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A name of power : who was Melchisedek?

A mysterious figure

In the psalm (109/110) for Corpus Christi Year C, there is a reference to Melchisedek. This is one of only two references to him in the Old Testament. Here are the words in Genesis 14 :

‘And Melchisedek king of Salem brought out bread and wine; he was priest of the Most High God. Then he blessed him [Abram, who’s just returned from winning a major battle and freeing Lot from captivity] and said: ‘Blessed be Abram by the Most High God, Maker of heaven and earth; and praised be the Most High God, who has handed your oppressors over to you!’ And Abram gave him a tenth of everything.’

And that is absolutely all the information we have about Melchisedek in the Old Testament, apart from the reference in Psalm 109/110 :’You are a priest forever, a priest like Melchisedek of old’ or ‘…in the line of Melchisedek.’ Different translations of Genesis are not sure who gave the tithe to whom, and the words can vary slightly (I took the translation above out of the Jehovah’s Witness version, because I thought it was probably the most literal). You can see how early a part of the salvation story this is by the fact that Abram is still missing the extra syllable God will give him later.

Melchisedek at altar — Melchisedek and Abram, brass altar piece, 1181

Full of significance

Here he is in nineteenth-century stained glass

I’m not qualified to discuss all the later meanings added on to the figure of Melchisedek. There are old Jewish traditions about him, he’s mentioned in the Dead Sea Scrolls, he’s mentioned by some of the Gnostics, St Paul considers him a central figure in explaining how Jesus did not need to be related to Aaron or Levi and yet is the Great High Priest (this is all in the Epistle to the Hebrews, because it’s an interesting Jewish theological question), and what that means, is that this psalm is quoted in the New Testament more often than any other, all on this Melchisedek point.

Names in poetry and songs

But having read the account from Genesis, you now have as much information as the psalmist of this particular psalm, who we think might well have been David. I want to discuss the power of proper names in poems and songs, and specifically the difficulty of setting them to music. Proper names are awkward because they are too specific and often not euphonious. It works if the name is of someone with mythical or enhanced status (Milton! Thou shouldst be living at this hour…), but it’s difficult to avoid bathos where it’s just someone less important. Wordsworth wrote several poems which start with the name of the person he’s addressing, like the ‘Milton’ poem, but it doesn’t really work attached to a name that means nothing to the reader. Try it yourself, with the names of people you know, and it’s hard to repress a snigger. This is the whole basis of the joke in Monty Python’s Life of Brian.

Generic goddesses or proper names

The Greeks, the Romans and European poets up to the eighteenth century handle this by using nymph or goddess names for their (real) sweethearts, but a specific reference name is much harder to deal with. So we have ‘Jenny kiss’d me when we met’ interestingly described as a ‘Rondeau’ (musical dance form as well as a type of poem), Fair Phyllis I saw sitting all alone, which is a madrigal; but it’s hard to deal with a name and surname, unless a comic effect is desired (‘Just you wait, ‘Enry ‘Iggins’). Of course there are exceptions (Barbara Frietchie, Barbara Allen, Eleanor Rigby ), but on the whole, it’s easier to deal with people famous enough to have one-word names (Napoleon (Shelley), Shakespeare (Ben Jonson). Whitman avoids Lincoln’s name in his poem, just addressing him as ‘O Captain! my Captain!’.

Names with exotic sounds

But there’s one group of names, often but not always single words, which are in the text because of their sound and sometimes their overtones. They are characterised by an incantatory quality, often marked by exotic strangeness. They can be geographical, historical, romantic; they can be totally normal in one context but like magic or hilarious words in a child’s ear. Lear’s The Akond of Swat is one of the first that a young reader comes across and a good example (and there’s another poem about the same gentleman by George Lanigan, less well-known, same idea, quite different, extremely funny). It doesn’t even have to be poetry : Kipling’s great grey-green greasy Limpopo has created magic for children even in prose.

There’s a poem by W.J. Turner called Romance, which describes this perfectly, where the force of the poem lies in the magic exotic names of the places (cf. Marlowe’s Persepolis or Ilium). I came across this poem as a child; I still don’t know anything about those places, and I don’t want or need to; but ‘Chimborazo, Cotopaxi, they had stolen my soul away’ indeed. John Masefield’s Cargoes is similar, but he uses exotic words as well as names (though sadly I have never yet managed to use the word ‘quinquireme’ casually in a sentence).

Names of power

Beautiful dawn — Clouds of glory from my garden

With names of people, it isn’t pure sound usually, though Tolkien is a master of this, as you would expect (Galadriel, Faramir, Tom Bombadil). There’s a lot of foreign-naming going on in nineteenth-century poetry, part of the contemporary passion for the exotic. Samuel Taylor Coleridge is a good example (Kubla Khan, Xanadu). Swinburne is another (Aholibah). The Brownings tried, but don’t seem to me to succeed (just calling Italy ‘Italia’ is not enough, and Garibaldi is unfortunately suggestive in an English pronunciation). The names to conjure with are mostly those with reverberations, which come as it were trailing clouds of glory, to coin a phrase.

Names of mystery

However some of the most powerful magic comes when there is nothing but a name : look at Shelley’s Ozymandias. Sometimes it’s a name with just a bit more, which does not illuminate, but adds to the mystery : Hereward the Wake; Herne the Hunter; and even (I would argue, and so would Christopher Robin) Winnie-the-Pooh.

Melchisedek, name of power and of mystery

Melchisedek is a classic example of an incantatory name, because we have so little other information; and just because there is so little of it, it’s all very significant. Who is he? He is described as ‘king and priest of Salem’. ‘Salem’ could be Jeru-salem, but is also the same word as ‘shalom’, so this person is ‘prince of peace’, to use Isaiah’s formulation. Being king and priest is highly significant, not just in a Christian or Davidic forerunner context, but because it means you outrank others in both spheres (imagine if Charlemagne had been the Pope as well). Look at the trouble Henry VIII caused by making himself head of the Church in England, and that was even without invoking the priesthood; and one of the reasons Charles I was so difficult to deal with was because he believed so strongly in the divine right of kings; – but this is to raise the claim to a whole new level.

Melchisedek in landscape — Bringing forth bread and wine almost like a picnic

What does Melchisedek do? He appears with no context; he brings out (of where?) bread and wine; he blesses Abram (presumably by laying his hands on his head, so Abram has had to bend or even kneel before him); and he praises God by a name which shows that he means The One True God, not anyone local or subordinate; and then he disappears again, to reappear only in Psalm 109/110, which plays absolutely fair in not adding any further information, but using the same incantatory name.

Melchisedek qualifies for a feast day

Athos icon of Melchisedek

Melchisedek is significant enough to make it into the Roman Liturgical Calendar. His feast day is August 26th. For the Eastern Orthodox, it is May 22nd. For the Armenian Church it’s July 26th, as one of the Holy Forefathers. I was very excited to discover this, and went hunting for a feast of the Holy Foremothers, but sadly this does not exist, though I did find a feast of Holy Translators, which I trust includes people like Catherine Winkworth. Melchisedek’s importance for the Church is mainly because of the use St Paul makes of him, as indicating a pre-Levite and pre-Aaronic priesthood, in which Jesus can be the great High Priest ‘according to the line of Melchisedek’, which I’m not qualified even to discuss. I am just concerned with the practicality of setting proper names to music. At least Melchisedek is one where everyone knows how to pronounce it (I always worry about Massah and Meribah, in Psalm 94/95), but it presents problems of its own.

Modern icon, with classic attributes again

Setting Melchisedek to music

Melchisedek is a name, a word of four syllables. I try to avoid using anything smaller than a quaver, especially for the Response, so you’re looking at 2 crotchets or quarter notes minimum, which is half or two-thirds of a bar, if not a whole bar. You can play with rhythm but not duration : you need all four syllables. And it’s not just in the Cantor’s part, it is in the Response; and it is (mostly) the last word of the Response, so it is full of emphasis, it has the cadence. These are the unavoidable considerations, and I’m actually rather glad that this name does not come up as often as (say) Zion or Israel. Words like ‘ordinances’ are similarly tricky.

Variation in the Responses

It’s a sizeable chunk in the Response, and the words around it vary according to the different Lectionaries. US and OZ both have ‘You are a priest for ever, in the line of Melchisedek’, but they have different strophe words (OZ follows the same strophe words as the UK Lectionary. Mostly.). UK has ‘You are a priest for ever, a priest like Melchisedek of old’, and CAN has ‘You are a priest for ever, according to the order of Melchisedek’, which gave me the most trouble of all.

The US version arranged itself neatly into a 3/4 rhythm, with the stresses falling naturally as the tune lollops along, so the Response set the mood for the whole psalm. The UK Response seemed to have a more exotic or even other-worldly feel, and the rhythm was more flexible, so that came out in 4/4, but with a modal, haunting little tune. I didn’t want to lose the impact of the name, so I treated the ‘of old’ as a part of the title. OZ shares the US Response but the UK verse words. As though to rub it in, the second half of the fourth strophe is the same word-for-word as the UK Response, but combining the two together didn’t work, so I started again, and that is a completely different setting, in 4/4. Somehow that arrangement of words in the Response doesn’t seem to need the haunting quality; I think ‘in the line of’ is much more straightforward than ‘of old’, maybe.

The CAN Response was awkward because there were just so many words in it, and the rhythm was not flexible. Ideally, you don’t want a Response to be too long or too complicated (I’ve written about this before), because the congregation has to pick it up quickly and not forget it in between its appearances, so I try to keep it to four bars or eight if it’s a quicker flow. ‘You are a priest for ever’ is already half of a Response. ‘According to the order of’ is a lot of syllables, even before you get to ‘Melchisedek’. I had to do a lot of saying it out loud before I could fix a rhythm which worked, and I was surprised to find that I could relate it best to the UK modal tune (the strophe words were slightly different, but it was easy to adapt the tune). When I looked at the UK and CAN Responses carefully, they were each five bars, which surprised me again, but I think that’s one reason why they feel slightly uncanny, unbalanced (in a good way), and this preserves the exotic element which I didn’t want to lose.

See how an expert does it….

Psalm 109/110 starts ‘Dixit Dominus’ in Latin, and because it’s a neat, short psalm with wonderful words, many great composers have set it. It’s part of Vespers, for a start (Monteverdi and Mozart). Because of the Melchisedek line, it’s useful as celebratory music for Church celebrations, like Zadok the Priest is for royal events, with all those repeated ‘May the King live for ever’s. Here’s a link to the part where Handel sets the Melchisedek reference. He does it as (mostly) runs of semiquavers, so you only really hear it as the choir comes down to the triumphant conclusion. He’s following the music not the words, and you’d never get away with it as a Responsorial Psalm, but it’s a lovely piece of music.

Melchisedek, Abram, servants….and God as well

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The Easter psalm (117/118) : the power of repetition

The last psalm of the evening, the first psalm of Easter

I’ve done other blogs on the Holy Week music and on the Easter weekend specifically, but I want to look at the Easter psalm on its own, because we do in fact sing it again and again. When we finally make it to Psalm 117/118, at the Easter Vigil, it feels like the moment when Easter finally arrives. We have had bonfires, processions, vats of holy water, the drama of the light starting so tiny and spreading out from hand to hand to fill the church (and how symbolic is that); we have gone through a long sequence of readings (longer or shorter depending on what your parish can cope with); we have sung a different psalm after every reading; but once we get to Psalm 117/118, the Easter Mass is really under way and can move forward to the Gospel. It is The Easter Psalm, and it’s lucky that it’s so great, because we sing it over and over again at Easter and for the octave (and in Year B, even yet again on the fourth Sunday of Easter).

Christ leaving tomb — resurrexit sicut dixit

Between the shortest and the longest

It never comes back in exactly the same shape, though, and I’m always surprised, looking it up, to find that it isn’t one of the alphabetical or very long psalms. The psalm before it is the tiny Psalm 116/117, shortest of all the psalms, and the one after it (118/119) is the longest of all the psalms, and is, in fact, one of the alphabeticals. In fact, Psalm 117/118 has thirty verses, so it’s middling as far as length goes (but what a lot there is in it!). I’m sure it’s only coincidental, but it is fun that just as Easter falls between the shortest and the longest day, so the Easter psalm sits between the shortest and the longest psalm. But that way leads to madness and numerology.

painted Easter eggs — as full, they say, as an egg is of meat

Unlike many psalms, we actually use nearly all of it (just not in one go). Some psalms never get used on a Sunday, some we only use part of because they contain sections which feel inappropriate in the light of the New Testament (curses etc), but this psalm is like an apple, good all the way through.

Several poems strung together : forms..

And its form is interesting as well. It has sections like a litany, parts which are choruses, repetitions, accumulations, long verses, short verses……it’s a most rewarding psalm. It’s like a sampler of different options; you can (and the Church does) take sections out and use them as free-standing poems, but there is also a long overarching narrative. Repetition is neatly itself repeated as the recurring trope, not just the standard Psalms parallelism but even within single lines (v 11, v 13). There are other psalms which use repetition to make a litany (Ps 135, Ps 148), but here there is just enough to enjoy as a litany, and then we move on to something else.

…and content

The form is very rich, but so is the meaning. It has the whole human salvation story in a nutshell (at this time of year, perhaps we should say eggshell) : the just man attacked and thrown down by his enemies, but protected and raised up by the Lord, whom he will sing to and praise forever. Also, it’s one of the psalms most easily appropriated to a Christian foreshadowing, helped by the fact that Jesus actually quotes it himself (the corner stone and subsequent verses, Mtt 21.42, Mk 12.10, Lk 20.17). This psalm quotes or is quoted by so many others (not to mention the references to or from other books of the Bible) that you can hear echoes chiming all the way through : the Lord is at my side, I do not fear; trust the Lord, not princes; the Lord is my strength and my song; the Lord’s right hand has triumphed; I will enter by the Lord’s own gate; Blessed in the name of the Lord is he who comes; the Lord is our light….and so on. It’s like a compendium. And for us the echoes go forward (into the New Testament) as well as back, because these are the words that we hear from John the Baptist, from Jesus, from St Paul. This beloved psalm is quoted repeatedly, and it reverberates like a great bell.

Using it in the Easter liturgy

It starts with the word Alleluia!, one of the hallmarks of Eastertide, and a reminder of Easter for the rest of the year. The word occurs only twentyfour times in the Old Testament, and only in Psalms, and only in the last third of the book of Psalms (thank you, Internet) : three surprising facts in a row. So it’s a significant word, and unlike the infuriating ‘Selah’, on which opinions differ, we do actually know what it means (hurrah for God) and that it is a shout of joy. So the best possible start to a psalm in this position in the Easter liturgy, so good in fact that on the psalm’s first outing, at the Vigil, it forms the Response, all on its own, and we sing it three times.

The Risen Lord with attendant angel musicians (every home should have some), probably singing alleluia

Easter Vigil version : 3 x 4 lines, Rx 3 x Alleluia

Alleluia is usually written with an exclamation mark, as I did above, but note the way that the US and OZ versions of the psalm for the Easter Vigil use full stops instead, and the UK version makes the triple Alleluia a crescendo : ‘Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia!’. The CAN version has three exclamation marks. The variation of these ways of punctuating it makes us think about the force of the Response. I like the serious three-full-stops version particularly, because as we haven’t had any Alleluias for six weeks, it is as though we are feeling our way back to it, trying out how it sounds, learning to rejoice. When I set it, I was trying to emphasize the slight strangeness or dislocation of this, so I’ve gone for a sort of grave barbaric tune rather than just flourishes of trumpets. Carmina Burana rather than the Hallelujah chorus (and do click on that link, it’s brilliant).

The strophe starts with the first two verses, which works well, as v 1 is the burden for the whole psalm :’Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good,/for his love endures for ever’. It gives the psalm structure, because it is repeated at the end, and the second line is the element which creates the litany section, which immediately follows. Then the strophes in the Vigil version jump to the lines in the middle which seem to foreshadow Christ most directly:’I shall not die, but live […] the stone rejected by the builders has become the corner stone’. Three solid four-line strophes, each with the triple Alleluia as the refrain. ( I need another word for the bits that the cantor sings. I’m using strophe to avoid confusion with verse, but the only alternative I can think of so far is stanza. So you can have Italian instead of Greek, but that’s no improvement. I’ll keep thinking about this.)

Easter Sunday version: same strophes, different Rx

Within hours, we are singing the same psalm again, on Easter Sunday morning. We have the same three strophes as in the night, but a new Response : ‘This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad’. This is the verse of the psalm directly after the lines about the corner stone. It is a long Response, and you don’t want the congregation to have trouble remembering it, you want them to sing with joy and gladness (see Isaiah 12, Easter Vigil Fifth Reading). It needs a solid tune of its own, but it has to go with the tune for the strophes. I kept that the same, as I wanted to keep the solid connection between the Vigil and the Day Mass. The daytime congregation should be fine to cope with a longer Response, especially as they haven’t already been singing at intervals for the last hour or so, as they would have been the night before.

everybody wideawake and joining in the singing

2nd Sunday of Easter version : 3 x 6 lines, different Rx

The next Sunday (Easter Octave, Second Sunday of Easter, Divine Mercy Sunday) has the same psalm again. Only it isn’t. This time we have three strophes of six lines each, starting with the litany section of the psalm, while the Response is the first verse which starts the litany section (which was the first line of the first strophe of the psalm last Sunday, I hope this is clear). The middle strophe is a different bit of the psalm which we haven’t had yet, and the third strophe is the ‘corner stone’ four-line verse plus the Response from Easter Sunday. Actually, that’s only for Year A. For Year C, the corner stone strophe is the middle one, with another part of the psalm forming the last strophe. Year B has a different middle strophe, and the corner stone back in as last strophe. (I feel like the Cat in the Hat at this point : ‘Oh the fun we can have!’ And each country group has slightly different words.)

Putting it to music

You want people to realise it’s the same psalm, but you can’t use the same tune, as the strophes are half as long again. Eventually I decided to go with the shape of the first strophe and Response, and emphasize the litany element. (I’m hoping that as the words are the same, the congregation can spot that it’s the same psalm without my labouring it; also, I don’t want them to get bored.) With a litany, it means writing the strophe to accumulate momentum as it goes along, because if you’re going to repeat a short line three times, it has either to grow or peter out, it can’t stand still. So I went for waves of triumph getting bigger each time. This was fun to write, because you increase until it can all tumble back down the notes into the Response. But it’s also got to work for the subsequent strophes which are not in litany form.

Forever, everlasting and has no end

The UK version uses ‘has no end’ instead of ‘is everlasting’, and I found it irresistible to echo that in the music of the Response, so it just keeps rolling on to the next line until there aren’t any, when it’s still waiting.

Female charioteer with four in hand — the danger of the music running away with you

When I set the CAN version, a couple of years later, the words were slightly different, so I wrote a new tune altogether, and that was in 3/4, which is really good for accumulating momentum, though you have to be careful not to get faster. When this psalm comes back yet again in Year B (Fourth Sunday of Easter), the words are from yet other verses of the psalm, but I set it in 3/4 for all the different Lectionaries because the rhythm felt so rollicking. That time, the Response is the corner stone verse itself.

We bless you from the house of the Lord

This is one of the great encouraging psalms. This is partly because it shows the singer moving through peril to safety and bliss, not just hoping for help, but having received succour, and finding himself safe at last in the haven where he would be. The last few lines (see heading for this section) are a message to those of us still on the road; it’s almost as though the Communion of Saints is sending us a postcard of encouragement. ‘The Lord God is our light’ : the light showing in the windows of the house we are all trying to reach, and how the sight of that light lifts the hearts of those still walking on in the gloom!

Easter candleholder — light shining in the darkness

Its repetition at Eastertide only adds to its force, because that sort of encouragement is extremely cumulative. It’s not surprising to discover that it is many people’s favourite, Martin Luther for one, William Cowper the poet for another. Many people have made it their own, using it to pray so often that its words rise spontaneously when it seems appropriate. Cowper writes touchingly of how this psalm made him brave to cope with bullying as a small boy at school. He later spent time in an asylum following severe depression, and frames his account of his recovery in the words of this psalm (vv 17, 18 and 29). Elizabeth I quoted v 23 when she heard that her sister had died and she herself had become Queen. This spontaneous quoting of it is exactly what Jesus is doing when he makes the lines about the corner stone his own, and it shows how familiar and dear to him the psalm must have been. As before, this makes us realise again that the Psalter isn’t just our best prayer book. It was his as well.