For millennia
the biblical psalter has been the chief
liturgical book of God’s people of the old and new covenants.
The
Psalms
are unique in that they simultaneously reflect the full range of human
experience and reveal to us God’s word. In them we hear
expressions of
joy and lament, cries for revenge against enemies, confession of sin,
acknowledgement
of utter dependence on God, recitations of his mighty acts in history,
and finally songs of praise and adoration. With the rest of
the
Old
Testament, Christians share the biblical Psalter with the Jewish
people,
with whom it originates. Many of the Psalms are ascribed to
David
himself, and there is even a tradition making him the author of the
entirety
of the book. While there is no certainty to the ascriptions
traditionally
prefacing each psalm, it is likely that many of them do indeed
originate
with the revered founder of the Judaic dynasty. If the latest
of
the psalms were composed during the Persian and perhaps even into the
Hasmonean
eras, then the Psalter was compiled over the better part of a
millennium
of Jewish history before being finalized sometime during the second
temple
period. Translated into Greek as part of the Septuagint, the
Psalms
naturally found their way into early Christian usage as well.
The New Testament
writers see in several of the Psalms,
for example Psalms 2, 8, 22, 41, 69, 110 and 118, a foretaste of the
coming
Messiah. The early church fathers added to this number, seeing Jesus
Christ,
not only in several other individual psalms, but in the whole of the
Psalter
itself. Thus the psalms of lament came to be seen as
describing,
not merely the miseries of the human authors, but the very sufferings
of
Christ. Further, the imprecatory psalms were no longer cries
for
vengeance by a hurting and oppressed people, but invocations of the
very
judgement of Christ against the enemies of his coming kingdom.1 While
there is nowadays a certain reluctance to see too many gratuitous
references to Christ in a prechristian liturgical collection,
nevertheless
insofar as the Psalms partake of the larger redemptive-historical
narrative
of Scripture, we are fully justified in seeing in Christ the ultimate
fulfilment
of the salvation spoken of in these poetic stanzas. Thus in
some
Christian communities the singing of a psalm is ended with a
trinitarian
doxology.
The Psalms were,
of course, meant to be sung, as
they in fact were from ancient times by God’s
people. Exactly how
they were sung we can only speculate. Psalm 136 at least was
meant
to be sung antiphonally, perhaps between a cantor and the assembled
congregation. We know that Hebrew poetry proceeds, not
according to the strict rhyme
and metre familiar to especially protestant Christians, but by means of
parallelism and repeated stresses in the parallel lines. The
ancient
Hebrew psalmists delighted in repeating a thought twice, but in
different
words. And contrary to the strict metrical structure of modern
Christian
hymnody, that of the Hebrew psalms is much closer to our
children’s
nursery
rhymes in that, while the basic rhythm is repeated in successive lines
or groups of lines, the number of syllables varies from one line to the
next.2 A
recent attempt to recover
something
of this original poetic flavour can be seen in Gelineau psalmody,
invented
in the 1950s by the French priest, Fr. Joseph Gelineau.
In many Christian
traditions the singing of Psalms
has been eclipsed by hymns of more recent vintage. This is a phenomenon
common to Roman Catholicism, Orthodoxy and the various forms of
protestantism. All the same, many of the church’s
most famous hymn-writers, such as
Martin
Luther and Isaac Watts, turned their efforts to the versification of
the
biblical Psalter. The former’s A
Mighty Fortress is a christological
rendition of Psalm 46. The latter’s O
God, Our Help in Ages Past is a
free paraphrase of Psalm 90. Yet many churches today go
through
an
entire Sunday worship service without singing even a single
psalm. Thankfully, this is being rectified in most traditions,
as psalmody is
increasingly reincorporated into the liturgies of Catholic, Lutheran,
Reformed,
Methodist and other churches. Many of these have opted for
metrical
versifications of the psalms. Moreover, there are still a few
churches,
such as the Reformed Presbyterian Church in North America, which, as a
matter of principle, sing only the Psalms in the liturgy.
The
metrical psalter
Why metrical
versifications? In the years just prior
to the Reformation the Psalms were generally sung in Latin to gregorian
chant. Gregorian and other forms of chant very likely have
their
origins in the synagogue and perhaps even temple worship of
Judaism. In theory, the chant known as plainsong, with its
elegant simplicity,
could
be sung by an ordinary congregation with a little training. In
fact,
however, the chanting of the psalms and other hymns tended over time to
be monopolized by the clergy, cantors and choirs. Furthermore,
as
lay people gradually lost the use of Latin (or, in southwestern Europe,
as Latin proper developed into the several Romance languages), much of
the liturgy was no longer comprehensible to them. The liturgy,
far
from being the “work of the people,” did not
incorporate them as full
participants. It is not surprising, then, that private
devotions were often said in
the
pews while the mass was being celebrated at the altar.
|
| Clément
Marot |
To rectify this
situation, the Reformers sought to
render the liturgy, including the biblical Psalms, in a form more
easily
accessible to the people. During the first part of the sixteenth
century,
the French court poet, Clément Marot, turned his hand to
versifying
the psalms in rhymed, metrical form, and in his own French language.
These
brilliant texts, popular even among those remaining loyal to Rome, were
set to music by Louis Bourgeois and became the basis of the several
editions
of the Genevan Psalter of 1542, 1551 and 1562, which further drew upon
the texts of Théodore de Bèze, John
Calvin’s successor at
Geneva, and the music of Claude Goudimel. These in turn were
influenced
by similar metrical psalters in use at Strasbourg and elsewhere. Calvin
himself wrote some metrical versifications of Psalms, but these did not
survive, as he was apparently a better theological systematizer than
poet.
Although the
Genevan Psalms continue to be sung in
the Netherlands, Hungary, South Africa and elsewhere, they early fell
out
of use in the English-speaking world, except for a very few tunes. More
familiar to Anglo-Saxon Reformed Christians is the tradition dating
back
to the Sternhold and Hopkins’ Psalter of 1551, Tate and
Brady’s “New
Version”
Psalter of 1696 and, above all, the Scottish Psalter of 1650. In these
the tunes are generally set to the uniform metre known as iambic
heptameter,
or common metre (8.6.8.6 or CM). A glance at the metrical tune
index
in the back of a typical English-language hymnal indicates a
preponderance
of common, long (8.8.8.8 or LM) and short metre (6.6.8.6 or SM)
tunes. A notable exception to this pattern was Henry
Ainsworth’s Psalter of
1612,
published in Amsterdam for the expatriate English-speaking Reformed
communities
in the Netherlands, and brought over to Plymouth, Massachusetts, by the
Pilgrims eight years later.3 Borrowing
several
of the Genevan tunes, the Ainsworth Psalter was eventually supplanted
by
the more widely-used Bay Psalm Book with its more regular metres.4
By contrast, the
Genevan tunes are set to wonderfully
irregular metres and the tunes themselves have a pronounced rhythmic
intensity
and modal flavour, making them sound more like Renaissance madrigals
than
conventional hymns. Queen Elizabeth I of England is said to have
derisively
called them “Genevan jigs,” because of their
dance-like qualities.5 The
1929 edition of The Scottish Psalter has split pages so that the
various
texts and tunes can be mixed and matched, which is quite easily done
due
to the very few uniform metres used throughout. By contrast,
one
could scarcely do this with the Genevan Psalter because of the sheer
number
of different metres included. In this respect, the Genevan
tunes
are remarkably similar to the German chorale tunes associated with the
Lutheran Reformation. Indeed both can perhaps be said to
partake
of a common continental European musical and liturgical heritage.
Immigrants to
North America from especially the Netherlands
brought with them something of the Genevan tradition. The
Canadian
Reformed Churches, originating in the mid-twentieth-century
Netherlands,
sing from their own
Book of Praise: Anglo-Genevan Psalter
[
sic],
6 containing
English versifications for all the Genevan tunes. They
are perhaps the only group of Christians in this continent to maintain
the Genevan Psalter in its entirety. In the Christian Reformed
Church,
originating in the mid-nineteenth century United States and spreading
into
Canada after the second World War, the Genevan tradition never died
completely. Nevertheless, in its effort to americanize itself
during the xenophobic
years of the Great War, the CRC allowed much of that tradition to
be eclipsed by the more typically Anglo-Saxon 1912
Psalter. Those
Genevan tunes that were retained were kept in their later, isometric,
and
thus less rhythmic, forms. The 1989 edition of the Christian
Reformed
Church’s
Psalter Hymnal brought back a
number of Genevan tunes
and
returned them to their original rhythms, although their modal character
is not always apparent in the musical arrangements in that
collection. It is unfortunate that the typically ponderous way
of singing the
Genevan
psalms has led many congregations to abandon them altogether in favour
of more contemporary tunes and praise choruses. Yet when sung
properly,
the Genevan psalms can be a delight to the ear.
| In the
Genevan Psalms I felt that I had discovered a huge and largely untapped
source
of great riches. |
Perhaps the best
known of the Genevan tunes in the
English-speaking world are Psalms 42, 66/98/118 and 134. The first tune
is familiar as the setting for the beloved Advent hymn, Comfort,
Comfort,
Ye My People, a metrical versification of Isaiah 40:1-8
written
by
Johannes
Olearius and translated into English by Catherine Winkworth. A
number
of texts have been set to the second tune, including Reginald
Heber’s
eucharistic
hymn, Bread of the
World, in Mercy
Broken. The third tune
was renumbered as Psalm 100 in the Scottish Psalter and is often listed
as OLD ONE-HUNDREDTH in
contemporary hymnals,
thereby
masking its Genevan origins. English-speaking Christians sing Bishop
Thomas
Ken’s doxology, Praise
God from Whom
All Blessings Flow, to this
tune. Psalms 12, 68, 107 and 124 have also found their way
into Anglo-Saxon
hymnals,
sometimes in altered form to make them fit the more uniform metres
therein.
For
love of the Psalms
It is appropriate
to recount something of my own
experience with the psalms, noting what led me to undertake this
project.
I grew up in an Orthodox Presbyterian Church congregation, where we
were
accustomed to singing the psalms, although I rarely knew we were doing
so, since the OPC’s Trinity Hymnal
scattered the psalms among
the
other hymns. Those psalms we did sing came largely from the
1912
Psalter. In my youth our family began worshipping in a
non-Reformed
church which sang from a nondenominational hymnal heavily oriented
towards
the revival songs of Ira Sankey, Charles Gabriel and Fanny
Crosby. Needless to say, there were almost no psalms in this
collection, except
possibly the Scottish Psalter’s ubiquitous 23rd Psalm, which
has
managed
to find its way into most hymnals. In short, in moving from
one
denomination
to another, we had lost the singing of psalms, yet I did not feel this
loss, because I was never aware of our having sung them to begin with!
In my
undergraduate and graduate student years I
began to discover the liturgical practices of the most ancient of the
Christian
churches, including the Roman Catholic and Orthodox, many of which
survived
within the Anglican and Lutheran churches. My initial
introduction
to this tradition came in the form of a little volume purchased at the
bookstore of Luther Theological Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota:
Herbert
Lindemann, ed., The Daily Office: Matins and Vespers, Based
on
Traditional
Liturgical Patterns, with Scripture Readings, Hymns, Canticles,
Litanies,
Collects, and the Psalter, Designed for Private Devotion or Group
Worship
(St. Louis: Concordia, 1965).7 It
is a
marvellous
book, filled with all the riches of the Christian ages, some of which
were
familiar to me but much of which were not. Since I was not
part
of
a community that worshipped in this way, I privately followed the
pattern
of the daily office prescribed in its pages for perhaps a year or two,
before making other discoveries that would further enrich my devotional
life.
In the Episcopal
Church’s revised 1979 Book of Common
Prayer I discovered the Daily Office Lectionary, which takes the reader
through much, if not most, of the Bible in the course of two
years. It prescribed for each day of the church year,
beginning with Advent,
an
Old Testament reading, one or more Psalms, a New Testament epistle
reading
and a gospel reading. At about the same time I began attending an
Anglican church which followed a similar pattern for each Sunday of the
church calendar, following the three-year ecumenical lectionary.
This too prescribed a psalm to be said or sung between the Old
Testament
and epistle readings. It is no exaggeration to say that I fell in
love with this rich pattern of going through so much of Scripture in
the
course of the liturgy. Although my present church community has
not
discovered this pattern for itself, I continue to follow the daily
office
in the course of my own personal prayer regimen, though I have
sometimes
abbreviated it as my own circumstances have changed. (Try praying
the psalms while a screaming toddler is tugging at one’s
trousers
cuffs!)
It was the use of
the Psalms that most impressed
me. The Lindemann volume took one through the Psalter at an
exceedingly
leisurely pace, prescribing at most two psalms per week. The
Daily
Office Lectionary guided one through the entire Psalter over a six-week
period, with some variations due to the changing seasons of the church
calendar and the occasional interruption of a feast day. I myself
simply read through the Psalms in course, covering approximately two
psalms
a day. At other times I have followed a pattern covering the
Psalter
in four weeks. I have been rather less than legalistic about
all
this, sometimes going through long periods without the Psalms or even
the
remainder of scripture. Yet there they are, always ready to
take
me back and to sustain me through times of joy and adversity.
 |
Psalm 89 from
the Genevan Psalter |
Everyone goes
through tough
times, and I am no different
in this respect. During such periods I have found it deeply
comforting
to immerse myself in the Psalms, drinking in their praises, complaints,
expressions of sorrow, and individual and corporate confessions of
sin. Even the darkest of the psalms, Psalm 88, regularly takes
my
breath
away
when I read it. Who, after all, has not felt abandoned at some
point
in life? Who has not despaired of both present and
future? And, even though we are loath to admit it, who of us
has
not wished to
call down God’s wrath on someone who has crossed us in some
way? I have sometimes joked that, had Prozac been around two
and a
half
millennia
ago, a third of the Psalms and the whole of Ecclesiastes and Job might
not have been written! Yet the expressions found therein are
part
of the fabric of life – a life lived in a less-than-perfect,
and
sometimes
horrific, world. But a life lived, all the same, in
God’s
presence. God’s love sometimes touches us by means
of the
very suffering that
seems
so vexing while we are going through it. But afterwards, that
suffering
has become such a part of us that we cannot imagine exchanging it for
something
else. Our trials become for us what Sheldon Vanauken famously
called
God’s “severe mercy,” a mercy without
which we would
surely be lesser
persons.
At least since the
Enlightenment many Christians
have claimed to find the psalms something of an
embarrassment. Even
so indefatigable an apologist for the Christian faith as C. S. Lewis
refers
to some expressions therein as uncharitable and even
“devilish.”8 The
great Isaac Watts once wrote: “Some of them are almost
opposite to the Spirit
of the Gospel: Many of them foreign to the State of the New Testament,
and
widely different from the present circumstances of
Christians.”9 In
Dostoyevsky’s celebrated novel, The Brothers
Karamazov,
there
is a scene in which the protagonist Alyosha’s recently
deceased mentor,
Father Zosima, is being memorialized prior to burial. Because
Father
Zosima was a “priest and monk of the strictest rule, the
Gospel, not
the
Psalter, had to be read over his body by monks in holy
orders.”10 When
I first read this part of the book, I couldn’t help pitying
Father
Zosima, because he was departing this life without the benefit of the
Psalms. But, of course, the author’s point was that,
for the mere monk not
subject
to such a strict discipline, the Psalms would have to
suffice. I
could not bring myself to accept this implied inferiority of the
Psalter. Indeed, I and many others have found in the Psalms
the very lifeblood
of
the believer.
The
Genevan Psalter
What then of the Genevan
Psalter? Again, I
did not grow up with it and did not discover it until I was around
thirty
years of age. However, during a visit to Prague a decade
earlier
I had purchased a Czech protestant psalter and hymnal published in
1900.11 Ten
years later, to my surprise, I finally recognized that this volume
contained all one-hundred-fifty Psalms set to their proper Genevan
melodies. I had not known that Czech protestants, who trace
their
heritage to the
fifteenth-century pre-reformer Jan Hus, had ever sung these, but some
evidently
did, at least as recently as a century ago. By the time I
noticed
this, I had only recently discovered the Genevan melodies in their
proper,
rhythmic forms. To begin with, I had come into possession
of
a recording of Hungary’s Debrecen College Cantus singing
arrangements
of
the Genevan tunes (four by the celebrated twentieth-century composer
Zoltán
Kodály) with Albert Szenci Molnár’s
Hungarian
versifications.
At a used bookstore in South Bend, Indiana, I purchased an old copy of
the Psalter and liturgy of the Gereformeerde Kerken in
Nederland. Shortly thereafter, having moved to Hamilton,
Ontario,
I acquired a
copy
of the Dutch Liedboek voor de Kerken, an ecumenical
collection
containing,
once more, all of the Genevan tunes, but with a more recent
versification
of the texts in Dutch. Unable to play the piano, I generally
worked
these tunes out on the guitar, where they took on something of the
flavour
of John Dowland’s compositions for the lute. In my
head I heard
these
tunes in their Renaissance context, where their similarity to the works
of Thomas Tallis, William Byrd and Orlando Gibbons seemed
evident. I felt that I had discovered a huge and largely
untapped source of
great
riches. Around this time I began to versify the Psalms in a
contemporary
idiom so they could be sung to these marvellous melodies. The
current
collection is a product of this effort.
Of course, I make
no claim for special canonical
status for the Genevan tradition, which would obviously be a most
unreformed
thing to do. One of the things that distinguishes us as
Reformation
Christians from our fellow believers outside the Reformation is that we
regard Scripture as the basis for our unity, refraining in principle
from
ascribing normative status to the postbiblical accretions in our
various
local traditions. At the same time, there is something to be
said
for holding on to those traditions that have served us well in the
past,
even if we understand that they must ultimately be subject to the
overriding
standard of God’s Word. Moreover, if that particular
tradition
has
directed us to the Word itself, as have the Genevan tunes, then there
is
all the more reason to maintain it.
 |
Frontispiece
to Genevan Psalter,
1618 edition |
To be sure, this
is not the only way to sing the
Psalms. The Presbyterian Church (USA) devotes an entire
section
of
its Presbyterian Hymnal: Hymns, Psalms, and Spiritual Songs
(Louisville:
Westminster/John Knox Press, 1990) to numerous metrical and a very few
chanted psalms. Several denominations, including the PC(USA),
the
United Methodist Church and the Presbyterian Church in Canada, have
published
separately bound psalters.12 Then
there
is the rich tradition of Anglican chant, which combines the best of the
gregorian and metrical traditions and is appropriately sung by choirs
and
congregations alike. One should also mention the wonderful
collection
published in Great Britain titled Psalm Praise
(Chicago: GIA
Publications,
1973), a few of whose offerings have found their way into the
denominational
hymnals, including the CRC’s Psalter Hymnal. Norman
Warren
and Jim Seddon’s rendition of Psalm 30 is especially
haunting. In Roman Catholic circles the Grail/Gelineau Psalms
have been notably
influential
in the years following the second Vatican Council’s approval
of
vernacular
liturgies.13 Gregorian
chant has been
maintained
in Roman and Anglo-Catholic circles. And, finally, there is the
tradition
of Byzantine chant, largely unknown and certainly underappreciated in
the
west.
The Genevan
tradition deserves
an honoured place
among these venerable and innovative ways of singing the
Psalms. Though its roots are definitely in the Reformed
churches,
the Genevan
Psalms
would quite fittingly be sung in virtually any Christian
gathering. I myself once heard Genevan Psalm 96 sung as the
appointed psalm in a
Roman
Catholic church service televised from Québec one Sunday
afternoon
over the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. There is no reason
why
Baptists, Methodists, Lutherans and Anglicans could not find use for
them
in their own services of worship. My hope is that this
collection
will serve to disseminate an appreciation for the Genevan Psalms beyond
their natural constituency.
With respect to
the versifications, I admit that,
having no knowledge of Hebrew, I have relied on the major English
translations
of the Psalter, including the Revised Standard Version, the New
International
Version and the New Jerusalem Bible. I have not sought a
word-for-word
translation, which would, in any case, be impossible within a fixed
metrical
scheme. The Scottish Psalter comes close to a word-for-word
translation,
but largely at the expense of comprehensibility. My own
versifications
are free paraphrases – sometimes close to the text and
sometimes merely
communicating
the overall sense of the text, as seemed appropriate in each
case. While the biblical scholar, with her exacting standards,
may not like
my
approach, the poet will be more understanding. Some of the
versifications
are rhymed (e.g., Psalms 23 and 51) and some are not (e.g., Psalms 24
and
143). To an extent it has been possible to retain something of
the
parallelism of the Hebrew poetic form, but this has not always worked
within
the constraints of the Genevan metres. I have not been overly
literalistic
or legalistic on this score and have taken poetic licence where
necessary. It must also be recognized that it is not always
easy to write in
English
for the Genevan tunes. The Genevan metrical schemes and the
French
language both have an abundance of feminine endings, that is, phrases
ending
on unstressed syllables. By contrast, English has relatively
few
of these, which in large measure explains why English-language psalters
have tended towards the uniformity of common, long and short
metres. Thus in the present collection certain kinds of words,
e.g., those
ending
in -ing and -tion, will be noticed to reappear in several of my
versifications. In any case, I have attempted to match the
stresses in the melodies
with
those in the text, which not all existing English renderings of the
Genevan
Psalms do consistently.
As for the
harmonizations, these were worked out,
with the single exception of Psalm 8, in the year 1999 and
following. I have attempted to recover something of the modal
flavour of the
arrangements,
taking as my inspiration the music of those Renaissance masters
mentioned
above. Yet I have not slavishly kept within a modal framework,
particularly
where a musical line repeats itself and would thus seem to call for
something
different the second time. Some of the harmonizations may
sound a
little dissonant to those familiar with the arrangements traditionally
sung in the Dutch or Hungarian churches. Moreover, if one
follows the
suggested
tempos, the traditionalist is
likely to find them entirely too rapid. To such a person I
have a
two-fold answer: First, I am rendering them as I have heard them in my
head. Coming fresh to the Genevan tradition means that I am
working
without the benefit and the burden alike of having grown up hearing
them
sung a certain way. Second, at a time when so much traditional
hymnody
is being neglected in favour of (to my mind) vastly inferior praise
music,
with its repetitive phrases and transparently derivative tunes, we need
to affirm that the singing of the Psalms need hardly be a dreary
business. The liveliest of the Psalms, e.g., 47 and 92, would
even seem to call
for
a supportive percussion instrument, such as the tambourine. At
the
same time, we should never shrink from singing the laments, which
sorely
need to be reincorporated into our liturgical life. Our
individualistic,
consumer-oriented churches often seem to suffer from a lamentable
inability
to lament. Our congregations need to learn once again to sing Psalms 88
and 137, among many others.
Additional
material
Finally it should
be noted that the metrical psalters,
including the Genevan, almost always included a few biblical canticles
outside the Psalter proper, and my own collection reflects this.
Here is a description of the additional material, most of which is of
non-Genevan origin:
1. Seven non-Genevan psalms
written largely in the mid-1980s in the style
of the English and Scottish psalters, with their regular metres. With
the exception of Psalm 23, I
wrote these prior to discovering the Genevan tunes, and they are posted
for purposes of comparison with the more lively, and less regular
metres of the latter. Included are Psalms 23, 25, 51, 95, 98, 130 and
137.
Psalms 51, 95 and 137 are set to original melodies composed especially
for these texts. The tunes are titled MISERERE,
VENITE
and HICKORY ROAD respectively. I set Psalm
23 to DUNFERMLINE, from the Scottish
Psalter of 1615, and Psalm 25 to Thomas
Tallis' haunting THIRD MODE MELODY,
for which I composed transitional music between the stanzas. The tune
was
further immortalized in 1910 by Ralph Vaughan Williams in his
magnificent Fantasia on
a Theme by
Thomas Tallis, one of my all time favourites. In 1971
Texas
composer
Fisher Tull used this same tune as the basis of his Sketches
on a
Tudor Psalm. Psalm 98 is one of
the earliest metrical psalms I wrote and it is set here to the familiar
KINGSFOLD, which I arranged in 2003.
All
but one of these six metrical psalms could easily be matched to another
tune in common metre double (CMD) or long metre double (LMD).
However, given the plethora of CM and LM tunes and the relative paucity
of
CMD and LMD tunes, I decided to compose tunes in the latter metres to
diminish
the repetitiveness of multiple stanzas in the shorter forms.
Psalms 51
and 137 were published in Songs
of
Rejoicing: Hymns for Worship, Mediation & Praise
in 1989.
2. Eleven biblical canticles:
Two versions of the Decalogue, one from Strassbourg and one from
Geneva. My Strassbourg Decalogue was also published in
Songs of Rejoicing.
The Song of Hannah
appears in I
Samuel 2:1-10 and is ascribed to the mother of one of the greatest of
the earlier Israelite prophets, Samuel. She sings it in gratitude for
his birth after God has answered her prayer to end her barrenness.
Mary's Magnificat
is evidently based on this canticle. My own versification is set to GENEVAN
66/98/118.
The First Song of
the Servant of the Lord is a paraphrase of Isaiah
42:1,3b-7 and is set to a tune by
Orlando Gibbons, SONG 22. This passage was
quoted in
Mathew 12 by
Jesus, who applied it to himself.
The Song of the
Three Youths does not appear in the Hebrew canon,
but it is found in the Septuagint and later translations based on it,
where it is inserted in Daniel 3. This canticle was sung by Shadrach
(Hananiah), Meshach (Mishael) and Abednego (Azariah) in the fiery
furnace, where the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar had cast them after
they had refused to worship the idol he had erected. Though not
strictly regarded as canonical by Christians of the Reformation, it has
nevertheless found its way into the church's sung canticles, as found
in the Book of Common
Prayer
and the Lutheran liturgy. Both text and tune I wrote in June 2007. The
tune I titled BENEDICITE, after the Latin
name for the
canticle, Benedicite
Omnia Opera.
My versification
for the Song of Jonah
I wrote back in 1982, before I was acquainted with the tunes of the
Genevan Psalter. Accordingly it too is written in common metre double
(CMD). The tune is OLD 18TH
from the English Psalter of
1561, with a slight altering of the arrangement from the Scottish Psalter of
1929.
The Magnificat of the
Virgin Mary I wrote back in 1987, along with an original tune, which I
named SOUTH BEND. It is written in the
style of the
English anthem. In 2006 I composed a descant for the
last stanza. Among my liturgical compositions this is one of my
favourites.
The Benedictus of
Zechariah from Luke 1:68-79 is set to the tune AN
WASSERFLÜSSEN BABYLON, by Wolfgang Dachstein,
organist for
Martin Bucer in Strassbourg who contributed to the metrical psalter in
use in that city. The name of the tune indicates that it was originally
a setting for Psalm 137. This tune found its way to Geneva and
eventually into the Dutch churches that drew on this tradition.
The Nunc Dimittis of
Simeon from Luke 2:29-32, and the first version here is set to a tune
composed by Louis Bourgeois
in Geneva. The second is a CMD text set to
the tune BETHLEHEM.
The song No Condemnation is
a versification of Romans
8:1-2,9,11 which I was inspired to write when our pastor was preaching
through this pivotal chapter of Paul's epistle in 2009. The tune is
that of Psalm 110. The great reformer Martin Luther called Romans
the "most important piece in the New Testament. It is purest
Gospel. It is
well worth a Christian's while not only to memorize it word for word
but also to occupy himself with it daily, as though it were the daily
bread of the soul." Setting it to music will surely aid in our taking
Luther's advice.
The versification
of the Philippians hymn I wrote around 1984 and it
was subsequently published in the 1987 edition of the Psalter Hymnal of
the Christian
Reformed Church. I had chosen Orlando Gibbons' SONG 34
as the tune to which it should be set, but I was overruled by the
committee, which chose Joseph P. Holbrook's rather pedestrian tune, BISHOP,
instead. More
recently this song was republished in Singing the New Testament
and Hymns for Worship
(Grand Rapids: Calvin Insitute of Christian Worship and Faith Alive
Christian Resources, 2008 and 2010 respectively), where it was matched
with Sir Charles
Hubert Parry's JERUSALEM,
to which, in my humble opinion, it is even less suited.
However, when the Mennonites republished my text in 1992, they did
indeed use the Gibbons tune, to my delight. Needless
to say, I here use SONG 34,
which, incidentally, was believed by the late pianist Glenn Gould to be
the
finest piece of music ever written.
My versification
of the Colossians hymn
I wrote in 1992 and sang with guitar accompaniment along with my sister
at a church event near Boston that summer. I chose another Gibbons
tune, SONG 1, for this text. It has thus
far not been
published in any hymnal, but it is meant as a complement to the
Philippians hymn.
3. Four extrabiblical hymns:
my Credo in Septuple
Metre is
a metrical version of the Apostles' Creed, set to a tune, LUSIGNAN,
which I composed in 2001. It is written with a 7/8 time signature,
unusual in western music but common in Greek music. It is named for the
Frankish dynasty that ruled my ancestral island of Cyprus in the late
middle ages. Much as a western royal house was ruling an eastern
people, so my tune combines a thoroughly western tonality with an
eastern rhythm. The basic tune started out many years ago as little
more than a finger exercise for guitar, but I expanded it and
committed it to "paper" at the beginning of the new century.
The Te
Deum is an ancient
creedal hymn reputedly composed by Nicetas of Remesiana (4th-5th
century),
though popularly attributed to Sts. Ambrose and Augustine. The
first
three stanzas are an adaptation from Nahum Tate and Nicholas Brady's
New
Version Psalter of 1698, while the final three stanzas are my own
versification.
The first tune to which it is set, OLD
22ND, is
from
the Anglo-Genevan Psalter, while FOREST
GREEN
is a
familiar English tune found in most hymnals. My own harmonization of
the latter dates from 2003.
I Belong is a
versified
paraphrase of Question and Answer 1 of the Heidelberg
Catechism, easily the jewel of the sixteenth-century
Reformation
confessions. It was originally written in the mid-1980s to be sung to
Jean Sibelius' beloved FINLANDIA,
and I actually sang it to this tune as a solo at the South Bend
Christian Reformed Church. However, in 2001 I composed another
tune, which I named simply HEIDELBERG,
along with
appropriate harmonization.
A Hymn for Pentecost
is an entirely original text
that I wrote back in 1985. Having recently heard a recording of Ralph
Vaughan Williams' Fantasia
on the
Old 104th Psalm Tune, I decided to use Thomas
Ravenscroft's tune
for Psalm 104, as found in his Whole Book of Psalms,
published
in 1621. The choice of tune was influenced by the ancient tradition
appointing Psalm 104 to be sung on the feast of Pentecost. The key
to this tradition is verse 30: "When you send forth your Spirit, they
are created, and you renew the face of the ground."
Liturgical
use
of the Psalms
How ought the
Psalms to be used in the course of
worship? There are at least three possibilities: (1) according
to
a lectionary prescribing a psalm of the day; (2) according to the theme
of the scripture readings and the sermon based on them; and (3)
according
to the focus of a particular part of the liturgy, in which case more
than
one would be used in a single service. Lectionaries have an
ancient
lineage and are used even in Judaism where the reading of the weekly
Torah
portion leads the synagogue congregation through the five books of
Moses
in the course of a year. Most Christian lectionaries are
oriented
to the church calendar and the changing seasons from Advent to
Pentecost. Those Christians critical of the use of
lectionaries argue that they in
effect constitute a canon within the canon – that they unduly
limit the
amount
of Scripture we hear read in the course of the liturgy. Better
perhaps
is a lectio continua which would take a congregation through a single
book
over successive Sundays and cover most of both testaments in the course
of a pastoral term of service. Yet most protestant churches
follow
neither a prescribed lectionary nor a lectio continua but have embraced
the highly subjective approach of topical preaching. This
means
that,
far from avoiding the “canon within the canon,” the
congregation is
simply
exposed to their pastor’s own preferred internal
canon. To be
sure,
the traditional one-year lectionaries of the Roman Catholics, Orthodox,
Lutherans and Anglicans were deficient in that they included little if
any of the Old Testament and covered only a portion of the New. The
adoption
of the three-year lectionary by most of these churches (with the
exception
of the Orthodox) was meant precisely to expand and not to limit the
amount
of Scripture heard in the liturgy over the period covered. This would,
of course, include the Psalms.
| Our individualistic,
consumer-oriented
churches often seem to suffer from a lamentable inability to lament. |
The Reformed
churches have traditionally used the
Psalms, not as appointed by a lectionary, but as expressions of a
particular
focus in a specific part of the liturgy. Thus the congregation might
sing Psalm 95 or 150 as an opening psalm of praise where Roman
Catholics
or (more recently) Anglicans might sing the Gloria in Excelsis.
Its
members might similarly sing Psalm 32 or 51 as a confession
of
sin
where other Christians might sing the Kyrie eleison
or recite
the general
confession in the Book of Common Prayer. The Reformed churches in
Geneva sang Psalm 103 as a post-communion thanksgiving psalm, while the
churches in Zürich sang Psalm 113 at this place. By contrast,
Anglicans following an older version of their prayer book would sing
the Gloria in Excelsis here. The
disadvantage of this approach
is that,
just as the Gloria, Sanctus, Agnus
Dei
and so
forth, became fixed elements
of the liturgy in the western church, so have Reformed congregations
tended
to alternate among a very few Psalms from one Sunday to the
next. If Psalm 51 suffices as a general confession of sin, why
sing a
different
penitential psalm next week? The net result is that few of the
Psalms
are actually sung over time.
Perhaps the best
alternative would bring together
these approaches, which need not be mutually exclusive but can indeed
complement
each other. Psalms can be used to reflect the changing seasons
of
the church calendar, the developing themes of a single book read
through
in course as part of a lectio continua, and to
reflect the
different moments
in the liturgy.
It is in the
interest of encouraging, among other
things, greater Christian unity, even in liturgical matters, that I am
offering the present collection to the churches. After all, we
do
have the Psalms in common, even if we do not share other elements of
our
liturgies. Since the Genevan tunes are eminently singable, I
hope
and pray that my own effort might, if only in a small way, promote a
widespread
love for singing the Psalms, both within and without the formal
liturgical
setting. “Let everything that breathes praise the
Lord!” (Psalm
150:6)
David
T. Koyzis, Season of Pentecost, 2001, updated 2007
__________________________
NOTES:
1.
Recent examples of interpreting the
Psalms
as the prayers of Christ can be found in Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Psalms:
the Prayer Book of the Bible (Minneapolis: Augsburg
Publishing
House,
1970), and Patrick Henry Reardon, Christ
in the Psalms (Ben Lomond, California: Conciliar Press,
2000).
2.
See “Characteristics of Hebrew Poetry,” in The
Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha: Expanded Edition
(New
York:
Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 1523-1529.
3.
See Waldo Selden Pratt, The Music of
the
Pilgrims: A Description of the Psalm-book brought to Plymouth in 1620
(New York: Russell & Russell, 1921).
4.
See Zoltán Haraszti, The Enigma of the
Bay Psalm Book (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956),
and The
Bay Psalm Book: A Facsimile Reprint of the First Edition of 1640
(Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1956).
5.
Hughes Oliphant Old, Worship That Is Reformed
According to Scripture (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1984), p.
53.
6.
The subtitle is misleading. The
Anglo-Genevan
Psalter, incorporating much of the Sternhold and Hopkins corpus, was
published
by the English protestant exiles on the continent during the reign of
Mary
Tudor (“Bloody Mary”). The Canadian
Reformed psalter thus
includes
only the Genevan and not the Anglo-Genevan Psalms.
7.
The daily office is a form of prayer growing out
of the canonical hours observed in the monasteries. These are
spaced
about three hours apart and, in the western tradition, include Matins,
Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers and Compline. Each of
these
offices consists of the following items more or less in order: opening
versicle (e.g., Psalm 51:15 or 70:1); followed by Psalm 95 (for Matins)
or another canticle; one or more additional psalms; readings from Old
Testament,
Epistles and Gospels; another canticle (e.g., the Te Deum, the
Benedictus
or Magnificat); the Kyrie; petitions; the Our Father; collects; and a
closing
doxology or benediction. The Book
of
Common Prayer's service of Morning Prayer combines Matins
and
Lauds, while Evening Prayer combines Vespers and Compline. An online
version of the daily office, along with the lectionary, can be found here
in PDF format.
8.
C. S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms
(New
York: Harcourt Brace & World, 1958), p. 25.
9.
Isaac Watts, Preface to Hymns and Spiritual Songs
(London: J. Humphreys, for John Lawrence, 1707), pp. iii-xiv.
10.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov,
trans. Constance Garnet (New York: The Modern Library, no date), p.
393.
11.
Malý Kancionál
(Kutná
Hora: Karel Šolc, 1900). The front cover of the
volume bears a
picture
of a chalice, the symbol of the Husite reformation.
12.
See, for example, The Psalter: Psalms and
Canticles
for Singing (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1993).
13.
The Grail, The Psalms: A New Translation
from
the Hebrew Arranged for Singing to the Psalmody of Joseph Gelineau
(Ramsey, New Jersey: Paulist Press, 1963).
