A guitar journey through the Psalms

Four years ago I completed a project begun when I was 30 years old: setting the biblical Psalms to verse in contemporary English to the proper melodies of the Genevan Psalter. Four grants from the Stanford Reid Trust and the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship enabled me to hire someone to format the texts to the 1945 arrangements of Dutch organists Jacques P. Bekkers and Jacob Kort. I am currently seeking a publisher for this collection.

As an amateur musician myself, after discovering these tunes, I quickly worked up several for the guitar. Indeed these 16th-century melodies are well suited to this treatment, giving them a flavour similar to renaissance pieces for the lute. Unfortunately, many 19th- and early 20th-century arrangements of the Genevan melodies suppressed this flavour, making them sound overly sentimental and removing the syncopated rhythms of the originals. Congregations in turn slowed them down to a snail’s pace and may inadvertently have doomed their continued use in succeeding generations.

Just over a year ago, I began to post guitar performances of the Genevan melodies on my YouTube channel, @ByzantineCalvinist. A very few I had already posted more than a decade ago, so I decided to add as many more as I could manage to play with my limited guitar skills.

Anchored in our hearts

For most of 2022 and 2023 I had been unable to play guitar at all due to a painful attack of frozen shoulders following a freak illness contracted during a visit to Michigan. This condition made holding a guitar virtually impossible, and I had begun to doubt that I would ever play again.

But when the last of the symptoms disappeared at the beginning of 2024, I was delighted to recognize that I could once again painlessly hold a guitar in the proper position. However, by that time I had become quite rusty in my abilities. So I persevered and kept at it over the next months, and by November I was ready to add more performances to my channel.

Naturally, I recorded the ones I knew best and proceeded from there. To be honest, I doubted that I would be able to master all of the tunes, some of which are in tricky rhythms and require rather uncomfortable fingering positions in the left hand. Yet by the 30th of September, I had successfully recorded all 124 of the Genevan tunes, plus a few extra, and posted them at my YouTube channel under “The Genevan Psalter” playlist.

Although virtually all Protestants sang the Psalms in their liturgies from the Reformation onwards, over the centuries psalm-singing has declined. I hope that my efforts might help to reverse this trend and to anchor this biblical collection in our hearts and in our liturgies once again.