Genevan Psalter project: interim report and what makes a strong melody

As I've written elsewhere, the Standford Reid Trust awarded me a grant to continue my decades-old Genevan Psalter project, with three principal aims:

1. to order recording equipment;
2. to record at least 15 of the Genevan Psalms to post on my YouTube channel; and
3. to versify at least 30 Psalm texts so they can be sung to their proper Genevan tunes.

With the COVID-induced lockdowns ending only recently, I have not yet had the opportunity to shop for the needed equipment. However, I am making rapid progress on fitting the Psalms to their Genevan tunes, and I actually expect to complete all 150 Psalms within the year, which I had not anticipated when I wrote my proposal. This is why I have not posted here in a few weeks. I have come up with a rather effective method for doing this, and at present I now have only 31 Psalms remaining to be versified. Psalms 1-56 now stand completed, although I will continue to edit the collection once it is finished before seeking publication.

Unfortunately, the method I am using has not enabled me to commit all of these tunes to memory. The fact that I have put on hold my efforts to arrange the tunes is one factor in this. But I have also discovered that not all of the Genevan melodies are uniformly strong, and some seem to ramble aimlessly at length.

What then makes for a strong melody? A google search has revealed a few elements which I summarize here:

1. A good melody keeps its range within an octave and a half.
2. A good melody uses repeating motives.
3. A good melody proceeds by steps and half steps with only occasional leaps.
4. A good melody comes to a climactic point, which is often the note with the highest pitch.
5. A good melody creates tension and then resolves it.

Most of the Genevan tunes follow these rules, but not all. Let us examine a few such tunes and use these criteria to assess them. I will start with the wonderful tune for Psalm 150, as arranged by Zoltán Kodály:

This may be the strongest tune in the entire collection, although there are many other strong tunes as well. Its range is precisely one octave. It uses repeating motives, as line 2 repeats line 1, and line 7 repeats line 6. The movement of the melody is largely stepwise, with leaps in lines 3, 4, 6, and 7. The metrical structure is 7 7 7 7 8 7 7 8. which is unusual but wonderfully singable. In my own versification, I've put two Alleluias in the lines with eight syllables. The climax comes early in line 3. Tension builds up throughout the tune, but I believe line 4 contains the major tension in the melody. It is in the ionian mode, which is equivalent to our major scale, ending, of course, on the tonic.

By contrast, here is the melody for Psalm 11:

The tune is quirky for several reasons. For one, it has seven lines, a number difficult to work with, as Hebrew parallelism generally requires an even number. Second, there are no repeating lines, which makes it difficult to memorize. Not every strong melody contains repeated lines, but the movement of the melody is often parallel in two or more lines, which is not the case here. In fact, it is difficult to discern a pattern in the movement of the melody. Finally, a song with too many independent lines sounds as if it is merely rambling, without a clear end in mind.

As I've been studying the tunes in the first third of the Psalter, I've discovered two that have easily imprinted themselves in my mind. One of these is Psalm 7.

There are no repeating lines as such, but the movement of the tune is similar from one line to the next, as we can easily hear in lines 1 and 2. This makes it easy to memorize.

The other is Psalm 35:

Once again, there are no repeating lines, although line 6 is obviously a response to line 5, sharing the first four notes with it. The tune has an even number of lines, and it moves in a clear direction. The tension is found primarily in lines 5, 6, and 7, and is resolved in line 8. The range is an octave plus one.

I will continue to keep readers informed of my progress in completing this project.