Music for Mass blog

When is a psalm not a psalm? When it’s from Daniel

Coming up shortly, the Daniel Canticle

Trinity Sunday, though a major feast, does not have the same readings every year (unlike Christmas, Epiphany, and Easter). Some feasts are inconsistent (Pentecost Vigil has the same readings every year, but the Day Mass varies according to which year it is). This sort of thing is nerdy but crucial for me and Volmar the Vebmeister; we check obsessively so that you can trust what’s on the website (and we are very sorry when we get it wrong). Sometimes the readings change but not the Psalm, sometimes vice versa; I think it’s a question of how many excellent readings there are on a given feast, which it is desirable to fit in.

Trinity Sunday psalms

So Trinity Sunday, being one of the most ineffable feasts, has three full sets of readings, and three different psalms. Year B has Psalm 32/33, Blessed the people the Lord has chosen to be his own, and Year C the beautiful Psalm 8, O Lord our God, how wonderful your name in all the earth. Both psalms are about the wonders of Creation and man’s stewardship. But Year A, our current year, is different. The Responsorial Psalm is not even out of the Book of Psalms, it is a Canticle out of the Book of the prophet Daniel.

A Canticle in litany form

The Daniel Canticle is different in its form from our usual Responsorial psalms. It is a litany, where short lines alternate with a repeated refrain. Most people have come across litanies to Our Lady, with the response ‘Pray for us’ after each of her titles, and litanies of lists of saints which work the same way. It is easy to sing or say litanies antiphonally, because they divide so clearly. The UK/Eire and OZ Lectionaries have preserved its form as a litany, and unlike other litanies in the Psalter (Pss 116/117, 135/136), where the shape tends to be adjusted to resemble verse and chorus psalms (like Pss 45/46, 66/67), here the Response is made by the litany words cutting in after every line. So it’s different from our usual Sunday shape, but it is really effective (for one of my cantors, this is her favourite one to sing). The US and the CAN versions have been regularised, to make it look more like the standard Responsorial Psalm, and consequently easier for the congregation, presumably. The CAN version works because all the stanzas have been kept brief enough to keep the rhythm going. The US version has differing stanza lengths, which would have made it impossible to treat as a litany, because the rhythm is broken up.

a bit of rhythm makes the ship easier to handle

Litanies of the sea : shanties

What sort of song has alternating lines with a caller and a chorus? Sea shanties, that’s what. I love sea shanties. They are work songs, for a task where everyone needs to work together and in synch, like hauling up an anchor, hoisting a sail, turning a capstan or similar. It doesn’t have to be maritime, but that seems to be where this style originated. The song helps to keep the rhythm steady, the singing together keeps everyone invested, and the caller can use the traditional words or improvise and alter as he or she chooses, so long as the rhythm is the same. One of my favourites, and an absolute classic, is Old Billy Riley. Liturgy is only a different sort of work, so sea shanties are entirely appropriate. I was fascinated to discover that R. R. Terry, the Victorian Catholic convert, musicologist and for a long time choir director at Westminster Cathedral, published The Shanty Book, Part 1, Sailor Shanties, which you can read or download at Project Gutenberg. He was also at least partly responsible for the revival of Tudor Church music. He seems to have been a very complicated man about whom the details are surprisingly sketchy for the date, but we definitely share some interests.

The Book of Daniel

inside the fiery furnace, from a fresco in the catacombs

The Daniel Canticle comes from the third chapter of the Book of Daniel, and it is part of the song of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego in the fiery furnace. The Book of Daniel is absolutely bizarre in many ways, written about 160 B.C., during a persecution and before the Maccabean revolt. It’s the last book of messianic prophecy before the New Testament, though it doesn’t look like it because the minor prophets (which are historically older) are usually printed in a group after it, because they are all short. Daniel is filed in with ‘Major prophets’.

Daniel, an early vegan

Daniel is one of a group of young Jewish captives, selected to be servants of King Nebuchadnezzar. They are given new non-Jewish names, and they are to be trained and educated for three years, and fed from the king’s own table. But Daniel is worried about observing Jewish food laws, so he asks the chief eunuch to allow him not to eat the food provided. The chief eunuch is a kind man, so he explains that if Daniel and his three friends look thinner than the other boys, the king will be angry (and probably kill the chief eunuch). Daniel, possibly one of the first vegans in Western literature, offers the chief eunuch a deal : for ten days, Daniel and his companions will eat only vegetables and drink water, and then the chief eunuch can compare their looks with those of the other boys still eating from the king’s table. Daniel and the boys (of course) look better and are in better health than the others after the ten days, so they are allowed to continue, and when their training is over, Nebuchadnezzar chooses them out of the bigger group as his favoured servants because they are better and wiser in every way…..and Daniel can interpret dreams, as Joseph did, long ago.

Disaster strikes…

The story continues, with Nebuchadnezzar having dreams and killing all the other sages and diviners, who cannot help him because he cunningly demands that they first tell him his dream and then interpret it. (Daniel can do this, because God tells him the answers.) Nebuchadnezzar is a classic bad king, violent, rash and arrogant. He erects a statue to be worshipped whenever ‘horn, pipe, lyre,trigon, harp, bagpipe or any other instrument’ is heard. (This list of instruments is given, like an incantation, four times.)

The fiery furnace

here is the statue (in very fetching spotted pyjamas) with everyone else worshipping it, and the furnace below, with the angel protecting Daniel’s friends

This is in the province of Babylon, where Daniel’s three friends are governing on the king’s behalf, while Daniel stays behind at court. The three friends refuse to worship the statue, and Nebuchadnezzar orders the fiery furnace to be made seven times hotter than usual, and the three youths to be cast into it. The men who throw them in are burnt up just by approaching, but Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego walk around in the flames unscathed, praising God and praying. First there is a long prayer from Abednego, but he’s reverted to his Jewish name, so he’s called Azariah. It is a prayer that recognises and repents the sin which has placed the Jews in captivity and under persecution (this is why his Jewish name is used, I think, because he is representing his people here), and begs God for help. It’s a very beautiful prayer, which the Church uses for Morning Prayer on Tuesday of Week 4. Several phrases in it are very familiar because they quote the psalms (‘and now with all our heart we follow you; we fear you and seek your face’ Daniel 3.41, cf Ps 26/27.8).

Even hotter than seven times hotter

The king’s surviving servants pile more fuel upon the furnace, but the angel of the Lord comes down, fans the flames outward and provides a cool wind in the centre where the young men are walking. Then they sing together (at great length), and (part of) this is our Canticle for Trinity Sunday. Daniel’s story continues, but I won’t follow it further, even though there’s a dragon and the story of Susannah, not to mention the lions. And you won’t find the great litany in a Protestant Bible, as it is officially part of the Apocrypha, though it is used liturgically in the Book of Common Prayer.

Setting it to music : UK and OZ versions

Many shanties are modal or even minor, like the folk songs they descended from, but the words of the Daniel Canticle are blissfully joyful, so there’s no need for anything except a major key. A rolling rhythm is very important. The OZ and the UK version have slightly different words (and therefore tunes) for the Response, but they work in the same way. The Response is short, but comes twice in each verse. I decided to make the two versions slightly different, so that the movement felt more satisfactory : the first Response after line 1 goes up, to keep things going, and the second after line 3 comes down to make the end of the stanza. This means that it is easy to feel where you are. It’s important to explain to your congregation how it works (or at least to those who come early enough before Mass), but it’s so simple that it takes only a couple of minutes to get across. Then printing it on the page was tricky, to make it clear. I’ve put both Responses together at the beginning, because it actually works to sing them like that, and it gives you a neat beginning and end, which can be tricky with a litany. I would sing it through, then get them to sing it, then sing the whole psalm, and repeat the double Response to finish. And do sing it with a swing! It should remind you of hauling on a rope or something like that.

CAN and US versions

I didn’t double up the Response in the CAN version, because the First Response in each stanza has been left out in their Lectionary. The lines are so short, though, that each stanza is still only four bars, and the two bar response feels like the right weight. The US version is much more wordy, with the stanza including the alternating lines of praise as well as the congregation then having a Response with the same feel but slightly different wording. The length of the stanzas varies (first one is double in length, last one has three lines), so it works like an ordinary irregular psalm, but more repetitive.

Other Canticles as psalms

There are four different Canticles which are used as Responsorial psalms : one from Exodus (the song after Pharaoh’s host has been drowned in the Red Sea), which we use at the Easter Vigil; one from Isaiah (the fountain of salvation), used at the Easter Vigil, the Baptism of the Lord and Third Sunday of Advent C; the Magnificat, surprisingly only for Third Sunday of Advent B; and this one from Daniel, used for Trinity Sunday A and also for the extended version of the Pentecost Vigil. I am sorry that we won’t get to use it this year if all our churches are still shut, because it is a wonderful expression of joy and confidence in extremely difficult circumstances! Very appropriate, then; maybe we should all just sing it to cheer ourselves up.

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A hymn for our times : O God of earth and altar

A Victorian hymn for today

G.K. Chesterton’s O God of earth and altar is a hymn which deserves to be better known, and one which feels particularly relevant to the time we are living in. He wrote it for The English Hymnal which was published in 1906, as a ‘Prayer for the Nation’, and it has been rightly described as ‘vigorous’.

The text

1 O God of earth and altar,
bow down and hear our cry,
our earthly rulers falter,
our people drift and die;
the walls of gold entomb us,
the swords of scorn divide,
take not thy thunder from us,
but take away our pride.

2 From all that terror teaches,
from lies of tongue and pen,
from all the easy speeches
that comfort cruel men,
from sale and profanation
of honour and the sword,
from sleep and from damnation,
deliver us, good Lord!

3 Tie in a living tether
the prince and priest and thrall,
bind all our lives together,
smite us and save us all;
in ire and exultation
aflame with faith, and free,
lift up a living nation,
a single sword to thee.

The tune

It is the perfect length for a hymn, three verses of eight short lines. Even if you don’t know the tune of a hymn, three verses gives you a chance to join in : one to listen, one to attempt and clarify, and the last to sing with conviction. This is just as well, as O God of earth and altar is sung to two possible tunes among the Anglicans, King’s Lynn by Ralph Vaughan Williams, or Llangoffan, a Welsh folk melody. With typical Catholic stubbornness, we usually sing it to a different tune, Willsbridge by R. L. de Pearsall. He is himself a very colourful character, if you look him up, and his tune does fit the words well. It’s a long time since I’ve heard any version of this hymn sung, however.

Long rolling sentences

I have a particular weakness for hymns where each verse is one sentence. I think it can give them great strength and cumulative power. Of the Father’s love begotten is my usual example (though its two last verses each contain an extra full stop). It’s something that you can do with a translation from the Latin (which Of the Father’s love begotten is), as Latin has so many grammatical ways of extending a sentence without ambiguity. Sing, my tongue, the glorious battle and O Godhead hid are other examples. It is also not unusual in translations from German; Now thank we all our God for example. But it’s not just translations; there are several English originals, including the much-loved Dear Lord and Father of mankind (mostly), Thou, whose almighty word, O Jesus Christ, remember, and so on.

Elegant prosody

Technically, Chesterton’s poem is superb, alternating a double rhyme with a single one. This could sound affected or comic, as English is not so rich in double rhymes as some other languages (it’s easier to do in French or Italian, for example), but here it simply flows. Some effort is evident in the third verse, where Chesterton has to use the archaic ‘thrall’ to make the rhyme, but he pulls it off because so much of the language of the hymn is in straightforward monosyllables, and the reverberations of the archaic word are precisely what he is emphasizing. The plainness of nearly all the vocabulary is a very fine example of art to hide art. The language is simple and direct, another reason why it has not dated, and it is built, like Jerusalem, strongly compact, with no words wasted.

Analysis : first verse (and a quibble)

The first verse is a direct appeal to God, and here I would like to make a tentative suggestion. The apostrophe is ‘O God of earth and altar’, and I am not sure what it means. Then it occurred to me that it might be an error of transcription (incredibly common, as anyone who ever copies anything will know : this is why people are so attached to the copy and paste function, whose inventor died recently). I think it’s meant to be ‘O God of hearth and altar’, i.e. both a private and public God, both intimate and ceremonial; but the mistake occurred because ‘earthly’ is written just two lines down. (I also think that having ‘earthly’ there is another reason why Chesterton would not have used ‘earth’ in the first line.) I can’t go hunting for manuscripts to check in the current lockdown, but Chesterton himself once wrote a poem about how bad his writing was, and if you look at some examples of his handwriting, you can see how the confusion might have crept in.

Full of charcter, but not the clearest….

Apart from this minor point, Chesterton is starting his appeal here precisely in the same way that the psalmist does so often : O God in heaven, bend down and listen to me.

Then he sets out the difficulties of the situation in which we find ourselves. This is a hymn of community, one of the reasons why I like it; he is writing as himself, but for us all. There is nothing selfish, patronising or high-handed in his distress or his appeal. Apart from one reference to ‘cruel men’, it is exclusively ‘our’ and ‘us’, with no exceptions made. It is indeed a ‘Prayer for the Nation’, and as true now as it was in 1906. He is generous; he does not blame ‘our earthly rulers’, but he sees that they cannot solve the problem, and ‘our people’ are dying. He blames ‘the walls of gold’ which (sharp image) ‘entomb’ us, he sees that we can’t act together because we do not value each other (diagnosis of the last x years of politics), and then he sounds like the psalmist again : ‘take not thy thunder from us,/ but take away our pride’.

Like the psalmist, Chesterton values God’s thunder. He is calling upon the God who rides upon the wings of the wind (Ps 103/104), who has clouds and darkness as his raiment (Ps 96/97, and I could go on). This is the God who is unassailably Other, and powerful. This is who we need; no one else has been able to help. This situation is beyond us and out of our control; we need God to step in.

Second verse

The second verse is a sort of inverted litany, like the old Scottish ‘From ghoulies and ghosties…’, but it’s fascinating to see what Chesterton prays for us all to be delivered from, because it’s so modern. And he’s a writer, a journalist, so it’s this area of danger he knows best. He offers us a list which starts with ‘all that terror teaches’ – and this, remember, in 1906, when the Dark Web was a long way off. ‘Lies of tongue and pen’ – all the fake cures for corona being spread through social media? ‘All the easy speeches that comfort cruel men’ is, I feel, a bit more time-specific, but I’m not sure that I will still feel that if we continue to discuss euthanasia as we seem likely to do. ‘From sale and profanation of honour and the sword’ – yes, we have seen plenty of that; ‘from sleep and from damnation’ – this is a tight encapsulation of the Niemoller dictum. Enough frightening things there to give you nightmares, so from all this, ‘deliver us, Good Lord!’ , with an unusual exclamation point, for once feeling fully justified.

Third verse

The third verse emphasizes again the importance of community. In this public health crisis in which we find ourselves, we cannot simply act and hope to be safe as individual atomies, we have to think about the threat and protection of us all. So Chesterton prays for us to be tied and bound together, those in earthly authority (‘the prince’), spiritual authorities (‘the priest’), and – the rest of us. ‘Thrall’ is an Old English word (used very deliberately by the man who wrote The Ballad of the White Horse), with its root in slavery or servitude, and here meaning ‘the ordinary person not in control’, which feels exactly right. Once we are all wrapped into an indivisible bundle, Chesterton asks God to ‘smite us and save us all’. Note ‘and’, not ‘or’. God can do whatever he likes, and we have deserved whatever he does, because he is justice personified; but after the justice comes mercy, as Pope Francis always stresses. After the terror and the catastrophe, there will be the result. God will have made us into ‘a living nation,/ a single sword’, which will be ‘aflame with faith and free’ to do what God made it for.

The best hymns double as prayers, and this is one which clearly does that. The whole movement of the words follows the gathering together of all the people into a unity, and then lifting this up in supplication. It is a hymn which does not pretend that nothing is wrong, or that there are easy answers; but it beautifully expresses the hope to which we all cling. I am sure it already felt prophetic and apposite when it first came out, in the beginning years of the twentieth century, amid so many wars and social upheaval. I find it amazing that after so long, it still feels as if it were written for us, for now. I also find it comforting.