Treasury of Psalms and Hymns, Revised

Along with the copy of Goudimel's arrangements of the Genevan Psalms, I received as well a copy of a new psalter and hymnal, Treasury of Psalms and Hymns, Revised, which has just been published by NoteWorthy Music Services. Michael Owens, who sent me this, is compiler and editor. Like Cantus Christi, which I reviewed two years ago, it is an encyclopaedic collection of liturgical music covering several centuries and incorporating a range of traditions. In fact, it is almost certainly the most extensive and impressive collection I have come across, boasting 1,133 songs! As you might imagine, this makes for an exceedingly heavy volume, one which someone my age or older might find difficult to hold while standing throughout the course of several stanzas.

It is virtually impossible to do justice to a collection of this size in a single review, but I will comment on a few elements that stand out for me. When I reviewed Cantus Christi two years ago, Owens posted a comment that addressed some of the issues I had raised. One of these was the conspicuous absence of the fine-quality 21st-century hymns of Keith Getty and Stuart Townend. Treasury rectifies this by including seven of their hymns. Charles Wesley has 23 hymns, while his brother John has four. Isaac Watts has a whopping 57 metrical psalms and hymns. Not only does Martin Luther himself have 20 hymns, but the larger German Lutheran tradition is well represented here. Nineteen of John Mason Neale's translations of the ancient Latin and Greek hymns appear in this collection. Owens himself contributed 30 songs to both the psalter and hymnal sections. The prolific Fanny Crosby has only three songs here, and the revivalist tradition as a whole is underrepresented—for good or for ill. (I admit to being less than an enthusiast for revival hymns.)

Not surprisingly, the Genevan Psalter is a source for 46 of the versifications in the Psalm section. Four of these, namely, Psalms 65 (201), 91 (277), 92 (280), and 96 (294), were the work of an obscure Upper Canadian political scientist. Here is one of them:

He provided an additional two Psalms, namely, 51 (157) and 137 (440), authoring both words and music for the former and the music only for the latter. These originally appeared in a collection published in 1989.

Perhaps I need not mention that a total of 38 Psalms and hymns are attributed to that prolific author "Anonymous." Others come from the less well-known Ailbe Psalter. Finally, one psalm is authored by Fr. Joseph Gelineau (1920-2008), whose chant tones are popular in Roman Catholic churches that use The Grail translation of the Psalms.

Owens' comment on my earlier review indicates that this volume is intended to serve the 24-year-old denomination known as the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC), of which there are more than 100 congregations in 11 countries.

I must return to the size of this collection, which is remarkably large. Most church congregations of which I am aware tend to return to the same songs and cycle through them in regular if unsystematic fashion. The church which part of our family is now attending sings through an unusually small number of hymns, of which the Getty/Townend corpus constitutes a disproportionate part. My assumption is that, among congregations that will be singing from Treasury, virtually all will use only a small proportion of the whole. Given the relative newness of the denomination, there is undoubtedly room for innovation in congregations in which an entrenched local tradition is absent and thus carries no weight. If, for example, the members of a congregation are unfamiliar with psalm-singing but as a whole are committed to singing the Psalms, then Treasury provides ample resources. But it remains to be seen how many they will actually sing.

Because of the size of Treasury, the index material that one would generally find in the back of a hymnal is published separately in a thin paper-bound volume of 71 pages.

On the Treasury website, I see that they intend to provide "Bulletin-ready PDFs of all selections, and many alternatives, on this website." For those who find the sheer weight of the hard-bound volume daunting, this will likely be welcome.