Psalm Spotlight: Psalm 63
Elsewhere on this site, you can find my current philosophy as pertains to the setting of Psalmody, and anyone who follows my work is well-acquainted with how this bears out in practice. But to put it briefly for those who may be new to my site, I find that there is a nearly inexhaustible (and largely un-tapped!) source of compositional fodder: ancient Gregorian manuscripts. If one searches hard enough, one can often find legible manuscripts that set some portion of a modern refrain (read: refrain in use according to the current lectionary), or even another portion of the same psalm, and these ancient melodies can be recycled into new, modern adaptations fit for responsorial psalmody.
This is, I believe, a superior approach to simply composing new melodies for the modern lectionary, and there are multiple reasons for this:
The ancient manuscripts contain our musical patrimony. Now, they largely languish away forgotten in libraries and archives. I believe that just as it is imprudent to abandon the prayers of our forefathers, it is also imprudent to abandon wholesale their music.
Chant is still the music proper to the Roman Rite, and so if we are going to replace it with something else, that replacement needs to be imbued with the same spirit as the chant it supplants.
The Council Fathers asked for chant to be retained—even in the Novus Ordo—and this mandatum has been largely ignored. Few parishes are in a place liturgically (or politically) where they can suddenly switch to chanting. But many parishes are capable of singing vernacular arrangements that contain echoes of plainchant.
The musical style of medieval chant is wholly other, and distinct from modern music. It is sacred. It incarnates a certain liturgical/musical ethos which is distinct from modern music, and this is a good thing. Music at Mass isn’t supposed to feel like what you hear during your day-to-day.
Last week’s setting of Psalm 63 marks one of the more successful attempts at employing this approach.
I had the unusual blessing of being able to actually draw on two manuscripts for this project: the first is an Antiphonale dated to c. 1130, and the second was an Antiphonarium dated 1537. What is remarkable is that these two chants only differ by a single pitch, even though they were produced in different countries four centuries apart.
The only derivation between these two manuscripts is the pitch of the word ‘in’ which is a step higher in the 1537 manuscript.
Because the latin text is relatively short and succinct, I was able to maintain the melodic contour and number of pitches nearly 1:1. And this is what I mean when I say that the old chants can be revived and recycled into new, modern settings of the psalms. The glorious result is that people are singing essentially the same antiphon, to the same melody, nearly 900 years after the first manuscript was made. And that, my friends, is a truly living, breathing tradition. Far from being stuffy, this is a very exciting way to approach modern psalmody!
