Psalm-setting challenge

One day back in 2007 I sat down in a mood of bitter rancour and rapidly sketched out an unpremeditated draft setting of Psalm 39, that text unmatched for the utterance of such dark states — ‘my heart was hot within me …man walketh in a vain shadow...O spare me a little, that I may recover my strength before I go hence and be no more seen ...’. A few more days sufficed to polish the draft into completion: the mood passed; its complement followed — the gentle healing hopefulness of Ps. 121: ‘I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills.... The Lord shall preserve thy coming in and thy going out from this time forth for ever more’. Some time later still, the two finished Psalms seemed to require a third, different again: a song of praise and thanks, maybe less spontaneous than its companions but no less deeply felt; the brazen celebration of Ps. 113, glorifying the Lord ‘from the rising of the sun unto the going-down of the same’, then calming into tenderness for verses concerning the poor, the simple, the barren woman granted her household and children, before ending in a renewed paean of rejoicing.

This unlooked-for enterprise, born of anger and ending in joy, bore unlooked-for fruit the year after, when my colleague at Caius, who trains its excellent Chapel choir, saw an opening, amid the diverse events marking the University’s 800th anniversary, for a concert of great imaginative vision: to commission other Psalm settings from distinguished alumni down the decades, putting together a contemporary Psalter, with angles upon this incomparable collection of archaic songs unbeholden to the traditions and idioms of Anglican Church music.

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