Genevan Psalter Project: A complete first draft

This week I completed something begun three and a half decades ago. I now have written metrical texts for all 150 Psalms set to their proper melodies in the 1562 Genevan Psalter. The work took thousands of hours to complete, most of which were scattered over the years from 1985 to this year, when a grant from the Reid Trust enabled me to accelerate my work and to complete a first draft over the past two months. A full introduction to the Genevan Psalter can be found here: THE GENEVAN PSALTER: INTRODUCTION and in the sidebar to the right. However, for this collection, which includes the tunes and texts only, I have written a far briefer introduction, which, in its current form, I post below:

This collection represents thirty-six years of work. I began setting the Psalms to verse to their proper Genevan melodies in 1985, one year before completing my PhD studies at the University of Notre Dame. Around 1999 I began to arrange many of the tunes as well, posting my work on a website hosted by Redeemer University College in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. After it was taken down upon my retirement, I reposted some, but not all, of the material on my blog . . . . In 2021 I was awarded a grant from the Stanford Reid Trust to continue my work with the Psalter, including upgrading my YouTube channel and writing new metrical texts. For now I have put aside the arrangements, including in this collection only the tunes and the versified texts.

In the Dutch language metrical Psalms are referred to as berijmde psalmen, or rhymed psalms. However, in my collection only the psalms set to the most familiar melodies are rhymed, and those that are do not necessarily follow the traditional rhyming schemes. Thus a disclaimer is in order. This is not poetry, and I make no claim to be a poet. Reading the texts below without their proper tunes will not always suggest that we have crossed the boundary between prose and verse. This is due largely to the unusual and irregular metres employed by the authors of the Genevan Psalter. Yet what initially appears to be prose definitely fits the Genevan tunes, as will be evident when we sing them.

In my work, I have diligently compared several English translations of the Bible on a verse-by-verse basis. Often I have been able to retain the Hebrew parallelism of the original texts, but sometimes I have had to combine two parallel lines into a single one, due primarily to the limits of the metrical pattern. Moreover, in reworking these texts I have sought, where possible, to ensure that the stresses in the texts match closely with those in the music, something which is not always the case in the traditional versifications, even in the original French and other languages. My hope and prayer are that this will make the Genevan Psalms more “user-friendly” and thus more likely to be used liturgically in English-speaking congregations, even outside their native Reformed tradition.

Of course, this collection will require further editing while I try to find a place to publish it.