METRICAL PSALMS

Metrical Psalms: translation

A rhymed vernacular translation of apsalmsung to music with a regular pattern of beats (meter). Because the poetry of the Hebrew psalms has neither rhyme nor meter, but rather depends on semantic parallelisms between verse pairs, singing complete psalms before the 16th century had traditionally been the province of trained singers,cantorsor choirs. When Protestantism insisted on a singingcongregationand, in its Reformed and Puritan churches, on the psalms as the only appropriate texts to be sung, the metrical psalms provided, at first, simple tunes and strong memory cues in its meter and a familiar language so that the musically untutored might sing them.

Versified psalms at first appeared without explicit musical settings.Two of the earliest influential sets are by Clément Marot in France (1532) and Thomas Sternhold in hisCertayne Psalmes Drawen into{}Englishe Metre(c. 1549). But Sternhold’s psalms were likely meant to be sung to popular tunes, and Marot’s were similarly set in the three editions of theGenevan Psalter. Both became mainstays of Reformed traditions. Robert Crowley also published aPsalterin 1549 whosehomorhythmicharmonizations suggest the English liturgical practice offaburden. Polyphonicversions of the Genevan melodies and Sternhold’s psalms (harmonized by John Day, 1563) soon followed. Eventually the line between metricalpsalmodyandhymnblurred as the translation of psalms became a rhymed, metrical paraphrase, as inIsaacWatts’The Psalms of David(1719).

See alsoBay Psalm Book; Calvin, Jean; Lining Out.