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With
the establishment at the Restoration of the Anglican chant as the sole solution
for providing music for the psalms a long period of stagnation set in:
from
1660 to 1900 there is little or no development or change of method, Wesley
alone betraying some dissatisfaction, though his work bore little fruit.
During
the eighteenth century the methods of singing the metrical psalm and the
chanted prose psalm had become much alike.
It is quite as easy to sing the
prose psalm to a psalm-tune (by using the first note of each line as the
reciting note) as it is to sing the metrical version of a psalm to an Anglican
chant.
The latter method was certainly tried as the following extract from a
nineteenth century manuscript choir-book copied by the writer at Wheddon Cross
on Exmoor will show;
the chant is the familiar one by R. Langdon, the text by
Charles Wesley:
Example 50:
Compare
also the tune 'Troyte's Chant'—a specially written short chant of a type used
later for some special psalms in The Parish Psalter—found in Hymns A.
& M. to Abide with me, which, like Example 50 above is quite a
successful if dull method of singing the hymn:
it might also, of course, be
sung to an ordinary double chant repeated.
There
are no certain means of knowing how the chanting of the prose psalms was done;
in many books the only pointing given was the Prayer Book colon halfway through
each verse, and presumably the choirmaster pointed the difficult verses in ink
or pencil and left the others to luck and custom.
Wesley's psalter, produced
for his choir at Leeds Parish Church, inserts marks to correspond with the
bar-lines of the chant, which by his time was almost invariably barred as it is
normally today.
The chanting by his day had possibly become formal and stiff
but there is reason to suppose that though it was done at a deliberate pace it
was more elastic than the sort of chanting heard everywhere in 1900.
It is,
indeed, true to say that the extremely stiff chanting still sometimes heard in
churches is no older than Stainer's Cathedral Prayer Book.
[Which used the pointing and methods of the old Cathedral
Psalter.]
The new parish church choirs formed as a
result of the Oxford Movement were often composed of persons with very little
literary feeling;
indeed, one may suppose that before the advent of compulsory
education in 1876 many of them had received only elementary instruction in the
art of reading the printed word.
In his book, therefore, Stainer, who took much
interest in these new choirs, felt obliged to give them all the help he could
and provided the psalter with plenty of marking based on the musical notation
of the chant.
To such un-literary minded choirs the appeal of the music was
stronger than that of the text which was made to fit willy-nilly into a
preconceived chant-rhythm.
Absurdities of sense, 'church' pronunciations, false
quantities, queer accentuations of words and phrases began to abound.
By 1900
the educated man could listen to the psalms sung in church only by leaving his
common sense in the porch with his umbrella.
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Inevitable
reaction followed.
The feeling after freer rhythms in chanting was but one of
the many signs that the clear-cut, foursquare rhythmic outlines of the
Victorians were slowly being replaced.
As early as 1870 or so Wagner was
writing his music dramas in a kind of free recitative which caused
consternation among his aria-loving prime donne.
Research into folk-music and
plainsong, each in its own way rhythmically unfettered, quickened the minds of
composers into new notions of rhythmic balance where two-plus-two did not
always bring the inevitable four.
Men of liberal education, men with a love and
understanding of language, were being attracted to the cloth and organ loft:
Robert Bridges, who did much research into the more unusual poetic metres,
proved himself as interested in religious verse as he was in secular.
It is
thus no wonder that in the matter of chanting—with which Bridges also concerned
himself—dissatisfaction grew and experiments were made.
A spate of newly
pointed psalters followed and much study was undertaken on the principles
involved in good chanting.
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It
soon became clear that the laws underlying true speech had to be reinstated:
the ideal must be rather to fit chant to words than words to chant.
The norm of
good speech was that heard in good reading, not that in casual conversation.
The details began to be clear:
words must have their correct tonic accent (our
FOREfathers, not as hitherto, OUR foreFAThers) and vowels should
have their true length (no long or double notes on short vowels like yet,
spirit, thanksgiving).
In the sentence words must take their stress from
the sense (for THIS God is OUR God for Ever and EVer:
in
the old pointing the second God took length and stress in defiance of
vowel length and sense accent).
Certain difficulties soon became apparent,
notably the very short verses in some psalms.
In Thou art the king of glory:
O Christ, the O in the second half is long but unstressed and Christ is long but stressed, and the whole phrase which contains but one accent has
to be fitted to a musical phrase of four accents.
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Not
only the words presented problems.
Attention was directed to the chant which up
to now had been thought of as a melody with seven accents in alia breve (two-two) time.
Research, however, showed that it was possible to think of the
chant in other rhythms:
in
the chant books of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the chants
were set out in many different forms.
It was noticed, too, that by barring the
chant in the Sapphic rhythm (that of Monk's well-known tune to Abide with me which makes a simple quadruple chant when thought of in this way) more even
results were got for certain verses of the psalms.
Here, then, are the two
versions of the Anglican chant which seem to suit most verses of the psalms:
[See Collected Essays XXI-XXVI by Robert
Bridges, published Oxford University Press, 1955, where by repeating the
reciting note after the first bar-line or repeating melody notes of the chant
interesting rhythmic variants are suggested.
The book also gives examples of
the various barrings used in early chant books.]
Example 51: chant by Doctor William Turner
As
for the last two hundred years all chants have been composed on the alia
breve system it is not always possible to convert them satisfactorily to
Sapphics;
where it is possible the accents are reduced from seven to four, an
obvious advantage for verses whose words contain fewer accents than seven.
[Examples are given later (page 205) of fitting
the words to the two schemes.]
Both the above methods
treat the chant as a hymn-tune, i.e. a melody with fixed accents.
It has,
however, been suggested that the chant can be thought of as containing only
two fixed accents—the final note of each half
[That is in a single chant.
For the purpose of this expose
the double chant is considered as merely two single chants.]
- the other notes taking accent or not at will as in a plainsong
tone.
This is a questionable procedure as there is no doubt that harmony tends
to create its own accents (the less notes two consecutive chords have in common
the stronger the accent), but it works for some difficult verses as will be
shown.
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We
have, then, two systems, the first which we may call the hymn-tune method
giving the chant a fixed number of stresses (seven in alia abreve, four
in Sapphic) and the other, the free-chant method presupposing only two fixed
accents.
In both systems the final word-stress is taken normally on the last
musical accent.
To find the principles involved in fitting the words to the
chant we may take a few verses and fit them to the chant in various ways. In
the verse:
Let us come before his PREsence with THANKSgiving:
and shew ourselves GLAD in him with PSALMS.
we have (neglecting the recited portion which presents no difficulties because there is no melody) four word-accents and shall get the best result by treating the chant as a Sapphic:
Example 52:
The
notation used does not, of course, mean that the beat is strictly regular:
unstressed words, especially those with short vowels, should be sung quickly
and lightly exactly as a good reader would speak them.
The example is sung, as
far as notation can render it, somewhat as follows:
Example 53:
The
Sapphic structure of the chant is felt under the ordinary reading stresses like
a theme hidden in a variation;
the effect, in fact, is something different from
reading pure and simple.
Treating this verse with the alia breve chant
we get:
Example 54:
The
result is not so good, with its unnecessary stress on and and him.
The New Cathedral Psalter.
[The
New Cathedral Psalter, ed. Lang, Scott Holland, Lloyd and Martin. Published
by Novello.]
points the first half of the verse thus:
showing
the poor effect of not making final accents coincide.
In The English Psalter
[The English Psalter, ed.
Macpherson, Bairstow and Buck. Novello, 1925.]
which,
like the New Cathedral, works with the seven accent chant, the pointing
always manages to get the word-stresses to coincide with the musical accents.
The pointing of the second half of another verse taken from some modern
psalters is instructive, the verse chosen could hardly be called a
controversial one, yet there are many variants.
They are all successful and any
choice would be entirely personal:
Example 56a: Pointing for New Cathedral Psalter
Example 56b: Pointed to the Sapphic Chant
Example 56c: Pointing from English and Oxford Psalter
Example 56d: Pointing from Parish Psalter
Further
study would show that modern pointed psalters tend to use each of the rhythmic
systems of barring chants as occasion dictates, awkward verses usually
requiring a departure from the norm:
the New Cathedral and English psalters, however, use the alia breve chant more or less exclusively,
the latter relying on other methods to ease difficult situations, as will be
shown.
The Parish Psalter [The
Parish Psalter, ed. Nicholson. Faith Press.] uses
the alia breve or the Sapphic freely alternating, while The Oxford
Psalter [The Oxford Psalter. Oxford University Press.] is freer still, the pointing
often presupposing the free chant, more often the Sapphic and seldom the alia
breve.
Pointing can be judged only in performance.
The mere possession of a
well pointed psalter will not ensure a good rendering:
one choir will attain
excellent results from a psalter which in the hands of another produces
nonsense.
Choirs who are fortunate enough to contain members with a sense of
literary values can soon be made keen on solving the fascinating problems of
pointing;
with other choirs ideals must be restricted, though much can be done
with the use at rehearsals of gramophone recordings.
[Those interested would do well to apply the principles
described above to the other published psalters not mentioned here.]
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The
numerous short half-verses in the psalms cause much difficulty and it is
interesting to note the various solutions offered by modern pointings.
In Psalm
115 which abounds in such verses we find:
eyes have they and see not.
noses have they and smell not.
Both
phrases occur in the second half of the verse where the chant in alia breve has four accents.
In reading there are but two accents, on eyes, see, and noses, smell with a subsidiary stress (rhetorical, not a sense
accent, though the point is one of personal predilection) on have, so
that have they and forms a dactyl or musical triplet.
Eyes, though
monosyllabic, has a long vowel.
Each phrase contains two (or three) accents
only.
Such are the data of the problem.
The New Cathedral pointing
cannot be considered a very satisfactory solution:
Example 57: Pointing from New Cathedral Psalter
It
lengthens the short vowel of have and gives unwarrantable stress to they.
A slightly better result is got in The Psalter Newly Pointed [The Psalter Newly Pointed (S.P.C.K. 1925).] by treating the chant as a Sapphic thus:
Example 58: Pointing from Newly Pointed Psalter
This
gives two notes to the word and (short vowel) though, sung lightly and
quickly, the two notes on the short vowel are not distressing.
By clamping
verses together and thus hiding the parallel structure of the text— very
obvious and dramatic here—the English psalter achieves with the alia
breve chant an otherwise good result by neglecting the reciting note (it is
made to carry the first half of the verse) from the first phrase and by taking
the second phrase on the first half of the chant, thus:
Example 59:
Here
the second phrase also uses a device suggested by Bridges, that of repeating
the reciting note after the first bar-line, making at that place a bar of
three-two time.
The result is quite good.
[There is much to be said for using chants of varying
structure, chiefly for psalms of special difficulty.
Little has been done in
this direction.
See Free Chant Canticles by S. H. Nicholson (Faith
Press) for the method applied to the canticles which in these particular
settings come off remarkably well in performance.
It is also possible that the
notation used in this book (the words are placed under the chant in their
correct positions) would solve many singers' problems if applied in pointed
psalters to difficult psalms.]
The Parish psalter
cuts the Gordian knot by singing the whole psalm to a shortened chant having
only three accents in the second half instead of the usual four—a successful
solution.
In the Oxford psalter still another solution is found by
presupposing a free chant with only two final accents. Written out as sung it
goes thus:
Example 60: Pointing from the Oxford Psalter
As an
alternative suggestion, the Parish psalter uses a device also suggested
by Bridges, that of shifting the colon:
the result is novel and interesting:
Example 61: Alternative Pointing from Parish Psalter
Or perhaps it is better noted as a Sapphic:
Example 62:
In
both notations the semibreves on speak not, hear not are, of course,
sung as short notes copying the natural reading of the words.
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In
chanting the pointing of the text is only one of the difficulties.
The psalms
sung solo would present few problems.
The actual result at performance is as
much the choirmaster's problem as that of the editor.
Cathedral choirs, because
of their daily singing, can quickly achieve excellent results.
In parish church
choirs the problem is harder since they sing together only two or three times a
week.
There is an easy solution to their difficulties which requires only
courage and patience on the part of the clergy and congregation:
it is that of
restricting the psalm repertory until the psalms sung are known by heart.
A
start can be made with the canticles and about six psalms.
When they are
working well gradual additions can be made.
It is difficult to define the
congregation's part in chanting the psalms—either its actual part or its ideal
part.
History shows that the congregation has seldom been able to tackle the
psalms except in metrical translations.
Experience shows, however, that the
congregation can, in the course of a year or two, get to know the pointing by
heart when the repertory of psalms is temporarily restricted.
By long
familiarity they learnt—some of them— the old pointings:
by similar means they
will learn the new.
But if it takes a choir many months of hard but fascinating
labour to achieve a good result in chanting, a congregation of sensible and
enthusiastic people will not expect to acquire proficiency without a similar
expenditure of effort and patience.
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Modern
psalters can be judged at the bar of the principles mentioned above.
If it is
ever produced, the ideal psalter will not restrict itself to any one method;
the psalms vary too much for that.
Some psalms will need specially written
chants, short verses will need their own treatment—which need not be
uniform—alternate 'proper' chants should undoubtedly be provided which suit
their own psalm, and the chants themselves should have most of their
passing-notes eliminated.
As for the text of the psalms, it is high time that it
was paragraphed and expurgated of pre-Christian cursings.
It is a pity that the
short verses cannot be retranslated;
it would be easy to do but impossible to
popularise.
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