Retrospectives on Composing for the Church’s Worship, Part 3

This post continues 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.

In 1998, GIA Publications, Inc., published my third attempt at setting Psalm 23 for liturgical use as part of the recorded As The Deer collection. I had already been introduced to the poetry of Fr. Francis Patrick Sullivan, SJ, through his 1974 volume Table Talk with the Recent God, so I was very excited to explore his Lyric Psalms: Half a Psalter (1983). (As a side note, I have learned that Fr. Sullivan served as a member of the International Commission on English in the Liturgy from 1982-1988. I wonder if he was a contributor to ICEL’s magnificent Consultation on a Liturgical Psalter (1983), whose “Brief on the Liturgical Psalter” and “The Psalm Texts with Critical Notes” still represent to me a pinnacle in inviting scripture scholars, poets, and composers to collaborate on sung texts for liturgical worship.)

The General Instruction of the Roman Missal #61 states that “[i]t is preferable for the Responsorial Psalm to be sung…. Hence the psalmist, or cantor of the Psalm, sings the Psalm verses, while the whole congregation sits and listens, normally taking part by means of the response, except when the psalm is sung straight through [emphasis added], that is, without a response.” While I assumed that the in directum method of singing the psalm text primarily referred to using a Latin-language Gradual from the “Graduale Romanum” or “Graduale Simplex,” it opened up to me another compositional avenue for creating a setting of the Responsorial Psalm as an art song. The combination of this directive along with my appreciative response to Fr. Sullivan’s paraphrase of Psalm 23 led me to create a setting for solo voice without congregational sung interventions. Employing oboe, flute and harp as instrumental accompaniment, the setting tries to mirror the irregular prosodic structure of the poet’s paraphrase in a lyric style, probably influenced by Ralph Vaughn Williams or Benjamin Britten.

A performance of this setting of the Shepherd Psalm appears at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGWs1f_Wzpk.