This post is the first in the Obsculta Preaching Series, sponsored by the Obsculta Preaching Initiative at Saint John’s School of Theology and Seminary. In these posts, our authors engage a variety of ways in which scripture, preaching, and liturgical worship interact with the life of the faithful.
Katie Harmon recently invited me to offer some perspectives on what factors might go through a composer’s head in the process of creating a piece of music for liturgical worship and if they have changed (at least in my case) since the days immediately after the Second Vatican Council until now. To narrow it down and to compare apples with apples, I decided to look at how I’ve set Psalm 23 from 1968 until 2020.
My first recorded collection of liturgical music, titled “Singing in the Light,” appeared in 1968. Published by the World Library of Sacred Music when I was a junior studying at our Archdiocesan minor seminary, Nazareth Hall, it betrays many of the characteristics of worship music produced in the “folk Mass” period. (Without sharing too many embarrassing details from the experience, I seem to remember that the entire collection was recorded in a single session with another session devoted to mixing the tape recordings for reproduction on vinyl; the sessions cost a grand total of $800.)
While still in grade school I had heard Joseph Gelineau’s setting of Psalm 23 sung in English by our parish choir. I was immediately taken by the antiphon melody with a range of an octave sung (rather reluctantly) by the congregation and by the melody for the verses sung by a soloist with a range of a tenth. (It took me years to discover the theory behind the composition: modal melodies and harmonies; musical settings of regularly pulsed [“sprung rhythm”] texts; short easily-remembered congregational refrains intercalated between strophes of the psalm text sung by a cantor or schola.)
My own setting was created for worship with my high-school seminary classmates. The antiphon (like my Gelineau-model limited to an octave, but unlike Gelineau in a lower tessitura) was intended for untrained male voices singing in unison. The verses were intended to be sung by two cantors, but when the time came to record them, I sang both parts, not always perfectly matching the unison segments. (I even tried to cover up a flub by using an echo effect on one of the voices in the final refrain.) The instrumentation was limited to two over-dubbed 12-string guitars and an electric bass.
Knowing that psalms were poetic texts, but not understanding anything about Hebrew prosody, I tried to paraphrase the Douay-Challoner text in my family Bible by adding end-rhymes. Most obviously I followed the Septuagint/Vulgate numbering system by referring to this text as “Psalm 22.”
Fortunately “Singing in the Light” was not widely distributed, although you can still hear this setting of the Shepherd Psalm at:
It would be more than 20 years before I next attempted to set this psalm.
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