Music Spotlight! (Jan. 23, 2022)

Psalm-Singing... New yet Ancient

by Hannah Cruse, Music Director & Organist

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You will notice this Sunday something rather unusual pasted in the middle of your bulletin... a Psalm refrain. Some of you may wonder why it's there.

"We never sing Psalms. Why are we singing them now?"

During the forthcoming Arts and Worship Sermon Series, we hope to bring at least two ideas to your attention--that witnessing art often reveals awe-inspiring, transformative beauties of our Great God, and that participating in the creation of art parallels the work of the Holy Spirit, mobilizing us as the Body of Christ.

Psalm-singing is one of the most obvious ways--from a historical and Biblical standpoint--to engage with our creative gifts. We will get to "practice" listening and responding to the Spirit with a new Psalm each Sunday during this series. Since the practice is all new to us, I'd like to spend the rest of this article laying a foundation. Everything has a reason and a purpose!

Though our congregation may only be singing the Psalms now, Christians have been singing them (in one capacity or another) always. The Jewish collection of hymns seems to continually edify and renew the Church in every age and place. As J. A. Lamb writes, "The Psalter witnesses to this solidarity of the Church. For where the worshippers join together in the psalmody of the Church, they are performing in a very real sense an Opus Dei, while they are at the same time proclaiming their unity even in diversity" [The Psalms in Christian Worship, p. 162].

The book of Psalms--roughly half of which may have been written by King David--was integral to congregational worship in the temple and synagogue. These songs helped communities together express praise, thanksgiving, lament, wisdom. A trained cantor may have presented the bulk of the verses in recitative fashion (sung in the rhythm of ordinary speech). However, all worshipers participated in the music-making somehow, either by singing responsorially, dancing, or playing instruments (strings, percussion, and wind instruments).

Though we have few documents mentioning music from the early Church, we know that followers of Christ drew upon the rich Jewish tradition of Psalm-singing. Some Apocryphal writings of the Apostolic Fathers demonstrate that Psalms were sung by early Christian communities. We know that Psalmody was sung in worship routinely by the time of St. Jerome, St. Ambrose, and St. Augustine. St. Chrysostom (347 - 407 AD, Antioch) said that "women and men and old men and youths" could all be one in the spirit through the melody of their psalms [p. 28].

The Western and Eastern Churches developed their own strains of Psalm-singing during the next handful of centuries. Admittedly, reducing such a period of history to one paragraph is brutally unfair, but we must for the sake of brevity. In the early Catholic mass, Psalms functioned both as a musical offering between Scripture readings and as accompaniment to liturgical actions later on in the service. Especially after Pope Gregory I (540 - 604 AD, Rome), Psalm texts were fitted to predetermined melodies. A melody would be based on one of 8 modes, or musical scale patterns. Each mode provided a unique sonority (think of it like color or mood), which could be employed by the song leader to interpret and illuminate Psalm texts. Essentially, Psalm-singing was codified throughout the Holy Roman Empire. The importance of this practice led to the establishment of schools, called scholae cantorum, for singers. As you can imagine, it became very difficult for lay people to join in the singing. They did not have access to written notation and would not have known how to read it anyway. Nor did they have opportunities to memorize all of the modal melodies or learn Latin. During the Renaissance, the compositional tactic called polyphony (layering of musical lines simultaneously) further complicated, obfuscated, and ultimately eliminated congregational singing.

The disappearance of congregational participation is a huge reason why theologians such as Martin Luther, Jean Calvin, and Ulrich Zwingli, called for church reform in the 16th century. Psalm-singing was one of the first congregational practices to make a come-back! Luther wrote, "I plan after the example of the prophets and ancient fathers of the Church to make German psalms for the people, that is to say, spiritual songs, so that the Word of God may dwell among the people by means of song also....such as the common people may understand, yet pure and skillfully handled" [p. 134]. Calvin encouraged two of the best artists of his day, poet Clement Marot and composer Louis Bourgeois, to develop a new Psalter with texts in the vernacular language and rhythmical, memorable melodies.

For reasons not totally clear, Psalm-singing fell out of popularity in the 18th and 19th centuries. Perhaps the heightened spiritualism of the Wesleyan movement and Great Awakening overshadowed, for a time, some ancient practices such as Psalm-singing. Also, Psalmody may have been overlooked in favor of the more romantic, sweeping, organ-led hymns of the Anglican Church in England.

In the mid-1900's, Catholic composer Joseph Gelineau (1920 - 2008) proposed a way of singing the psalms in translations close to the original Hebrew and yet simple and tuneful enough for congregations. Many composers from different denominations have followed in his footsteps by writing congregational Psalm settings in the time-honored "verse-refrain" format. Congregational song in general has exploded since the Second Vatican Council in the 1960's, when the Catholic church called for more ecumenicism (unity between churches). Today, you will hear Psalm-singing creatively arranged for both "traditional" as well as "contemporary" worship contexts across many cultures.

In our lifetimes, we have watched technologies develop and no doubt experienced the surreal feeling that we're all deeply connected yet so misaligned with each other. Perhaps it is this disjointed feeling that spurred a revival of Psalm-singing in modern times. This ancient, communal, embodied practice ties us to our history--but especially our siblings in Christ here and now--with a unified vision.

So Psalm-singing is not so weird and terrifying after all! Even though jumping into new things is scary, I encourage you to give it a shot this Sunday. Our choir member Doug will lead Psalm 33, singing the verses alone and bringing you and the congregation in for the repeated refrain, printed in the bulletin. This setting (written by Hal Hopson, born 1933), may be modern, but the form and practice are ancient. While we may not make Psalm-singing a permanent feature of worship, we can incorporate it into our repertoire of spiritual practices and open our hearts to its renewing power for the people of God.

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Examples...

Gregorian Psalm 1 Tone: