The Genevan Psalms

Two months ago in this space I recounted the story behind my longstanding interest in the biblical Psalter and its liturgical use. In the mid 1980s I came across the Genevan Psalter, with which I had previously not had much contact. My childhood church sang largely from the 1912 Psalter, with a very few Genevan melodies included, such as the ubiquitous Psalm 134, renumbered OLD HUNDREDTH in the 1650 Scottish Psalter.

It wasn’t until age 30 that I discovered the riches of the Genevan Psalms. To my surprise, I found that I had already had a copy of them in Czech which I had acquired at an antiquarian bookshop in Prague a decade earlier. Published in 1900, during the last decades of Habsburg rule, it contains the versifications of Jiří Strejc, a member of the Unitas Fratrum, the heirs of the 15th-century Hussites.

I was quite taken with the Genevan tunes, whose metrical structures are much less regular than those of the psalters used in the English-speaking world. Their rhythms are occasionally syncopated in the style of Renaissance madrigals. Although generations of Dutch Reformed Christians became accustomed to singing them in agonizingly slow even notes, they were originally sung in the spirit of dance tunes, famously leading Queen Elizabeth I to deride them as “Genevan jigs.”

In the Scottish Psalter virtually every text is in common metre, or 8 6 8 6, and split-leaf psalters have been printed for generations, enabling worshippers to mix and match texts and tunes easily. By contrast, one could hardly do this with the Genevan tunes, whose irregularities resist such treatment. It would be impossible to sing Genevan Psalm 23 to the well-known tune for Psalm 68, which became the anthem of the French Protestants seeking freedom from their Roman oppressors.

Fresh versified texts

Near the end of the last millennium, I posted a simple website devoted to the Genevan Psalter, which I updated regularly thereafter. Initially I posted some 40 Psalms which I had set to verse in the late 1980s and into the ‘90s. Eventually I expanded this number to 85, covering more than half of the total number. While some of my metrical psalms rhymed, not all did so. Trying to render a psalm in metre already risks doing violence to the text. Rhyme only compounds this problem. Moreover, most of the existing texts of the Genevan Psalms in several languages fail consistently to match the stresses of the texts to those of the tunes, which I have tried to rectify in my own work.

My Genevan Psalter project sat on the shelf for several years, as I published books, kept up with my teaching, mentored my students, and struggled unsuccessfully to keep my job. But now I’ve returned to it. After my former employer took down my old website, I reposted much, but not all, of the material on a blog dedicated to the subject.

I was recently awarded a grant enabling me to expand on my work with the Psalms, including coming up with at least 30 fresh versified texts and recording some of these for my YouTube channel. My long-term goal is to complete texts for all 150 Psalms, perhaps publishing them in a portable volume to make for easy singing. (At one time I was also arranging the tunes, but I’ve put that aside for now.)

Of course, metrical psalmody is not the only way to sing the Psalms. Many Christians, including Orthodox, Roman Catholics, Lutherans and Anglicans, continue to chant them in prose form. We have not generally done this in the Reformed tradition, but it might be worth a try. Yet however we may sing them, we should never neglect the biblical Psalms in our worship. As Calvin put it, “there is no other book in which we are more perfectly taught the right manner of praising God.”