Category: Psalms

Kate Keefe writes about the experience of composing music for the psalms to sing in churches, and what comes up in the process.

The Lord is my shepherd : why so many versions

Psalm 22/23 : lots of different shepherds

We’ve just had Psalm 22/23, aka The Lord is my shepherd, as a Sunday psalm. It comes up quite a lot, and whenever it does, I sort through all the versions and occasionally get the chance and the time to write a new one, but there are several versions already, and I was thinking about why.

Different words

The first reason is that each country group has its own version of the words.  The Bishops’ Conference in each country group has jurisdiction over its own lectionary, and they do change the words quite a lot, especially when it’s a particularly frequent or loved psalm, and 22/23 is both.  And it’s surprising how even quite a small change in the words can make a big change to the music.  My aim always is to get as close to the spoken emphasis as possible, so the stress pattern is crucial: ‘I shall not want’ compared to ‘I’ll not want’, and even more so ‘there is nothing I shall want’. OZ and the UK and Ireland, and CAN  have the same verse words (not always, but usually), but different Responses; and if the Response falls into 3/4 while the verse is in 4/4, obviously you have to change the whole thing.

Different verse length and shape

The psalm itself is irregular, with two verses of six lines and two of four.  We have less tolerance of this in our verse rules than in Hebrew prosody, so we tend to regularise it; sometimes down to five verses of four lines each (this is what happens in the hymn versions, and in the Scottish metrical psalms), but obviously that means you have to move things around.  Sometimes the words in the Missal have been sorted into verses of the same length, sometimes not; sometimes I can extend a line by adding in quavers, sometimes not.  Sometimes the Missal version just leaves a bit out.  The CAN All Souls version of The Lord is my shepherd leaves out the lines about the dark valley, but I would have thought that for that feast and for funerals, that’s one of the elements that you would really want to have in!

So many beautiful versions already

Because of its simplicity and the power of the image, it’s a psalm that seems to invite people to try to make it their own, and I have a book of nothing but versions of the words, some successful, some less so (although you never know what will suddenly strike you as what you need to hear).  My book of musical versions, on the other hand, is only in my head, ranging from the Crimond and Br James’ Air that we sang at school, to the Gelineau and the Schubert with lots in between. I don’t have the luxury of being able to repeat words (listen to some of the old Mass versions some time and imagine what they would be like if Mozart or Byrd had been limited to a straight run, as church musicians now are), but what I have to set is a group of lines of (very) varying length in a way that the congregation will feel comfortable with, sing along to, and not feel takes too long. There’s a beautiful set of tunes for the Psalms by Tallis,  but his approach is like the Scottish metrical psalms, and the words are not repeated but seriously paraphrased.

A good ‘first’ psalm

This must be one of the first psalms that anyone learns.  Like The Magic Flute for Mozart and Midsummer Night’s Dream for Shakespeare, it’s immediately accessible and enjoyable at  a very young age, and from there, you can go on to understand more and more (I’m trying to avoid the expression ‘gateway drug’, but that’s the idea).

The shepherd image for Jesus

The fascinating thought for me is that when Jesus first learned it, as a little Jewish boy, he would of course have had the mental image of God as the shepherd, whereas we Christians, programmed by so many pictures and storybooks, never imagine the shepherd as God, but always Jesus himself.  And when he says to the disciples, ‘I am the good shepherd,’  he is making a very specific claim.  When we sing ‘the Lord is a warrior, the Lord is his name’, we mean God the Father; but ‘the Lord is my shepherd’ means, for us, only Christ.  I think this is why we need the incarnation: it is so much easier to imagine Jesus as the person with the smell of sheep about him.  I have to make a real effort to think of God that way, but for Jesus (who after all knows him far better than we do) and for the psalmist (in this case we are fairly sure that it’s David), it is entirely natural.  In the dark valley, or anywhere else, that is a comforting thought.

©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.

Music for Easter (Saturday Vigil and Easter Sunday)

The Easter Vigil is the greatest event of the Church’s year, the celebration of the most dramatic and exciting moment in human history. So it should be celebratory, dramatic, exciting.  And it is long. Not all parishes do all seven OT readings with their accompanying psalms, but I don’t know which you will choose, so we have settings for all of them.  But even if you only do a few, with a full Mass (including the Gloria, of course) to follow, and starting at night, this is a musical marathon (which I have written about here). I have tried, then, to give you lots of variety to keep people interested, but also not to make the music for Easter too strenuous to sing. Above all, though, I have been striving after joy, because it seems to me that it is the hallmark of the Easter readings.

Not just Psalms

We’ve got some of the best words in the Bible available to sing here, and not just Psalms but also Canticles, bits out of Exodus and Isaiah, and there are even alternatives to choose from for individual readings.  Choose early, because then you can concentrate on what you are actually singing.  I have done compacts wherever possible, to limit the sheer bulk of your folders for the Vigil, but some of the texts are too irregular to compact and I had to give up or try separating out the instruments.

Vigil Readings : salvation history in a nutshell

We start with the Creation (Pss 103/104 or 32/33) and canter through the whole of salvation history so fast that it’s not surprising we get a bit out of breath.  I love the creation psalms, there are lots of them, where we tell God all about the wonderful things he made (which he knows already, but it’s like telling your children how beautiful and clever they are, or your husband that you love him.  Just because you both know something already doesn’t stop you repeating it).  These psalms give me a chance to play with the music, to make the water ripple and the birds sing, to go up for the mountains and go down for the depths of the sea.  It may be unsubtle, but it feels right.

Then there’s Abraham and Isaac, and the ghastly choice Abraham faces, to sacrifice his son, his only son, whom he loves, as God says to him, piling up the facts which make it so ghastly… but then God stops him,  Abraham unties Isaac and they go home rejoicing.   We are left remembering how God had to sacrifice his son, his only son, whom he loved, and he had to go through with it, all because of us.  So the psalm following this reading is a more reflective one (15/16), with words of comfort in the middle verse.

Then the crossing of the Red Sea, so exciting, and the wonderful canticle after it (Exodus 15), all trumpets and triumph.  I really mustn’t go on about all the readings and psalms [in fact, I now do here], or the Webmaster will make acid comments about writing a book rather than a blog, but my other favourites are the Isaiah canticle, where you can hear the water being heaved up out of the well, and the yearning deer after the Seventh Reading, where the CAN convention of using both psalm numbers means we have the longest psalm label on record (41,42/42,43).  This is a brand new CAN psalm, and I was aiming for yearning, but the rhythm of the response words was too strong, so we definitely have a leaping deer here, but still yearning as it bounds.

During Mass

After all this excitement, we have Psalm 117 with a simple Alleluia response.  This psalm comes up a lot over the Easter season, in various permutations, but this is the first time, so I’ve gone for a sober joy here, the great news is still sinking in.  It’s simple, so everyone can join in, but strongly rhythmic, and it’s a three-fold Alleluia as it replaces the usual Alleluia before the Gospel.  No more Lent Gospel Acclamations till next year!

Easter Sunday, Mass during the day

This is the same psalm as in the night, but with a different Response, although you can of course substitute the triple Alleluia version.  I do feel the mood is different now, daylight and daffodils instead of darkness and bonfires, and I would take it a bit faster now that everyone has had a sleep and is fresh again.  I have a very soft spot for this psalm response, as our youngest son was born during Eastertide, and his father had to go off to church that morning leaving me and the very new baby in the hospital, and sing it as cantor.  New life, new hope; indeed ‘this day was made by the Lord; we rejoice and are glad.’  Happy Easter (alleluia alleluia).

© 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.