Restoring the rhythm of the Psalms

My monthly Christian Courier column is devoted to the Psalms once again: The Genevan Psalms: Restoring the rhythm of the Psalms. An excerpt:

Two months ago in this space I recounted the story behind my longstanding interest in the biblical Psalter and its liturgical use. In the mid 1980s I came across the Genevan Psalter, with which I had previously not had much contact. My childhood church sang largely from the 1912 Psalter, with a very few Genevan melodies included, such as the ubiquitous Psalm 134, renumbered OLD HUNDREDTH in the 1650 Scottish Psalter.

It wasn’t until age 30 that I discovered the riches of the Genevan Psalms. To my surprise, I found that I had already had a copy of them in Czech which I had acquired at an antiquarian bookshop in Prague a decade earlier. Published in 1900, during the last decades of Habsburg rule, it contains the versifications of Jiří Strejc, a member of the Unitas Fratrum, the heirs of the 15th-century Hussites.

I was quite taken with the Genevan tunes, whose metrical structures are much less regular than those of the psalters used in the English-speaking world. Their rhythms are occasionally syncopated in the style of Renaissance madrigals. Although generations of Dutch Reformed Christians became accustomed to singing them in agonizingly slow even notes, they were originally sung in the spirit of dance tunes, famously leading Queen Elizabeth I to deride them as “Genevan jigs.”

Read the entire article here.