outgrowth from “Sacred Nine Project: Sing Me, Sing Me Not,” was published in November of 2023 in Journal of Singing.

Among Raybon’s hundreds of compositions, two have been published (and counting!) “The Busy Bee,” for SA or TB and piano with Santa Barbara Music Publishing, and “Jesus, Show Us How to Pray,” for SATB and piano with GIA Publications.

In addition to annual professional choir concerts in New Orleans, Raybon has begun creating site-specific “Amerimusicals” for out-of-town entities:

2023:

Libby Prison, The American Civil War Museum, Richmond, VA

The Mending Sampler, University of North Carolina at Chapel HIll

2025:

Hannah & Her Daughters, the Connecticut Museum of Culture and History & the Glastonbury Historical Society, Glastonbury, CT

The Billings Pendulum, the American Academy of Religion, Boston, MA