Psalm 18 • Diligam Te, Domine
While I’ve lamented in previous blog posts that sometimes it’s difficult to even find an ancient melody to adapt, †1 other times the results of my searches can be uninspiring—or at least, the formulaic chants that I can find are very simple and result in a very different æsthetic than the more florid chants (graduals, alleluias, etc.). One of my favorite florid adaptations to date is Astitit Regina (The Queen Stands…) which you can read about and listen to here.
Such is not the case this week with Psalm 18, “I love You, Lord, my strength.” (In Latin: Diligam te, Domini, virtus mea.)
One of the few ancient manuscripts that I could find (at the time) with legible notation (as distinct from the St. Gallen-styled neumes which do not appear on staves and ultimately require a foreknowledge of the chant to decipher) was one of the aforementioned formulaic settings:
View the original here.
Considering the peculiar situation our choir was in this week (singing for a Confirmation Mass whilst we would ordinarily be rehearsing for Sunday) meant that it needed to be a simpler setting that we could learn in 10 minutes Sunday morning before Mass anyway. So in the end, this worked out very well. This same antiphon (albeit altered slightly) has survived into modern chant books, which is where I first found it.
As you can see, I was able to salvage the entire antiphon 1:1 by keeping the last four notes as the psalm tone:
In the end, the result may be modest, but it served its function well.
†1 By this I mean, it can be difficult to find melodies in ancient sources that treat the exact same text as the text the refrain according to the modern lectionary. Many of the refrains called for in the current lectionary were not used as regular refrains 1,000 years ago or they were not necessarily set as florid antiphons for use as a proper antiphon (Entrance, Gradual, Offertory, Communion, etc.). When these particular psalms were chanted, it was often just to a formula or “tone” for use in the divine office (liturgy of the hours). Unfortunately for me, during my initial research phase, I missed this manuscript which indeed does set this text in a florid fashion and would have provided more musical material to adapt. Nevertheless, I’m still happy with the end result.
