Singing the Reformation 2016

I've recently come across the website for the Church Service Society, an organization founded in 1865 to renew worship in the Church of Scotland. This is the description of the Society's work from the page titled, History and Purpose: 

The Society published Euchologion in 1867, the first corporately produced service book available to the Kirk since John Knox’s Book of Common Order, and which continued through eleven editions up to 1924, until the Church itself (the main Presbyterian denominations reunited in 1929) took on the responsibility. Since then there has been increasing provision of worship resources in the Scottish churches. It might seem as if the vision of the founders had been amply fulfilled.

Yet the sheer diversity of contemporary worship makes it as important now as in the 1860s to distinguish between the permanent and the transient, between the authentic and the artificial, between what is helpful and what is merely novel. The search is no longer for what is liturgically correct, as if there were some fixed way of worshipping that applied to all places and times. The current quest is for worship that is catholic and continually reforming, that is scriptural and topical – big enough to let our congregations glimpse eternal truths and mysteries, yet earthed in their experience and their resources. The Church Service Society contributes to that search – through meetings, study days, lectures and its journal, the Record.

The Society - at first Presbyterian but now ecumenical, with members both within and beyond Scotland - is a fellowship of members, ministers, elders, and church musicians who are all convinced that worship is the Church’s fundamental task and privilege and wish more fully to explore its possibilities. It celebrated its 150th anniversary in 2015.

In 2016 the Society recorded several metrical psalms with a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) of the United Kingdom. The results can be found here: Singing the Reformation 2016, with more detailed information found here: About Singing the Reformation 2016. The project is uniquely Scottish in that the metrical versifications are rendered in the Scots language, which some linguists consider a dialect of English but others a distinct language closely related to English. Here we find recordings of the Psalms along with pdf copies of the music and texts.

Here is the Scots version of the first verses of Psalm 103:

My saull gie laud untae the Loard, my spreit sall dae the same,
an' aw the secrets o' mine hairt praise ye hes hailly name.
Gie thanks tae Gode for aw hes gifts, schaw no' thy sell unkyne,
an' suffer no' hes benefits tae slip oot o' thy myne.

This is based on the original English text of Thomas Sternhold:

My soul, give praise unto the Lord, my spirit, do the same:
And all the secrets of my heart, praise ye his holy Name;
Praise thou the Lord, my soul, who hath to thee been very kind,
And suffer not his benefits to slip out of thy mind.

Take time to explore the collection posted here. It will interest both those with a heart for worshipping God and those with a love for linguistic variety.