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 …’.
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.
The remit was broad: not just English, but also Hebrew, Greek, Latin; if English, not just the Book of Common Prayer, but also exploring the extraordinary wealth of verse translations down the ages. Most poets, major or minor, seem to have attempted one or two Psalms, if only as exercises; and there are several versions of the entire 150 — John Keble in the 19th century, Christopher Smart in the 18th, and — beyond question the finest — the translation begun by Sir Philip Sidney, continued (after no. 43) and concluded after his untimely death with still greater power and resource by his sister Mary, Countess of Pembroke.
We offered leeway in the forces too. Clearly the small mixed-voice choir was the constant, with or without organ; and the optional use of a single other solo instrument of choice. Funding was applied for and granted; invitations went out, acceptances came in; then the completed settings began to arrive, slowly, though well in time for choir and organ-scholars to gradually assimilate by incorporation into Caius Chapel’s regular services. Despite this, the demands remain daunting: a choir still in its first months’ formation, tackling six new pieces (eight if my trilogy counts as three), amid the usual heavy demands, intellectual and social, of student life. Rehearsals for the event on 22 November amply justified the effort and the risk.
Maybe the eventual roster of composers is over-neat in its simple symmetry: one from (almost) every stage of life — Alexander Goehr in his 70s, me in my 60s, and so on by decades, from Judith Weir, Edward Rushton, Cheryl Frances-Hoad to Sasha Siem, who graduated in 2005. Their responses have proved as diverse as their ages: the only common element is the odd shyness to set any version of the text except from the 1612 Psalter. Characteristically, Goehr has not taken a complete Psalm or self-contained section, preferring a quasi-random mosaic of fragments — ‘broken’, he calls it: 14 verses from three separate sources (139:42:75). Equally characteristic is the thoughtful introspection of his choices: the opening phrase — ‘O Lord, thou hast searched me out and known me’ — can stand for the whole. My own choices, the venture’s starting point, have already been given. Both of us use the organ and eschew the obbligato soloist. Judith Weir, however, presents a bold, assertive trombone, to paint in bright primary colours a deceptively naïve Benedicite wherein fire and hail, beasts, fishes and fowls, all trees and cedars, dragons and deeps, combine in praise.
Frances-Hoad reverts to the organ for her setting of Ps. 1, beginning in lyric commendation for the man of Good Life, reversing halfway to condemn the Bad in a long unaccompanied passage seething with mounting turbulence till, at the prophecy that they shall all perish, the organ re-enters on a corruscating dissonance; after which the mighty brute is instructed to de-clutch (even as the voices rise ‘to a virtual scream’), and expires as ignominiously as the Jabberwocky. And Siem’s piece is still more radically deconstructive/destructive: her take on her text, some verses from Ps. 140, is as memorable in its severity as any of the richer textures preferred by her elders: pared to the bare bone, female voices in three parts splinter the excoriating denunciation of man’s vile ways, the jagged phrases sharply pointed with intermittent stabs from a solo trumpet, till the acrid brilliant little thing locks into traumatised stasis.
These utterly disparate six composers have all produced a response to hallowed religious words that is as intensely felt as it is musically inspired. Whatever the state of our individual belief or disbelief, we unanimously believe in Music!
Comments