Metrical psalter
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A metrical psalter is a kind of
Biblical basis
During the Protestant Reformation, a number of Bible texts were interpreted as requiring reforms in the music used in worship.[1] The Psalms were particularly commended for singing.[2] In particular, John Calvin said,
When we have looked thoroughly everywhere and searched high and low, we shall find no better songs nor more appropriate to the purpose than the Psalms of David which the Holy Spirit made and spoke through him[3]
Various Reformers interpreted certain scriptural texts as imposing strictures on
"Is any merry? let him sing psalms."
It is interesting to note that the word translated "sing psalms" in the
Another key reference is Colossians 3:16
"Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom, and as you sing psalms, hymns and spiritual songs with gratitude in your hearts to God."
The need was felt to have metrical vernacular versions of the Psalms and other Scripture texts, suitable to sing to metrical tunes and even popular song forms.
Following an interpretation of the
The psalters themselves
During the pre-reformation days, it was not customary for
The Genevan Psalter
One of the greatest metrical psalters produced during the Reformation, the
The texts of the French Psalter were brought together from two independent sources: the poet Clément Marot and the theologian Théodore de Bèze. Marot and Beza's psalms appeared in a number of different collections, published between 1533 and 1543; in the latter year Marot published Cinquante Pseaumes, a collection of 50 psalms rendered into French verse. The full psalter containing all 150 canonical Psalms, plus the Nunc Dimittis, appeared in 1562.
The French psalms were set to melodies that were harmonized and altered for congregational singing. Music for the
An example of the Huguenot Psalter is Psalm 134 (tune given above):
Vous, saints ministres du Seigneur,
Qui, dévoués à son honneur,
Veillez la nuit dans sa maison,
Présentez-lui votre oraison.[8]
The Dutch metrical psalter
A metrical psalter was also produced for the Calvinist
Metrical psalters in German
The Genevan Psalms were translated into German by Ambrosius Lobwasser (1515–1585) in 1573 "Psalter des königlichen Propheten Davids" and were sung a capella to Goudimel's harmonies for over two centuries. The Lobwasser psalms are still in use in the Amish congregations in North America, who took them with the Swiss Hymnbooks to the New World. The music edition of 1576 was reprinted in 2004, which was a result of the International Psalm Symposion in Emden. In 1798 the German pastor in Den Haag Matthias Jorissen gave out his: "Neue Bereimung der Psalmen" which replaced the old-fashioned psalm book for nearly 200 years. The present Hymnbook (1996) of the Evangelical-reformed Churches and the Old Reformed Churches of Germany contains the complete psalter with many psalms of Matthias Jorissen and other authors. It was an important decision of the synods to retain the psalms in the hymnbook with the Genevan tunes. The need and interest in the complete Jorissen- Psalter led to different new editions in 1931, 1951 and 2006. The last one was given out for singing of the people and not for scientific use only. Today, psalms make up a quarter (102) of the Protestant hymn book from 1998 in German Switzerland.
Another German psalter is the Becker Psalter.
Metrical psalters in English
Robert Crowley
The first complete English metrical psalter and the first to include musical notation was The Psalter of Dauid newely translated into Englysh metre in such sort that it maye the more decently, and wyth more delyte of the mynde, be reade and songe of al men. Printed in 1549, it was the work of Robert Crowley and was printed by him, Richard Grafton and/or Stephen Mierdman. Crowley's psalter is a rare example of two-color printing (red and black on the first four leaves) in this era, which makes it visually resemble medieval manuscript psalters. (Christopher Tye and Francis Seager later included musical notation in their psalters, and the Sternhold and Hopkins psalter eventually incorporated a basic tune with the Anglo-Genevan edition of 1556. John Day's The Whole Book of Psalmes (1562) contained sixty-five psalm tunes.) Crowley also included a calendar for calculating feast days as in the Book of Common Prayer, to which Crowley's psalter appears to be intended as a supplement.
The music provided in Crowley's psalter is similar to the Gregorian tones of the Latin
Crowley's lyrics are mainly based on
From Crowley's rendition of Psalm 24:
- The earth and al that it holdeth, do to the lorde belonge:
- The world and al that dwel therein as wel the olde as yonge.
- For it is he that aboue al the seas hath it founded:
- And that aboue the freshe waters hathe the same prepared.
For the sake of comparison, here is how the same text is rendered in contemporary English Bibles:
- The earth is the Lord's, and all that therein is: the compass of the world, and they that dwell therein.
- For he hath founded it upon the seas and prepared it upon the floods. ( Coverdale, 1535)
- The earth is Gods and all that therin is: the worlde, and they that dwell therein.
- For he hath laide the foundation of it vpon the seas: and he hath set it sure vpon the fluddes. ( Bishop's Bible, 1568)
- The earth is the Lordes, and all that therein is: the worlde and they that dwell therein.
- For he hath founded it vpon the seas: and established it vpon the floods. ( Geneva Bible, 1587)
- The earth is the LORD's, and the fulness thereof; the world and they that dwell therein.
- For he hath founded it upon the seas, and established it upon the floods. ( Authorised, 1611)
Sternhold and Hopkins ('Old Version')
Sternhold and Hopkins wrote almost all of their Psalms in the "common" or
- All people that on earth do dwell,
- sing to the Lord with cheerful voice:
- Him serve with fear, his praise forth tell,
- come ye before him and rejoice.
In 1621, Thomas Ravenscroft published an expanded edition of the Sternhold and Hopkins Psalter; Ravenscroft's edition added many more psalm tunes, some of which had been composed, since the original publication, by leading late Tudor and early Stuart English composers such as Thomas Morley, Thomas Tallis, John Dowland, and Thomas Tomkins. Another musical contributor to this volume was John Milton, the father of the poet of that name.
By any objective measure of circulation Sternhold and Hopkins's psalter was a success. As a separate volume, it was re-printed more than 200 times between 1550 and 1640; in addition, the psalms in this form were included in most editions of the Geneva Bible, and also in most versions of the Book of Common Prayer. They continued to be in regular use in some congregations until the late eighteenth century.
Literary opinion after the sixteenth century, on the other hand, was decidedly negative. In his 1781 History of English Poetry, British poet laureate Thomas Warton called the Sternhold and Hopkins psalter "obsolete and contemptible," "an absolute travesty," and "entirely destitute of elegance, spirit, and propriety." In 1819, Thomas Campbell condemned their "worst taste" and "flat and homely phrasing." In 1757, John Wesley described the verse of Sternhold and Hopkins as "scandalous doggerel".[9]
Sternhold and Hopkins render the beginning of the 24th Psalm in this way:
- The earth is all the Lord's, with all
- her store and furniture;
- Yea, his is all the work, and all
- that therein doth endure:
- For he hath fastly founded it
- above the seas to stand,
- And placed below the liquid floods,
- to flow beneath the land.
Tate and Brady ('New Version')
First published in 1696, the
The hymn Through all the changing scenes of life is the setting of Psalm 34 from the New Version, and As pants the hart for cooling streams is a setting of Psalm 42.[11]
Isaac Watts ('Imitated')
Isaac Watts produced a metrical psalter, in which he breaks out of the ballad metre in his 1719 The Psalms of David, Imitated in the Language of the New Testament, and Apply'd to the Christian State and Worship, which, as the title indicates, was intended as an interpretation rather than a strict translation of the psalms. As an example of what is meant by "Language of the New Testament", Psalm 35 ("A psalm of David") verses 13-14 ("But as for me, when they were sick, my clothing was sackcloth: I afflicted my soul with fasting.... I behaved myself as though it had been my friend or my brother") becomes: "Behold the love, the gen’rous love, That holy David shows... The spirit of the gospel reigns, And melts his pious heart."
His translation of Psalm 24 into long metre begins:
- This spacious earth is all the Lord's,
- And men, and worms, and beasts, and birds:
- He raised the building on the seas,
- And gave it for their dwelling-place.
Other versified psalms in English
During the period of the English Reformation, many other poets besides Sternhold and Hopkins wrote metrical versions of some of the psalms. The first was Sir Thomas Wyatt, who in around 1540 made verse versions of the six penitential Psalms. His version of Psalm 130, the famous De profundis clamavi, begins:
- From depth of sin and from a deep despair,
- From depth of death, from depth of heart's sorrow
- From this deep cave, of darkness deep repair,
- To thee have I called, O Lord, to be my borrow.
- Thou in my voice, O Lord, perceive and hear
- My heart, my hope, my plaint, my overthrow.
Sir Philip Sidney made verse versions of the first 43 psalms. After he died in 1586, his sister, Mary Sidney Herbert, the Countess of Pembroke, completed the translation of the final two-thirds of the psalter. Together they used a dazzling array of stanza forms and rhyme schemes—as many as 145 different forms for the 150 psalms. The Sidney Psalter was not published in its complete form until the twentieth century, but it was widely read in manuscript, and influenced such later poets as John Donne and George Herbert.
However, poetry remains a matter of private devotion unless given a musical setting for trained choirs or for congregational singing. Rather than iambic pentameter, in England and Scotland in the 16th and 17th centuries, the overwhelming preference in rural congregations was for iambic tetrameters (8s) and iambic trimeters (6s), ridiculed in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, in which Nick Bottom and the other "rude mechanicals" obsess over the need for a prologue "written in eight and sixe". The three meters then in use: Common Meter (8,6,8,6), Long Meter (8,8,8,8), and Short Meter (6,6,8,6) remain in widespread use in hymnals today.
Other English metrical psalters
Later writers attempted to repair the literary inadequacies of the Sternhold and Hopkins version. The Bay Psalm Book (1640), the first book published in the British colonies in America, was a new metrical psalter:
- The earth Jehovah’s is,
- and the fullness of it:
- the habitable world, and they
- that there upon do sit
- Because upon the seas,
- he hath it firmly laid:
- and it upon the water-floods
- most solidly hath stayed
In the 1640s, the English Parliamentarians Francis Rous and William Barton both authored their own metrical paraphrases. Their translations were scrutinised by the Westminster Assembly and heavily edited.[12] Rous's original version of Psalm 24 read:[13]
- The earth is Gods, and wholly his
- the fulnesse of it is:
- The world, and those that dwell therein
- he made, and they are his.
- For firmly he hath founded it
- above the sea to stand;
- And laid below the liquid flouds,
- to flow beneath the land.
After much alteration, a much-altered translation based on Rous's work was approved by the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland and published in 1650 as the Scottish Metrical Psalter, to be used throughout the Church of Scotland.[12] This showed some improvements, but ballad metre remained ubiquitous:
- The earth belongs unto the Lord,
- and all that it contains;
- The world that is inhabited,
- and all that there remains.
- For the foundations thereof
- he on the seas did lay,
- And he hath it established
- upon the floods to stay.
One of the most widely known hymns in Christian worship, "
But by the time better metrical psalms were made in English, the belief that every hymn sung in church had to be a Biblical translation had been repudiated by the Church of England.[citation needed] A flowering of English hymnody had occurred under writers such as Isaac Watts and Charles Wesley, but their hymns were freed from the stricture that each verse had to be a translation of a scriptural text. Attitudes towards the Biblical text itself had also changed, with closer emphasis being paid on its exact phrasing. This new regard for the letter of the Biblical text diminished the appeal of the psalters' previous versions; those who sang them no longer felt they were singing Scripture. The success of these newer hymns has largely displaced the belief that each hymn must be a direct translation of Scripture. Now, many hymnals contain Biblical references to the passages that inspired the authors, but few are direct translations of Scripture like the metrical psalters were.Metrical psalter in Gaelic
The
Modern-day metrical psalters
Many churches continue to use metrical psalters today. For example, the
The
The Melbourne Congregation of the Presbyterian Church of Eastern Australia produced The Complete Book of Psalms for Singing with Study Notes in 1991. Music in staff format is provided in a variety of meters, mostly to established tunes. The texts draw from the best of older versions but provide much new material.
The
The Canadian Reformed Churches have published and sing from Book of Praise, the Anglo-Genevan Psalter (1961, 1972, 1984, 2014), containing English versifications for all the Genevan tunes. In 2015 Premier Printing published New Genevan Psalter which consists of the 150 Psalms as found in the Book of Praise as well as the Ten Commandments and the Songs of Mary, Zechariah and Simeon.
Split-leaf psalters
A split-leaf psalter (sometimes known as a "
References
Citations
- ^ Sunshine, Glenn. "The Reformation and Music". BreakPoint. Retrieved 31 May 2023.
- ^ Peel, Warren. "A Brief History of Psalm Singing". gentle reformation. Retrieved 31 May 2023.
- ^ Calvin, John (1545). The Form of Church Prayers. Epistle to the Reader.
- ^ "Novum Testamentum Graece (NA 28)". Retrieved 31 May 2023.
- ^ "Why Psalms Only – Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland". www.fpchurch.org.uk. Retrieved 24 March 2021.
- ^ Erasmus, Desiderius. "Paraclesis, prefacing Novum Instrumentum omne". Retrieved 31 May 2023.
- ^ "Desiderius Erasmus". Retrieved 31 May 2023.
- ^ "Psaume 134. Vous, saints ministres du Seigneur". Psautier de Genève (1729) (in French).
- ^ Wesley, John (1827). The Works of the Rev. John Wesley. Vol. 10. New York: Harper. p. 233.
- ^ "Tate & Brady". Hymnology Archive. Retrieved 1 March 2021.
- ^ "The Psalms in metre" (PDF).
- ^ a b Lamport & Forrest 2019, p. 158.
- ^ Rous, Francis (March 2004). The Psalms of David set forth in English meeter set forth by Francis Rous... Retrieved 6 June 2020.
- ^ Petersen 2014, p. 327.
Sources
- David Daniell, The Bible in English: Its History and Influence (Yale, 2003) ISBN 0-300-09930-4
- Timothy Duguid, Metrical Psalmody in Print and Practice: English 'Singing Psalms' and Scottish 'Psalm Buiks', 1547-1640 (Ashgate, 2014), ISBN 9781409468929.
- Lamport, Mark A.; Forrest, Benjamin K. (2019). Hymns and Hymnody: Historical and Theological Introductions, Volume 2: From Catholic Europe to Protestant Europe. Wipf and Stock Publishers. ISBN 978-1-5326-5127-4. Retrieved 3 June 2020.
- Petersen, Randy (2014). Be Still, My Soul: The Inspiring Stories behind 175 of the Most-Loved Hymns. Tyndale House Publishers, Inc. ISBN 978-1-4143-8842-7. Retrieved 3 June 2020.
- Psaumes de la Réforme: Ensemble Charles Goudimel: Christine Morel, conductor. Music of Charles Goudimel, Jan Sweelinck. (Naxos, 1995; catalog no. 553025) (sound recording)
- Scottish Metrical Psalter (Eremitical, 2007) ISBN 0-9800817-0-X
External links
Psalter text & audio
- "Genevan Psalter Resource Center". Archived from the original on 13 April 2009. Retrieved 29 April 2020.
- "Metrical Psalters and Tunes to Sing Psalms". (Seven psalters in the English and Scottish traditions. Text and MIDI.)
Psalter text
- Rous, Francis (1643). "The Psalms of David set forth in English meeter set forth by Francis Rous..." quod.lib.umich.edu. University of Michigan. Retrieved 5 June 2020. (text only)
- "Scottish Psalter and Paraphrases: The Psalms of David in Metre according to the version approved by The Church of Scotland and appointed to be used in worship, 1650". (text only)
- "Seedbed Psalter". (A modern Psalter written by Timothy and Julie Tennent)
Psalter audio
- "Psalm Singing Online". (Recordings of seven Scottish Metrical Psalms 1650.)
- "The Cyber Hymnal". (Hymns derived from Psalms. PDF and MIDI.)
- "The Cyber Hymnal". (MIDI files arranged by meter)
- "The Psalms Sung". (700 recordings of psalm settings from The 1650 Scottish Psalter, Sing Psalms (2003) and a number of other psalters)
Psalter miscellanea
- "Preface to the Genevan Psalter, 1565"., John Calvin
- "Introduction to the Genevan Psalter". Archived from the original on 28 March 2010. Retrieved 14 August 2006., David T. Koyzis
- "The Reformers on Psalms and Hymns in Public Worship" (PDF).
- "The Genevan Psalter - Bibliography".
- "The Genevan Psalter - Annotated Discography".
- "The Origin of our Psalm Melodies". Archived from the original on 2 October 2018.
- The Book of Psalms for Singing. 1998. ISBN 9781884527005.
- Isaac Watts (2014). The Psalms of David Imitated in the Language of the New Testament And Applied to The Christian State and Worship.
- Duguid, T., Metrical Psalmody in Print and Practice: English 'Singing Psalms' and Scottish 'Psalm Buiks', 1547-1640 (Ashgate, 2014), ISBN 9781409468929.