Recovering the Practice of Communal Singing

This was published today in Comment, the daily publication of Cardus:

Just before the dawn of the recording industry, popular songs were sold to the North American public in a format requiring of customers more musical literacy. When Let Me Call You Sweetheart and Down by the Old Mill Stream were published in 1910, their popularity was judged by sales of sheet music, and not yet by the records that would come into their own during the interwar years. Yes, people would attend performances of these songs by local bands and choirs, but they were more likely to gather round the upright piano at home and sing them together. People had to make their own music rather than rely on others to make it for them. Obviously not everyone had professional-quality voices, but that didn't matter. Young and old alike sang their hearts out.

Although I was born well into the recording age, I grew up in a family that sang with gusto at the slightest provocation. We had two pianos in our house, and everyone played at least one musical instrument. We were raised on the old movie musicals by Rodgers and Hammerstein, Lerner and Loewe and, of course, Meredith Wilson, whose score for The Music Man harked back to that earlier era just before the outbreak of the Great War. In fact, so many times did we play The Music Man soundtrack that scratches eventually caused the record to skip. (If you were raised on CDs, ask your parents or grandparents what that means.) The notion of Julie Andrews breaking into song in the course of her day did not strike us as the least bit unusual.

Where did all this come from? Read more here.

July updates: youtube psalms

Here are four samples of psalm-singing worth posting.

I am constantly amazed and heartened that, after four decades of communism, the church not only survived in Hungary but appears to be thriving, with ordinary Hungarians continuing to sing the Psalms as they have for centuries. This is Psalm 25, sung, one assumes, according to the versification of the great Albert Szenczi Molnár:



In the meantime, Ernst Stolz is continuing his slow but steady journey through the Psalms. First, Psalm 26:



And then, Psalm 27 below, which I think is one of the finest recordings of a Genevan Psalm. It ends all too soon; I really wanted it to keep going. To begin with, the tune, in the mixolydian mode, is one of the more compelling of the Genevan melodies. Second, the combination of lute, recorder and strings nicely brings out the Renaissance flavour. Definitely worth repeated listenings.



Finally, this is not a Genevan Psalm, but this congregational singing by young and old of Psalm 45 is energetic and inspiring. I believe this group, the Providence Church of Pensacola, Florida, has some connection with the psalm-singing Reformed congregations of Moscow, Idaho.

Ernst Stolz: Psalm 25

A cappella Psalms

Here is another useful link for those with an interest in sung psalmody: The Psalms of David Sung A cappella. The website has been put together by one Connor S. Quigley, who has graciously permitted us to "Listen, Share & Download for Free." With pleasure!

URC Psalmody

The United Reformed Churches in North America (not to be confused with the vastly different United Reformed Church across the pond) began nearly two decades ago when a number of congregations broke with the Christian Reformed Church and formed their own denomination. Up until now these churches have been singing from the CRC's old blue Psalter Hymnal dating back to 1959 and 1976. But this book is long out of print, and continuing to sing from it is obviously not feasible over the long term. Accordingly the URC is planning a new Psalter Hymnal in co-operation with the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. Progress on this front can be tracked at URC Psalmody.

I myself grew up in the OPC, and we sang from the 1961 edition of the Trinity Hymnal, which was heavily based on the now century-old 1912 Psalter. Although it contained a large number of metrical psalms, it did not include the entirety of the biblical Psalter. By joining forces with the URC to produce a Psalter Hymnal, members of the OPC will now have access to all of the Psalms for the first time in 76 years, which is definitely a step in the right direction.

Stolz: Psalm 23 . . . encore une fois

June updates

Russell Stutler is a Christian residing in Japan who loves the biblical psalter and has posted Three ways to sing the Psalms. Included is a nice survey of published psalters appropriate for personal use, even on public transportation. I myself have taken to reading through the Psalms on my Kobo Touch eReader, which holds huge amounts of information in a small, easily portable unit. Perfect for the bus ride.

Sarah Noll has come up with a way to sing prose Psalms that closely resembles Gelineau Psalmody. Check out her efforts at Prose Psalm Singing (NKJV) to a steady tempo.

Those interested in hearing all 150 Psalms sung in Hebrew would do well to look at this website: Ashkenazi/Sefardim Torah Leining/Reading MP3 Audio, hosted by Daf Yomi Review. All 150 files can be downloaded for personal listening. If you don't understand Hebrew, perhaps it's time to learn.

Psalms on the chest organ

I had not heard of a chest organ before now, but here is a young man playing three Genevan Psalm tunes on this 17th-century instrument. The tunes are for Psalms 42, 134 and 65/72.

Stolz: Psalm 22

Ernst Stolz has rectified his apparent omission by recording and posting Psalm 22. Unlike his other recordings, this one features a baritone soloist singing the first stanza successively in French and German:

Stolz: Psalm 24

Stolz is picking up his pace a bit and has now recorded Psalm 24, whose tune is, of course, identical to that of Psalms 62, 95 and 111. He has already recorded Psalm 23 twice, but he looks to have skipped over Psalm 22.

Stolz' latest: Psalm 21

Ernst Stolz is recording the psalms in order, which brings him now to the 21st:

Psalm 1

I have just uploaded my performance of Psalm 1:

In defence of the Scottish Psalter: simplicity

Compared to the lively and irregular metres of the Genevan Psalter, the Scottish Psalter's ubiquitous common metre texts can seem monotonous in the extreme. However, the Rev David Silversides makes a legitimate point in defence of the latter in his piece on The Development of the Scottish Psalter:

It is a lovely biblical thought, is it not, that the Psalmody of the people of God should be such that as many as possible, even those of limited musical ability, can seek to join in? Yes, we should make our Psalmody as beautiful as possible, but without causing one of the saints of God to be left unable to attempt to sing because of its complexity. It should never become so elaborate that we end up with those who are musically skilled as the only ones who can really sing. At the Reformation, there was a deliberate reversal of Rome's practice of having the professional singers perform to a silent congregation. Our Reformers purposely sought to have the Psalms sung by the whole congregation of the people of God. John Calvin in Geneva resisted anything too complex in the singing of Psalms in order to ensure that the whole congregation could join in the praise of God.

Did the Scottish Psalter achieve this aim of simplicity? Well, let us ask the question: How many tunes do you need to know to be able to sing the whole Scottish Psalter through? The answer of course is one. It may not be desirable, but if you can manage one tune, you can sing every verse in the Book of Psalms from the Scottish Psalter. Where there is only one version of a particular Psalm, it is always in common metre (i.e. the number of syllables in the four lines respectively is 8:6:8:6). If there are two versions of a particular Psalm, one of them is always in common metre. This means that if you can remember the tune that our precentor used in singing Psalm 95 this evening, then you could sing every Psalm to that tune if you use the Scottish Psalter. Now that is simplicity if ever it existed.

Psalm 121

This is a soulful arrangement and performance of Psalm 121, a favourite of many believers down through the ages. I don't know who is performing it or who composed the lovely arrangement for winds and chorus, but it was uploaded to the Upquark2 channel.

Versifying the Psalms: a speed record?

This is from Imre Revesz, History of the Hungarian Reformed Church (Washington, DC: The Hungarian Reformed Federation of America, 1956):

The great name in connection with the versifying of the Psalms, an idea he learned abroad, is that of Albert Molnar Szenczi (pronounced "Sentsi"). He himself tells us that he completed the whole Psalter in Hungarian verse in less than a hundred days.

Not knowing the Hungarian language, I am not competent to judge the literary quality of Molnar's versifications. But even if it were in stilted or clumsy Hungarian, I question his claims to have completed these in so short a span of time. The Genevan Psalter itself took at least 23 years to complete, and it has taken me some 27 years to versify just over half of the Psalms in English. Could Molnar really have produced his metrical psalter in just over three months?

PR Psalm Choir: Psalm 134

During its recent concert, the Protestant Reformed Psalm Choir sang Psalm 134, using the text of their own Psalter as set to the arrangement by, well, yours truly.

Psalm 23

Here is the latest upload to my Byzantine Calvinist youtube channel:

Stolz: Psalm 20

Ernst Stolz is moving a little more slowly through the Psalms these days. Here is his performance of Psalm 20:

PR Psalm Choir: Psalm 46

Joshua Hoekstra has been posting videos of the recent concert by the Protestant Reformed Psalm Choir in Grandville, Michigan. Here the choir sings Psalm 46, according to the familiar version in the Scottish Psalter of 1650, as set to the tune Stroudwater:

The group will be releasing a CD of their performances later this year. We wish them God's blessings in this endeavour. The Protestant Reformed sing from the 1912 Psalter, whose centenary we observe this year.

Psalms for All Seasons

Ben Myers reviews the new collection, Psalms for All Seasons, published earlier this year by Brazos Press and Faith Alive Christian Resources. From Myers' review:

I sometimes worry that our hymnbooks – where you have a more or less arbitrary selection of songs, arranged by various doctrinal and liturgical themes – create the impression that worship is a matter of human choice. You choose your Sunday hymns as you might choose a dessert from the menu at a restaurant; and you choose them on the basis of thematic relevance (this week, let's sing about love; this week, let's sing about forgiveness), so that entire dimensions of human experience might never once enter into the singing of a congregation.

But with psalmody as an overarching structure, the congregation is invited to share in experiences that might seem quite remote from their own everyday concerns. That is why we find some of the psalms so offensive: we simply cannot conceive of such experiences, even though they are – manifestly – genuine human possibilities. Instead of criticising such psalms, we need to learn how to sing them.

Our own private griefs are, often enough, quite paltry: but we are invited to join in the gigantic earth-shaking laments of the psalms. Our own criteria for happiness are selfish and small: but we are allowed to share in the magnificent heaven-rending joys of the psalmist. Our own love for God is so feeble that we might even forget all about God for days at a time: but our hearts are torn wide open as we join our voices to the enormous lovesick longing of the psalmist's praise. We are safe, affluent, protected, untroubled by enemies or oppression: but we learn to join our voices to the psalmist's indignant cries for the catastrophic appearance of justice on the earth.

If your congregation sings only Hillsong choruses, then their emotional repertoire will be limited to about two different feelings (God-you-make-me-happy, and God-I'm-infatuated-with-you) – considerably less even than the emotional range of a normal adult person. It is why entire congregations sometimes seem strangely adolescent, or even infantile: they lack a proper emotional range, as well as a suitable adult vocabulary. But in the psalter one finds the entire range of human emotion and experience – a range that is vastly wider than the emotional capacity of any single human life.

Myers obviously echoes Calvin in his eloquent defence of psalm-singing. I've not yet seen Psalms for All Seasons, but I hope to do so soon.