Psalm Singing and the Genevan Psalter

Good afternoon, and welcome to this event on psalm singing and the Genevan Psalter. My name is Kathy Smith, and I'm the interim director of the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship. And it's my pleasure to welcome you to today's event, the first event in a series we are doing this year on dwelling in the psalms. We're excited to be spending this year focusing on the psalms, a prominent theme in our work at the Institute since its beginning in 1997, founded by our former director, John Witvliet. And it's a beautiful initiative that emphasizes both our Reformed roots and our ecumenical audience. So welcome to the audience here present and the audience online. We're glad that you joined us. I'll just mention that our year of dwelling in the psalms includes a wide variety of resources that we are posting on our website at worship.calvin.edu, and we'll be adding to that throughout the rest of 2025 and into 2026. We're also sponsoring local and regional psalm festivals hosted by churches and educational institutions, and we already have over 110 festivals that are being planned between today and the end of 2026. So we're so excited about this wonderful response to a very important theme. And we have several events upcoming here at Calvin too. On November 9 and 10, Woodlawn Church's choir, directed by Chan Gyu Jang, and Calvin University's campus choir, directed by Mark Stover, will join together to present two psalm festivals on the theme “O Rest My Soul” in Woodlawn’s Sunday morning service on November 9, here in this space, and then repeated in Calvin's Monday morning chapel on November 10, also here and on live stream. And then on November 17, we have psalm writer Wendell Kimbrough coming. He will lead in Calvin’s chapel on the theme of “A Soundtrack for the Soul.” December 7, we'll have our traditional Lessons and Carols service with Calvin's choirs hosted by LaGrave Avenue Church in downtown Grand Rapids, and that will include psalm settings as well under the theme “From Generation to Generation” in honor of Calvin's 150th anniversary year. And finally, on February 5 and 6, we will host a major conference called Psalms 150 here at Calvin with an exciting lineup of speakers, artists, musicians, theologians, and preachers, all focusing on the psalms. This one-and-a-half-day conference will occur in place of the annual Symposium on Worship, which is taking an interlude this year. But we hope you will come for a rich experience of dwelling with psalms and dwelling with us in February. The Psalms 150 conference is another way that we are celebrating the 150th anniversary of Calvin University and Calvin Seminary. And now today, we have the pleasure of learning about psalm singing and the Geneva Psalter. There is a program. If you don't have one, raise your hand, and someone will bring that to you. We're eager to learn from and with Dr. Karin Maag, who is the director of the H. Henry Meeter Center for Calvin Studies here at Calvin University. Dr. Maag is an expert on Calvin and on the Genevan psalms. She's a very popular teacher and international speaker on these topics and also a very fine musician herself who has gathered a group of fine musicians to help us sing today. So we're very much looking forward to learning from you today and singing together. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Maag.  

Well, I'm delighted to be speaking to you today on psalm singing and the Genevan Psalter at the invitation of the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship, and I very much appreciate the invitation to speak. I also want to dedicate this presentation in memory of Howard Slenk. Howard Slenk was emeritus professor of music at Calvin University. He was a noted choir director and organist, and a long-time passionate fan of the Genevan psalms. And I'm so glad that his wife, Marilyn, and his sister can be here with us today. When I was asked to prepare this presentation, I noted that I would be willing to do so, but I said also that I wanted to make sure that the presentation would include singing, so we are going to do psalm singing over the course of the next hour. You want to make sure you have one of these red hymnals to hand. If you don't already have one, look under the seat in front of you; see if you find one. You are going need it. I will announce things as we go, so it won't be a surprise. You'll know what you have to do. Our singing today will be accompanied by Chan Gyu Jang, who is a staff member at the Institute of Christian Worship. Thank you, Chan. I'm also joined by a small group of friends. Thank you to Kai Ton Chau, Jody McLean, Yudha Thianto, Frans van Leire, and Kate van Liere. This small group will sing in part on some of the verses, and I will give you a heads-up so you know what's supposed to happen and when you're supposed to sing and when you're supposed to listen. So we will start out with singing. I'd like you to turn in your red books to number 498. 498 should say “Our Help Is in the Name of God the Lord.” This psalm is actually a setting of Psalm 124. This psalm speaks of God's faithful care for his people even in times of calamity. The Genevans sang this psalm regularly during the Reformation period, including especially in December 1602, when they survived an attack by their archenemy, the Catholic Duke of Savoy, who tried to attack their city by night. The Genevans repelled the attack, and the next day being a Sunday, they went to church and they sang this psalm. They sang Psalm 124, giving thanks to God for their deliverance. So here are the instructions. We will all sing verse 1. The small group will sing verse 2 all by themselves. And everyone joins together in verse 3. Please rise in body or in spirit to sing number 498.

Our help is in the name of God the LORD; the one who made the heavens with a word; Creator of the world, each living thing. Come, bless the LORD, lift up your hearts and sing: “Our help is in the name of God the LORD.” When evil seems to have the upper hand, call on God’s name: the LORD, the great “I AM.” When troubles rise and all around gives way, remember God stays with us night and day. Our help is in the name of God the LORD. Praise God the LORD who hears the captives’ prayer; like birds escaping from the fowler’s snare, we are set free; our praises now ascend: “Blessed be the LORD: Creator, Savior, Friend. Our help is in the name of God the LORD.

Thank you. Wonderful singing. Thank you so much. In December 1551, in a move calculated to send chills down the spine of any church musicians here today, the Geneva government put their chief psalms composer, a man named Louis Bourgeois, in prison. What had he done to deserve being thrown into jail? Had he perhaps been fighting, or disorderly, or disturbing the peace? No, his offense, as reported in the minutes of the Genevan magistrates, was as follows: “We discussed the changes in the melody of some of the printed psalms of David—changes that confuse those who have already learned the original melody. It is decided that since the said Bourgeois changed the melody without permission, he should be put in jail, and from now on, we should only sing the melodies as originally set.” Even when John Calvin himself appeared before the council that same day to plead for Bourgeois's release, pointing out that Bourgeois had only been correcting printer’s errors and restoring the tunes as the composer had originally intended, the council remained adamant. Only the “old melodies” were to be sung. So Louis Bourgeois remained in jail, albeit only overnight, for implementing changes in the 1551 edition of the Genevan Psalter because, in the space of just over a decade, Genevans had become so wedded to their psalm tunes that any alteration to these same melodies caused a furor. In my presentation this afternoon, I want to consider with you just how the Genevan Psalter came to have such a significant impact, both in Geneva and then throughout Reformed Europe and North America. What were the aims of those who had a major hand in putting the Genevan Psalter together? How were the Geneva psalms received? Based on eyewitness accounts, contemporary documents, and later research, this presentation will shed light on one of the most fascinating, carefully organized attempts to provide a rich and attractive repertoire of scriptural congregational song. And yes, we will be singing more Genevan psalms together as we go. First, some important background: Although John Calvin is the person most closely associated with the Genevan Psalter, the idea of singing texts of the psalms set to poetic meter did not originate with him. In fact, he learned of the practice during his time in the Swiss city of Basel in 1536 and especially in the German city of Strasbourg from 1538 to 1541. In Strasbourg, German-language congregations were already singing versified versions of the psalms in their mother tongue. Now, Calvin came to Strasbourg as an exile and served as a pastor to a congregation of French refugees in the city. He adapted and adopted the practice of psalm singing for the use of his own congregation. In 1539, he published a set of nineteen versified psalms in French, thirteen texts by the renowned French poet Clément Marot, and six by Calvin himself, all set to melodies used by the German-language congregations. Unfortunately, this first effort did not work out too well. Calvin’s own versifications were rather awkward—not to say plunky. They did not survive into later editions. And, second problem, the German melodies did not fit the French texts, largely because there’s a difference in syllabic stress between the two languages. So after his return to Geneva, Calvin tried again. He oversaw a gradual expansion of the Psalter from thirty-five psalms plus the Lord’s Prayer, the Apostles’ Creed, the Song of Simeon, and the Ten Commandments, all set to music, in 1542, to eighty-three psalms plus the Ten Commandments and the Song of Simeon in 1551. Here’s a couple of these title pages from these works. The complete Psalter appeared in 1562, offering 125 melodies for 150 texts, along with the musical settings of the Song of Simeon and the Ten Commandments. Once the complete Psalter was available, a consortium of printers and publishers worked together to get the book out. The 1562 Genevan edition alone came out in 30,000 copies—an astounding number, considering that a standard print run was 500 to 1,000 copies. Along the way, the team preparing the Psalter included not only Clément Marot, but also Theodore Beza. They were both versifiers of the psalms. On the musical side, Guillaume Franc, Louis Bourgeois, and a certain Master Pierre were adapters and composers of the melodies. The melodies themselves came from a wide range of sources, including simplified Gregorian chants and earlier Catholic hymns. The key point here is that the creation of the Genevan Psalter was not a one-time project. It only appeared in its entirety after a long process of development over many decades. The aims of the team producing the Psalter in its various iterations for congregational use were explained in the prefaces included in the separate subsequent editions. Calvin laid out his intentions regarding the use of music in worship in his detailed preface for the Psalter, first published in the 1543 edition and included in every subsequent sixteenth-century edition of the Genevan Psalter. Here, Calvin noted the powerful impact of music on the human heart and soul: "Music is either the primary or one of the most important ways to provide human recreation and pleasure, and we should just thus consider it as a gift of God for this purpose. In fact, we have experienced music’s secret and almost unbelievable power to move hearts in one way or another.” Therefore, Calvin felt that music had to be regulated so as not to lead people astray toward immorality. He called for songs that were not only good, but holy, drawing people “to praise God, meditate on his works, so as to love, fear, honor, and glorify him.” Calvin continued, “Therefore, after thoroughly searching everywhere, we will find no better songs nor more appropriate ones than the psalms of David.” Calvin thus laid out his theological vision for music used in corporate worship, but also at home and at work. The words had to be from scripture, and the melody was to reflect the text’s weight and majesty. For his part, Theodore Beza articulated his aims for the Genevan Psalter in a lengthy poem published as a preface to the work beginning in 1551. He highlighted the vital importance of psalm singing for persecuted Protestants, including prisoners and those facing death for their faith. He noted the psalms’ deep significance for those who were suffering or living in fear. Finally, he urged all would-be poets to turn away from their standard repertoire of lost loves and jealousy toward holy poetry and divine truth. Beza therefore enriched Calvin’s largely theological and metaphysical approach with a focus on the spiritual impact of these psalm texts on their audience. So we can learn about the theology and spiritual impact of the Genevan Psalter by considering Calvin’s and Beza’s prefaces. However, the most important and interesting notice included in a Genevan Psalter that brings to life the practice of psalm singing in Geneva takes us back to that unfortunate composer Louis Bourgeois, last seen in jail. If you think about it for a moment, the entire story of the city council imprisoning Bourgeois because he made changes to some of the psalm tunes seems distinctly odd. How exactly would the council have known? Had they made a line-by-line comparison of the new edition and the older one to find the changes? It seems unlikely that busy city councilors would have found the time to do such close reading. Or had some particularly musically minded congregational member noted the differences and made a formal complaint? In fact, the only reason the council knew about the changes was because Bourgeois told them about it himself in the notice he included at the end of the 1551 Psalter. He blew the story on himself. Bourgeois’s notice is fascinating at many levels. It is also very rare since the city council ordered that the said notice be removed from the 1551 edition and any subsequent ones. Rutgers University Library appears to hold the sole surviving copy of the 1551 Psalter with Bourgeois’s notice included. Bourgeois left aside any reflections on the theology or spiritual impact of the Psalter. His main interest, as for many church musicians today, was in getting the congregation to sing—and sing well, if at all possible. Before delving further into Bourgeois’s notice, however, let us examine how psalm singing was actually done in Reformation Genevan worship. The first important point to note is that all singing in corporate worship in Reformation Geneva was done unaccompanied and in unison. The organs in Geneva’s three main churches—the organs that predated the Reformation—they had been left to decay after the Reformation. And the organ pipes at St. Pierre, Geneva’s main church, ended up being melted down in 1562 and turned into plates and dishes for the city’s charitable hospital. Although Calvin did note the importance of harps and lyres in the psalms, he felt that these indications of instrumental accompaniment were part of the old dispensation and not meant for the current-day church. I’ve always been personally rather disappointed about that. For instance, in Psalm 71:22, the psalmist says, “I will also praise thee with the harp for thy faithfulness, O my God. I will sing praise to thee with a lyre, O holy one of Israel.” Calvin’s commentary on the same verse reads as follows: “To sing the praise of God upon the harp and psaltery unquestionably formed a part of the training of the law and of the service of God under that dispensation of shadows and figures, but they are not now to be used in public thanksgiving. We are not, indeed, forbidden to use in private musical instruments, but are banished out of the churches by the plain command of the Holy Spirit, when Paul in 1 Corinthians 1:13 lays it down as an invariable rule that we must praise God and pray to him only in a known tongue.” Thus, Calvin rejected the use of instruments to accompany singing in church because, according to him, these detracted from the main goal of praising God with words understandable to all. So, first feature: Sing in unison and unaccompanied. The second main feature of psalm singing in the church in Reformation Geneva was that it was very organized. From 1549 onwards, editions of the Genevan Psalter included a chart to help congregation members know which psalm was to be sung at which service. Longer psalms, like Psalm 119, was divided up and sung over several days. Hence, the selection of psalms was done in advance, and it was the same in each of the Genevan churches, so it didn’t matter which congregation you were in, you were still singing the same psalm on that particular Sunday. The choice of psalm was not left to the pastor’s own preference. By 1562, the chart layout provided for singing the entire psalter over the course of twenty-five weeks—so, twice in a calendar year. Based on the charts, worship opened with the singing of a psalm, and then the congregation sang a psalm again before and after the sermon. At the quarterly celebrations of the Lord’s Supper, the practice shifted. Instead of a psalm after the sermon, the congregation was to sing the Ten Commandments, and the Song of Simeon was sung at the end of the prayer of thanksgiving following communion.  Now, outside of church, Genevans were encouraged to sing psalms at home. There, harmony singing, singing in parts, was allowed and even encouraged. Several composers, including Claude Goudimel, prepared four-part settings of the psalms. In a fascinating and very creative move, printers developed techniques to make these four-part psalters as accessible as possible, and I’m going to show you an example. It’s a little hard to see, but if you look carefully, you can see that the two pages are printed in two different directions. Can you see that? OK. So how this worked is—OK, there’s four people in your house, you all want to sing psalms together; you have a soprano, an alto, a tenor, and a bass. Right. Does that mean you need four books? That gets expensive. No, what they do is they print it such that you can hold one book out flat, and four people stand around the book, and each side sees their own part. Isn’t that cool? That’s such a smart idea: one book, four singers. Everybody gets to see what they need to sing. It’s great. These psalms in harmony could vary from very straightforward ones, where the melody is written out almost in chords, to quite complex polyphonic arrangements, which require a high degree of singing proficiency. So, given all this in-depth practice of psalm singing at church and at home, it seems clear that Genevan churchgoers would be bathed in the psalms and would have the words and melodies firmly lodged in their memories. And clearly, they had them pretty lodged in their memories to know that there was a problem when someone changed a tune. Yet the process of learning the psalms was not straightforward. In order to teach people the music, at the start of the Reformation Geneva employed someone called, in French, un chantre, a voorzanger in Dutch, a precentor, a cantor, someone to lead the psalm singing. His task was twofold. First, he was to teach the psalms to Genevan children and then have them lead the singing in church. The first mention of someone serving in this capacity appears in the records in June of 1542, when Guillaume Franc asked for and received payment from the city for “teaching the children to sing the psalms of David in church.” By 1543, Franc was receiving an annual salary from the city for this work. By July of 1545, Franc had left Geneva and was replaced by two men, Guillaume Fabry and our dear friend Louis Bourgeois. The two men were assigned to separate churches: Fabry at Saint-Gervais, and Bourgeois at Geneva’s main church at Saint-Pierre. This strategy, however, did not last long, as a month later the city council noted that the children under Fabry’s direction faltered and stopped singing the psalms in the middle of the evening worship service. Either they got stage fright, or they forgot what they were supposed to do. Who knows? The council ordered that Fabry’s capacity be assessed, and in the end he was dismissed. Bourgeois then took over the entire responsibilities of chantre for the whole city in December of that year. Over time, as the psalms repertoire became more familiar, congregations no longer needed the children to help lead the singing at each service. Instead, by 1556, the chantre, this precentor, were hired for each of the three churches to lead off the singing and keep the tempo. In Saint-Pierre, the chantre had an assigned seat in a central location: right under the pulpit. Schoolchildren continued to have regular practice in psalm singing. The Genevan Academy’s curriculum included an hour of psalms singing a day for the children. Therefore, although they were no longer officially leading the singing from the front of the church, the schoolchildren formed a corps of well-versed psalm singers to encourage other congregational members. And the idea was, of course, that as successive groups of children grew up having learned the psalms in school, the entire congregation would become more familiar with the psalms and more confident in their singing. So now we are going to try some more psalm singing ourselves. I’m going to show you first some slides. This is Psalm 47 in French, from the 1551 Genevan Psalter. And then here is the English version of it from the 1635 Scottish Psalter—same psalm, but a different . . .  So whether you’re looking at in French or in English, you should be able to notice the following: There’s one note per word or one note per syllable, right? The mixture is long notes and short notes. So they don’t do anything where you sing one syllable over several notes, like the “Hallelujah Chorus” or something like that. The notes don’t go too high, and they don’t go too low. Everything is kept in the general range of congregational singing to make it easy to use. The aim was to provide a melody that was accessible to the bulk of the congregation. And if you look at the English version, it’s really interesting. So you have at the top of the left, those are the parts for singing at home, right? If you sang at home, you have the contra, treble, and bass, so the alto, soprano, and bass. The melody of the psalms is always in the tenor line, which was actually also true for Gregorian chants. The melody is always in the tenor. If you’ve ever done any shape note singing, the North American practice, again, the melody’s in the tenor line, and all the other parts sort of circle around that. The other interesting thing about this English version is you can see that in the margin there’s actually the text of Psalm 47 from scripture. The idea was that you could compare the versified version, the metrical version, with the actual text of scripture and make sure it was faithful to scripture itself. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to sing Psalm 47 in French, just the first verse, just so you can hear what it will sound like. But why don’t you turn to number 216 in your red hymnals, and we’ll stay seated for this one, so you don’t need to move. Go ahead and grab 216. And my friends all come up here as well, and I will sing just the French verse by myself, and then we’re going to do the English, and we’ll do the same pattern where everybody sings verse one, the small group sings verse two, and then we go to verse three. So, first verse, I will sing in French.  

Or sus, tous humains, 
Frappez en vos mains, 
Qu’on oye sonner, 
Qu’on oye entonner 
Le nom solennel 
de Dieu Éternel. 
C’est le Dieu très-haut 
Que craindre il nous faut, 
Le grand Roy qui fait 
Sentir en effect 
Sa force au travers 
De tout l’univers. 

Karin Maag 00:33:38 And now all of us in English.  

Nations, clap your hands; shout with joy, you lands. 

Awesome is the LORD; spread his fame abroad. 

He rules every land with a mighty hand. 

God brings nations low; he subdues each foe. 

From his mighty throne God protects his own. 

Our inheritance is our sure defense. 

God goes up on high with a joyful cry, with a mighty shout; people, sing it out!  

Let your voices bring praises to our King. 

Praise him with a song; praise with heart and tongue; 

praise with every skill; praise with mind and will. 

God rules all the earth; magnify his worth. 

God reigns over all rulers great and small.  

Leaders of the world, servants of the LORD, rally round his throne; he is God alone. 

Sing before him now, in his presence bow. 

God of Abraham! God of every land! 

Worship and adore God forevermore. 

Thank you. Now that one was perhaps a bit less familiar to us, but it’s clear that you can see how the Genevans would have to practice this in order to become familiar with these tunes and how it actually worked. This experience of psalm singing brings us back to Louis Bourgeois’s notice printed in the 1551 Psalter. In that text, he gave instructions for how to sing the psalms well, complaining in particular about poor singing. He started by underscoring “the dissonance that too often occurs during the singing of the psalms because of those who understand nothing in music and who nevertheless want to be heard above all the others.” Clearly, one of the problems encountered in congregational singing was the dreaded would-be soloist who made up for in volume what he or she lacked in skills. Later in the same text, Bourgeois provided further insights into the realities of congregational song: “Wherefore, let each take note, and let the ignorant in music lend their ears to those who do understand it. That is to say, that in singing they do not presume to force and elevate their voices as high as they might like, and that in simplicity of song, and without dragging, as they are in the habit of doing, they imitate them in order that all may be well ordered in the church of God.” In other words, some Genevans sang way too loud, some strained at the high notes, some ornamented the melody, and some of them slowed down the singing. Bourgeois went on to provide fairly stringent recommendations for those for whom psalm singing was new. “Let no one who is not confident in doing this well take it upon himself to sing, and may those who know nothing be content to listen to the others and learn in silence until they can sing in tune with those who do sing well.”  I sometimes feel that music leaders would like to say this more generally, but don’t. Bourgeois had no problem saying this to the whole group. It’s not maybe surprising that the council was upset with him. In fact, this injunction not to sing unless people knew what they were doing was, in fact, part of the reason that led the city council to decree that Bourgeois’s notice should be removed from all future printing of the 1551 Psalter. The council pointed out that these instructions went against the city’s own ordinances calling for everyone in the congregation to join in the psalms in worship. Making distinctions between those who knew what they were doing and should sing, and those who had no idea and should keep silent, went against a strong aim to have everybody in the congregation sing. Other testimonies from the period show how hard it was to get the congregation to sing, much less sing well. Charles Perrault, a pastor in the Genevan countryside, left a memoir for his successor in 1567, detailing his experiences in ministry and offering advice to the next incumbent. Regarding psalm singing and worship, he wrote, “I decided I would not sing at those services where there wasn’t another man present to help in the singing. But I did sing with another man, even if there were no women or girls to join in. Some people know the psalms very imperfectly, or can just about repeat after the others, which usually only means Pierre Chapuzzi, Godemar, Jean from Monet’s house, the Defosse woman, and the Gervais women’s daughter, together with anyone who happens to have come out from Geneva. Perrault’s testimony suggests that few people were confident psalm singers in his rural congregation, and Perrault clearly did not see himself in the role of cantor. Thus, twenty-five years after Calvin introduced psalms singing to the Genevan church, congregations in the Genevan countryside were still struggling to adopt this practice. 

Yet in spite of these difficulties, the practice of psalm singing rapidly spread from Geneva and the French-speaking areas of the Swiss lands to the rest of Europe. The easiest and quickest adoption of the Geneva Psalter was in France, where there were no language barriers in the way of transmission. Indeed, singing the metrical psalms became a hallmark of French Protestants, even before Reformed congregations were set up in France. Already in 1551, Jean Gérard’s Chronicle of Events in Lyon describes how gatherings of three or four hundred people, both men and women, sing together, old and young, the psalms of David translated by Clément Marot. The French Catholic authorities tried to prohibit such gatherings and prevent the singing of Genevan psalms in public, but to little avail. Marot’s psalm paraphrases set to music were popular, even in the highly Catholic world of the French royal court. In other countries, the adoption of the Genevan Psalter and metrical psalm singing was rather more complicated because of the need to versify the psalms in the native language of each place. In the Netherlands, there was Pieter Dathenus and Philips of Marnix, who each produced metrical versions of the psalms in Dutch using Geneva melodies. Dathenus’s version, published in 1566, won out. Synods in 1568 and 1578 instructed congregations to use the Dathenus psalter. The fact that Dathenus was chairing these very synod meetings may also have played a factor in this decision. By the time of the Synod of Dort in 1618-1619, the synod delegates decided that congregations were to use only Dathenus’s psalter in worship. Marnix’s edition of the psalter in Dutch had appeared in 1580. Although people at the time and later on agreed that Marnix’s versifications were better fitted to the melodies and more faithful to the Hebrew original than Dathenus’s, Marnix’s psalter did not take over. Part of the reason for this decision was a practical one. Changing texts once congregations had bought copies of the Dathenus’s psalter would be expensive and difficult. By the time of the Synod of Dort in 1618, fifty years had passed since Dathenus’s psalter was introduced to the Dutch Reformed Church. During the synod meeting, a pastor named Patroculys Roemeling provided a priceless assessment of the state of psalm singing in the early seventeenth century in the Netherlands. He noted that congregations struggled with the large number of different melodies in the psalter, that the melodies were too hard, and that congregational psalm singing was losing rhythm. In other words, church members started giving each note the same musical value, leading to increasingly slow and plodding singing. In another document written in the same period, Roemeling discussed at greater length the challenges associated with increasingly slow singing of the psalms. He noted that the pace made it difficult to sing entire songs. At most, two or three verses could be sung in the time available. He also pointed out that the slow pace actually made the words harder to understand, because people were stretching out the sounds and syllables. Hence, the Reformers’ aim of singing to foster understanding of scriptural text was being eroded. Across the board, Roemeling’s assessment of the state of psalm singing in the Dutch church was rather pessimistic, although he did make a number of suggestions to remedy the situation. He suggested that the organists—who didn’t play during the service, but played the preludes—that the organists should play faster, that that would encourage the congregation to sing faster. That was the first thing. He suggested the cantor should lead the psalms in a quicker way. And he also suggested that schoolchildren should learn the psalms at a quicker tempo, so that all this might help make the singing speed up again. Because when you sing unaccompanied, the tendency is always to slow down. Finally, he suggested that, to make life easier, the psalter should move from 129 different melodies down to just twenty-three, to make it easier for everyone to learn the psalms. 

The story of the spread of metrical psalms in Scotland highlights many of the same problems that affected the Dutch congregations at the time. The Dutch had learned the psalms from Geneva, and the Scots and the English did the same. The Scots and English exiles who lived in Geneva in the late 1550s learned of the practice of metrical psalm singing and began the practice of translating the psalms into English. There were really two tracks. The English in England sang the psalms of Thomas Sternhold and John Hopkins. They were the versifiers of the psalms into English in England. The Scots tended to include more Genevan melodies. They tended to keep closer to the Genevan Psalter. The English language setting of Psalm 47, for instance, that I showed you, in 1635, was the Genevan psalm set to an English-language text. However, with the devastation of wars in the seventeenth century and the pressures put on the Scottish church, the musical experience and skill level of congregations decreased in the seventeenth century such that by 1666, when the Scottish Psalter was published, once again with music, it only included twelve tunes, and all of them were in common meter, which was the practice from England. None of them were from Geneva. These twelve tunes rapidly became sacrosanct. And with a common meter, you can take any text and pair it to any tune. Everything matches. So the singing through the eighteenth century was really not that good. There was a very slow tempo, a superfluity of grace notes, and a lack of clear melody. At times, people couldn’t tell what they were singing. There’s a very famous story of a man arriving late for a service in Scotland, and he nudges his neighbor, and he says, “What psalm are we singing?” And he says the man said, “I have no idea what they're singing; I’m singing this particular tune.” So it didn’t matter in some way, so cacophony might be more the result. But we are going to try one, and we will not be a cacophony. I’d like you to turn to number 729 in the red hymnals. The words are “Let this be my supreme desire.” This is Psalm 26, and it’s set to one of these English common meter tunes. You will recognize the melody; it’s often sung to a Christmas carol. The small group will sing verses one and two in parts, and then everyone else will join in three and four.  

Let this be my supreme desire, my object and my prayer, 

until I stand before your throne to glorify you there: 

To lead a blameless life, O Lord, to trust you without fear, 

to bring my humble heart to you and know your love is near. 

To walk before you in the truth, to shun all evil ways, 

to come into your house to pray and shout aloud your praise: 

Let this be my supreme desire, my object and my prayer, 

until I stand before your throne and glorify you there! 

As you can tell, that is a much easier tune. It isn’t very complicated, and you can see how these could become very popular and very much enjoyed by people. The Genevans, however, had paired their text with their tunes, so when it was a psalm of lament, the Genevan melody was a psalm in a minor tone, and when it a psalm of praise, it was a psalm melody in a major tone. You lose that when you move to these common meter tunes that are all interchangeable with each other. So there was a loss there. 

The Scottish and Dutch congregations’ struggles with the Genevan psalm melodies were not unique. In fact, other Reformed communities also debated how best to sing the metrical psalms and in fact whether the Genevan melodies should even be used. This debate emerged most vehemently among the Hungarian Reformed in the early seventeenth century. Albert Molnár prepared a Hungarian translation of the Genevan Psalter, published in 1607. Molnár used both a French version and the German translation, prepared by Ambrosius Lobwasser in 1573. Critics then and now agree that Molnár’s rendering of the versified psalms into Magyar was brilliant. He retained the scriptural faithfulness and deep spirituality of the Genevan Psalter in spite of the huge challenges in putting the versification into Magyar and having them still fit the Genevan tunes. Yet not all Hungarians were happy with Molnár’s work. In particular, divisions emerged among those who favored his psalter and those who instead wanted to sing tunes set to Hungarian melodies. They go around saying, “We’re Hungarian. We’re not Genevan. Why can’t we sing Hungarian tunes?” They didn’t see why the practice of psalm singing required using Genevan tunes. In the end, the divide hardened between the two camps. Hungarian traditionalists supported using Hungarian tunes and felt that the reformation in Hungary had gone far enough. Those who supported singing the Genevan tunes and using Molnár’s settings also wanted to see further reformation in Hungary and bring it closer with Genevan practice, especially in worship. 

From Reformed communities in Europe, the metrical psalms traveled to North America with the pilgrims and the Puritans. Many of these had grown up with the Sternhold and Hopkins psalter in England and continued to favor its use, while others turned to the psalter prepared in the Netherlands by the English separatist exile Henry Ainsworth. Ainsworth attempted to make his English paraphrases closer to the Hebrew, and his version was favored by the pilgrims, but others found his texts hard to sing. Therefore, the Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony soon decided to work on a new translation of the psalter into English, closer to Hebrew than Sternhold and Hopkins, but simpler in style than Ainsworth’s text. The end result was the Bay Psalmbook, the first book to be written and printed in English in the English colonies in North America. The work appeared in 1640. Seventeen hundred copies were published, of which eleven are known to have survived to date, some complete and some missing a number of pages. The melodies that they used were those that had previously featured in the Sternhold and Hopkins psalters, so they’re often also set to common meter tunes. 

The practice of singing metrical psalms in the Reformed churches in early modern Europe and New England had clearly had wider ramifications. Those who sang the psalms to the Genevan tunes were in some ways declaring their allegiance to the Genevan model of Reformed worship. Psalm singing was a hallmark of the Reformed faith, whether in unison at church or in harmony at home. Reformed folks who traveled across Europe might not understand the language of worship in each church, but where Genevan psalm settings were used, they would feel at home as soon as the psalms started to be sung. In other instances, as I’ve shown, the psalms were sung to simpler tunes that became anchored in popular memories and even spread beyond Europe. Poets and composers lent their skills, enabling congregations of all kinds to join our voices in worship. To create a worship resource that has endured and that deserves to be both better known and more widely used today. Thank you. 

So now we will have a time for questions, and there is a microphone. So if people have questions, the microphone will come to you. And if you can’t get to the microphone, I'll repeat your question so that those who are watching online can actually hear. So questions, comments, things you’re wondering about, this is your chance to ask. I think George Monsma has a question. Let’s get you the microphone, George.  

Before my question, if I could just make a comment about the spread of psalm singing. When my wife and I served in Mali in West Africa, in the local church there, they used a French hymnbook, and we at times sang French Genevan psalms to Genevan tunes.   

Amazing. So, singing the psalms in Mali in West Africa. Amazing.  

My question is, as psalm singing spread in different lands, when did the practice of only singing in unison a cappella drop out? And I know it still exists to some extent today.  

Yes, so that’s a very good question. So there’s two questions here. When did it go from singing only in unison and a cappella? So, when churches started bringing organs back, first of all, for the prelude and the postlude, as they did in the Netherlands, and then those who did have a fairly strong musical sense realized that the best way to keep the tempo of the music going is to have an instrument. And then as soon as you bring in an instrument which doesn’t just play one note, but can play chords or different parts, then part singing becomes more popular. So singing in parts or bringing parts into congregational singing is often correlated with also bringing instruments back into worship. So there’s several things that need to happen. And then the other big question is singing psalms versus singing hymns. And that's a whole nother debate, right? What should we sing? Should we sing only the words of scripture, albeit paraphrased? Or is a human-composed hymn OK or not? And that’s a very big debate that really takes flight in the seventeenth century especially. Thank you. Other questions? Over here, yes.  

Yeah, I was just in South Africa two weeks ago, and I stayed at the home of a couple different Afrikaner families. And after dinner, they would sing a psalm, and they would sing Psalm 34 in Afrikaans. And I said to them, well, that's great. You got Psalm 34 memorized. They said, name a psalm. So I said, well 78 or whatever. And the kids, all the little kids knew all the words to this, and they said, at our Christian school, we learn all the psalms; that’s part of the curriculum. And I was flabbergasted. You could name any psalm and they would just go.  

It would come right out.  

But the question is about hymns. I've been to Canadian Reformed churches in Canada and others, and basically they do the hymn thing, like, before the service starts, anything goes, like in terms of hymns and so on, but the moment the domine comes on the pulpit, then you switch to the Genevan. Was that something that started around that time, too?  

Yes. So, in fact, it’s interesting. I have colleagues who've worked on early psalters, especially early Dutch psalters. And what's really interesting is that, although the bulk of the book is psalms, at the back they include some hymns, right? And those ones then are for singing at home or for singing at some other occasion, but not in worship. So hymns are not banned; they're just not allowed in the worship service itself. And you have to think, there’s some wonderful hymn writers at the time. Martin Luther wrote magnificent hymns, right? And so this sort of cross-fertilization happens. So even Dutch Reformed psalters can include some Lutheran hymns, but not for singing in church. Fascinating.  

Say something more about where the tunes come from. Were they all composed? Were some of them popular song tunes?  

That's actually a very interesting question, the question of where do the tunes come from. A lot of research has been done. In fact, Howard Slenk did a lot of this research on where did these melodies come from? There have been some people who have suggested that they were mostly popular songs—sort of almost like taking a love song and turning it into a church song kind of thing. But much of the research that’s been done more recently does suggest that, in fact, no, most of the melodies are taken from church music repertoire before the Reformation. So carols, the practice of singing carols predates the Reformation, so some of those tunes. Again, simplified Gregorian chants, melodies that people had from a church context, then moved into the Reformed context as well. But it’s still a debated question because we know more about the people who did the versifying than we do about the people who wrote the tunes, and that’s really interesting how that goes.  

Any comments on the congregational singing among the Moravians in Pennsylvania and the Carolinas?  

So, questions about singing among Moravians. So, the Moravians are a group that actually puts its roots back to a country called Moravia. It’s in Eastern Central Europe now. And they were very well known for their musicality, for their singing, also for their trombone choirs, which are amazing. And so they have a long tradition of looking into singing not just psalms but definitely hymns, and hymns also sung in parts. But a wonderful tradition, a singing practice that has then spread somewhat from the Moravians to other churches. If you look in Lift Up Your Hearts, the most famous one we have that is a Moravian one is “Christian Hearts in Love United,” which is a Moravian hymn. It’s actually in our red hymnbook here, which is a wonderful, wonderful tune. So yes, there’s lots of examples of really good singing in different parts around Europe by the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth century. Absolutely.  

Is there any evidence outside of corporate worship that percussion was used, or clapping, or dancing?  

All right, I will say, in terms of the sources I have looked for, no. I do not see evidence of drums or anything to keep a beat. It would have been nice if they did, because it would help with the slowing down problem. If something is keeping the beat, you can keep the music going. If there’s nothing, people slow down. No, there’s no evidence of that that I have found in any source I’ve seen so far.  

When they’re doing the translations, are they always returning to the original Hebrew text to do new versifications, or are they ever translating from existing French texts and then putting them into whatever language they’re moving into?  

It depends. So, for instance, the compilers of the Bay Psalmbook said they went back to the Hebrew and worked from that. Molnár, the Hungarian, used a French and a German version to get into Hungarian, but also had the Hebrew version, right? So it depends on what your context is, but it’s not obvious at all,  because the text of the psalms in scripture, the lines are different lengths, and they’re all over the place, and how do you set that into meter, and then meter that matches a particular tune? This is a very sophisticated ability to be able to do that. And the versions that have survived are the works of very fine poets. These were very talented people who did these versifications. Calvin, not so much.  

All right, any last question that I can get? If not, please turn in your hymnbook to number 1, number 1, “All People That on Earth Do Dwell.” You know this one; this is the doxology.  

One last comment, and it has to do with this number 1, “All People That on Earth Do Dwell.” I just returned from the meeting of the World Communion of Reformed Churches in Chiang Mai, Thailand, and I was on the worship committee, and we included this Genevan psalm on the last day of worship. And I had given them the text and the score from Lift Up Your Hearts, which has the English version and then eleven other languages. At the World Communion, there are six official languages and many other languages present. And when they printed it in the worship book, they insisted on putting the French with the music because that was the original language. And when they did that, they neglected to put the English in one of the texts following. Thank you. So we had everyone stand and everyone sang this song in eleven different languages.  And all the English speakers had to choose something other than English.  

Because it wasn’t available.  

Exactly, but we did have people singing in all those languages.  

I think that's wonderful, and that’s what we’ll do now, so you can turn—if you get to number 1 and then turn the page there’s all sorts of other languages; you can pick whichever language you want to sing in. We will sing all four verses. We will stand to sing in a moment, and then we will finish with the doxology, so it’ll be a fifth verse, “Praise God, from whom all blessings flow.” Please rise to sing. 

All people that on earth do dwell, 
sing to the Lord with cheerful voice. 
Serve him with joy, his praises tell, 
come now before him and rejoice! 

Know that the LORD is God indeed; 
he formed us all without our aid. 
We are the flock he comes to feed, 
the sheep who by his hand were made. 

O enter then his gates with joy, 
within his courts his praise proclaim. 
let thankful songs your tongues employ, 
O bless and magnify his name! 

Because the LORD our God is good, 
his mercy is forever sure. 
His faithfulness at all times stood 
and shall from age to age endure. 

Praise God, from whom all blessings flow. 
Praise him, all creatures here below. 
Praise him above, ye heavenly hosts. 
Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost!  

Amen. 

 Thank you so much. Please join me in thanking our musicians and singers. That was wonderful. Thank you, guys.