Psalms Archives - Page 27 of 32

What makes a good psalm Response?

All shapes and sizes

We’ve just had a couple of brief psalm Responses, ‘Here I am, Lord; I come to do your will’ and ‘Teach me your ways, O Lord’, and there’s a longer one coming up for Sunday: ‘If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts’, or for the Canadians; ‘O that today you would listen to the voice of the Lord. Do not harden your hearts!’ Even so tiny a sample shows how much the Response set for the congregation on a Sunday can vary.

A quick study

Sometimes it’s difficult to get the congregation just to remember the Response for the duration of the psalm. Length is a significant factor. Rhythm is very helpful, but not always on offer, especially if the Response has been imported from some different bit of the Bible (eg a bit out of one of St Paul’s Epistles as the Response to a psalm). A tune really helps, especially if it has a certain predictability, but it’s difficult to be predictable without being boring. This is a tune that the congregation hears once and then has to repeat three or four times, while the cantor sings something different, sometimes to the same words. It almost sounds like another fiendish parlour game from I’m sorry I haven’t a clue.

Learning the Response

In some parishes, everyone has a printed copy of the words of the psalm; in many they don’t.

Potsherd with mass text — This is the earliest known Mass sheet fragment : on a piece of pot

Some people won’t pick up a sheet at the back of the church on principle; not everyone can read quickly. If you’ve ever tried to sing along in a language (or alphabet) not your own, you will be aware of how hard it can be to keep up with the unfamiliar. The congregation has to pick up the words as well as the tune. Our current congregation, like many others, includes many people for whom English is not their first language, so I speak the words first, and then sing them. With a very long Response, you already see the congregation begin to flounder at this point, but keep trying, and be very clear. Some churches allow you to run through the Response before Mass, and this can help, but it disturbs those who are trying to pray before Mass starts, and it doesn’t help the many who arrive more or less at the same time as Father processes in.

Alternative Responses

Unfortunately, even if you don’t like the psalm Response, you can’t change it, as it is set in the Lectionary. Occasionally you are offered a choice between two Responses (All Saints has some of these, so has the Christmas Vigil), and often you can substitute ‘Alleluia’ for the words of the Response. Since the Alleluia is going to be sung later, the one word response seems to me a bit of a cop-out, unless you are omitting the Alleluia proper. And it’s not always the most appropriate response either, especially if (part of) the psalm is gloomy. I don’t set Alleluia on its own as a psalm response, as I think the longer ones work better.

Singers with long score — …but maybe not too long

Getting a good Response

A good psalm Response is not too short or too long. A single sentence works best. The very short ones tend to be a bit blink and you miss it, and you aren’t allowed to repeat them to improve the length, but have to use the words as given. Getting them across to a congregation in a bigger church can be quite challenging, and short can be as difficult as long. Don’t rush; be measured and clear. ‘Arrow’ prayers work better for individuals than in congregations, because there is no time to catch up if you miss the beginning ; this applies to short psalm responses too. Litanies work for bigger groups because they have a predictable rhythm and a repeated response. Ditto the Rosary.

Mixed medieval choir, with musicians outside the frame — Mixed group singing with musicians providing the frame

But the Response is different every week, one of the trickiest things for the congregation to handle. No wonder many people don’t even try to join in. Try and make it easy for them; I try to make the music immediately attractive and straightforward, one note per syllable (mostly), a clear rhythm and line, something to latch on to, (nearly always) ending on the tonic (unless I’m after a different effect), and (even more nearly always, but there are exceptions) lifting off from exactly the same point of introduction.

Stress levels

The first thing you have to do with any given Response is work out where the natural stresses are if you are saying it as a spoken text, because this will help your congregation to grasp the Response as a whole. It sounds obvious, but it can be tricky. Some words act as stumbling blocks from the start (‘ordinances’ is my favourite example, ‘favourably’ is coming up shortly for the Canadians).

Many Responses start with an unstressed syllable (‘The’ or ‘O’, for example, usually followed by ‘Lord’), which means that you can’t start on the first beat of the bar. But if you don’t start on the first beat of the bar, then each verse has to be framed to lead into the Response smoothly, while allowing for the fact that the congregation may not have the words or is just hoping that it will all be over soon.

The last syllable of the Response is also very important. In English, it’s often a short, stressed word (‘joy’, Ps 125/126; ‘want’ Ps 22/23), which is very helpful. Sometimes it’s an unstressed syllable at the end of a long word like salvation, forever or deliverance, which is usually straightforward; but a single short unstressed word can get lost if you aren’t careful (you can’t give it a bar to itself or it receives too much stress). ‘The Angel of the Lord will rescue those who fear him’ (Ps 33/34): you need the stress on ‘fear‘, but you can’t put too much stress on ‘him’.

The importance of small differences

The smallest of changes to the text can have a significant effect on the rhythm. The psalm coming up for the Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B, has different Responses according to different Lectionaries. ‘I turn to you, Lord, in time of trouble, and you fill me with the joy of salvation’ (US and OZ, but their verse words are different). ‘You are my refuge, O Lord; you fill me with the joy of salvation’ (UK). ‘You are my refuge, Lord; with deliverance you surround me’ (CAN). Simply adding or subtracting an ‘O’ changes the rhythm of the first half to a surprising extent, and although these are all clearly translations of the same thing, I can’t use the same tune for all of them.

This is why many people are keen to intone or use a sort of chant-lite, but unless it is really well done, it won’t help the congregation much, as people usually find rhythm and melody more effective in making the words stick in the mind. Chant takes a lot of practice and works best in (surprise surprise) a group which does not change, and sings together often (e.g. a monastery). A congregation is a much more varied group, and all of them need to be able to take part.

Medieval school choir with cantor and teacher — Cantor and supporting choir?

I get nervous as soon as I see a psalm setting with no time signature. It’s difficult to sing without applying one unconsciously, and not everyone will agree. A time signature means there is a supporting structure, like a trellis in a garden, or the rules of form for a sonnet.

Start from the Response…

Sung mnemonics work really well only if the tune fits the spoken rhythm and precisely isn’t too interchangeable (that’s why it’s difficult to learn your times tables to a tune, as too many of the number words have the same number of syllables : twice two could be anything under ten except seven, according to the rhythm). So once you have a spoken rhythm, you make up a tune that follows it, and you always start with the Response because that stays the same, at least for this Mass. The verse words are going to be irregular, so I will need to adapt the tune to them (and sometimes it works better than others), but that affects only the cantor, so long as I make sure that the lead-in to the Response is unaffected.

….whatever it is

Many psalms turn up on a different Sunday with a completely different Response. Sometimes you can just write a new tune for that Response, but sometimes the rhythm of the Response is so definitely either a 3/4 or a 4/4 that you may have to go back to the beginning and start again, as you can’t have a 3/4 Response with a 4/4 psalm, or vice versa. ‘Lord, you are good and forgiving’ is a 3/4 Response; ‘Lord, let us see your kindness…’ is a 4/4.

Occasionally a psalm comes with a repeated Response actually in the text (Pss. 45/46; 66/67; 79/80 for example), but that’s not to say that it will be the Response appointed to be sung. Ps 79/80 turns up three times in the Lectionary, and on one occasion (27 OTA) it is given a Response out of Isaiah 5. That’s all right, as Isaiah is a beautiful and poetic book with a strong sense of rhythm.

I have far more trouble with the responses gleaned from St Paul’s letters. He may be a towering genius but he didn’t have the benefit of being translated by Joseph Gelineau and the Grail. I suspect it’s not just the translation, though; I’m not sure St Paul had a good sense of rhythm or whether he actually could sing, because when he does quote a song or poem, it stands out so very clearly from his own prose, which could be seen as heading towards a slightly bureaucratic style (I am trying to be diplomatic here). It’s not fair to blame or reproach him for this; the Epistles weren’t meant to be sung, but read, read out and passed around. It’s the choice of extracts as lines of singing that I find occasionally difficult to handle.

Choir singing from one book — Long Responses can be hard to remember without checking the score

The point of the Response

In the end, what matters is that people pick up the Response and sing it back to you. Joining in is the most important thing. The music should make it easier, not harder. You can feel the energy with a succesful Response, and you can see the congregation begin to feel stronger and more involved as they join in. This is why we sing in church: if you sing, you commit. You need to use your voice, your breath, your diaphragm; you can’t help but get involved. Setting music to the words is meant to make people want to join in, and make it easier to do so. ‘Let all the people praise you, O God; let all the people praise you’ (Ps 66/67 ). The italics are mine, but follow the natural stress; and this is why I write tunes for the Response.

© Kate Keefe and Music for Mass 2018. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Kate Keefe and Music for Mass, with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Sheep are cute, but why are we ‘sheep’?

The Lord is my shepherd (again)

The twenty-third psalm is up again for next Sunday, another slightly different version. I’ve mentioned before how our idea of the Shepherd is different from Jesus’ (and from any Jewish reading of the psalm, and it was theirs long before it was also ours), but this time I want to look at the sheep. In the Psalms, God is the shepherd and we are the sheep.

Illumination of sheep and shepherds — orderly sheep for once

Sheep are cute, sheep are beaut

My title is from a children’s song by the Australian musician Don Spencer. We were given a cassette when the children were little and we were doing a lot of car journeys. I think the whole family can still sing it word-perfect. In fact, the real title of the song is Bob the Kelpie, because it’s actually about the sheepdog, and if we’d had YouTube in those days, I’m sure the children would have adored the film, although I find it slightly surreal with the singer lounging in a doorway with his guitar while the hard work of shearing goes on inside the shed.

We call it ‘Sheep are cute sheep are beaut’, not just because it’s the first line, has a catchy tune or because it’s an audacious rhyme (we love those). Mainly I think it sticks in the mind because those aren’t the obvious adjectives anyone would use about sheep. Lambs are cute and cuddly (in cartoons and at a distance). I particularly like the way their tails rotate when they feed (babies can only grunt and knead with their fists in similar circumstances). Adult sheep however are not the most attractive of animals.

Features of adult sheep

There are more human sheep than real mountain sheep in the psalms, by a small margin. Why are we so often described as sheep? In the rest of the Old Testament, it’s the standard image to describe the relationship between God and his people. Sheep aren’t stupid, by any means; you only have to look at one to see the crafty intelligence in its eyes; but they are wilful and wayward. They need a shepherd to give them any sort of higher purpose and to make them worthwhile. They can’t even shed their own skin, as a snake can do. A neglected sheep just gets woolier and woolier, not good for the sheep or for anyone else. The parallels are easy to draw!

Music demonstrating sheep qualities

All we like sheep have gone astray is one of the best choruses to sing in the whole Messiah, with all the exciting dodging about; and in He shall feed his flock, the difference between unlimited careering around and the order brought by the shepherd is demonstrated clearly by the music in its peaceful linear progression. As they say to aspiring film directors, show, don’t tell, and Handel is brilliant at this.

No poems about sheep

There are plenty of poems about horses (e.g. The Arab’s farewell to his steed), dogs (e.g. To Flush, my dog), and even cats (e.g. My cat Jeoffry). There are poems about lambs (Blake springing immediately to mind), but though there are lots of poems where sheep figure as part of the landscape, I can’t think of any where they star, apart from nursery rhymes (Baa baa black sheep, incidentally the first song to be played on a computer) or joke poems. Sentiment seems to be the usual driver for animal poems, apart from some rare exceptions, and sheep are not sentimental. Chesterton could maybe have written one as a companion piece to his donkey poem, but he didn’t as far as I know.

When we talk about people being like sheep in a modern context, it is not usually complimentary. But I think this is because we are no longer an agricultural society. If you read about what shepherds or farmers think about sheep, a different picture emerges. For them, they are important and precious, of worth not only monetary.

Sheep virtues

Sheep are patient, tenacious, vegetarian, pacifist and sociable. They co-operate with each other. They are so collective that the singular noun is the same as the plural, like fish. They have some intelligence. Welsh mountain sheep are bred to learn their own mountain area and do not stray even without walls or fences. They are defenceless against predators. They recognise their own shepherd, and they leave the job of fighting to him. This is one reason why they figure in landscapes : because they demonstrate peace and tranquillity. If there were a threat, they would all be running away, like the herbivorous dinosaurs in Jurassic Park when a carnivore arrives.

There is a famous and popular picture by Shishkin, entitled Morning in a Pine Forest. When he painted it, his friend added young bears to it, and it instantly became one of the favourite pictures in the gallery. The bears give scale and a sort of human touch (they also make the picture more chocolate-boxy). My point here is that sheep turn up in so many landscapes for similar reasons, even if they were painted from the beginning rather than added later, and even if they were real sheep that the artist was looking at. Sheep may safely graze and the scene is all set. And it’s not just pictures. The Staffordshire potters are using the same shorthand.

Spode Blue Italian dish — I don’t know what the people are doing, but the sheep are safely grazing

Sheep in the mists of time

Animals don’t alter as much and as fast as people do, so I think we can reckon that a flock of sheep in the days of Abel, Jacob, Moses, David and indeed in Jesus’ own time, would have operated in very similar ways. Even nowadays, the sheep and the people are similar, even if the modern shepherd has access to new technology.

Doodled sheep — This sheep doodle is mediaeval, but could have been drawn yesterday

Sheepdogs vary only by breed around the world, and Welsh collies tend to be gentler than the Georgian shepherd’s dogs, but then the latter might have to cope with wolves and lynxes instead of foxes. Some shepherds nowadays use quad bikes, but most will still be walking, and the dog is there to save their legs and keep the flock together.

This gives a shepherd a lot of time to think and plenty of fresh air (I’m sure too much sometimes). He or she is usually working in beautiful surroundings, hills and mountains, because sheep flourish there where the grass is not rich enough for cattle. (But there’s also a flock of sheep that grazes the perimeter at Heathrow, which I find unexpected but delightful.) There’s one British Member of Parliament who is a part-time shepherd, and you can see the attraction of the contrast between herding sheep and the House of Commons. More than one shepherd has been a poet. And David of course, King and psalm writer and composer, was a shepherd in his youth.

Shepherd piping to his flock; angels in the sky — Playing to a captive audience and the dog joining in

The link between shepherds and music is very strong. Many shepherd crib figures for Christmas will have a pipe of some kind. Often they have two they can play at once (I’ve seen this in Georgia and Serbia, and it’s very impressive).

Shepherd playing double pipe, another dancing — the sheep aren’t paying much attention, but the shepherds are making music and dancing too

Sometimes it’s a version of bagpipes. The illustrations of shepherds in manuscripts often show them playing and dancing. Much more unlikely, but great fun, are the pictures of sheep playing musical instruments, and the psalmist has singing sheep in Ps 99/100.

Sheep playing the bagpipes — What tunes would he be playing?

Jesus does it too

Why does Jesus talk about sheep? Mostly because of the OT references, but also through observation, I think. When he spends time alone in the desert, when he walks the mountains with the disciples, when he goes off on his own, he would often have come across flocks and their shepherds.

He uses sheep in parables because everyone would have known what he was talking about. It is interesting that one psalm (118/119) contains in close proximity a reference to God’s word as a treasure (‘I take delight in your promise like one who finds a treasure’) and an appeal for help ‘I am lost like a sheep; seek your servant’. In the New Testament, we have the parables of the pearl of great price, the treasure found in a field (Matthew 13) and later of the lost single sheep in the flock of ninety-nine (Mtt 18).

In the Old Testament, the great Shepherd is God. This would have been Jesus’ understanding of Ps 22/23 too. So when Jesus says, I am the Good Shepherd’, it is indeed a mindblowing claim for the Jews who are listening to him. It means that he is leader, protector, defender….and God. But in case we find this too intimidating, he says, ‘I know my own, and my own know me’. Sheep don’t worry about, or argue with their shepherd. They trust him, because they know him. Sometimes they even run off and get themselves lost; but he will find them again, and bring them home. It’s a very comforting image.

Shepherds with flock in fold — All are safely gathered in

© Kate Keefe and Music for Mass 2017. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Kate Keefe and Music for Mass, with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.