Psalms

One of the projects that is on my to-do list (after house-moving and getting the Transcendence infrastructure sorted out) is to do some work encouraging and promoting the use of psalms in worship. There are so many ways to use them and so many musical styles in which to explore their treasures. It seems that I'm not the only one who has noticed the lack of sung scripture in a lot of modern worship songs, and I'm pleased to see that Keith Getty has been thinking on similar lines, as he's just released an album of psalm settings.  Still there is a whole lot more work to do, and a whole lot more musical styles to explore. An easy way of doing psalms is to re-write the words so that they fit with  hymn tunes (Metrical psalms). A new set of these by Adam Carlill, called Psalms for the Common Era has just been published and was flagged up by Praxis in their December newsletter. Adam has translated the texts directly from the Hebrew unlike some metrical versions (including my own humble attempts) which merely copy the English. My copy of this particular psalm book hasn't arrived yet but I look forward to exploring them.  My favourite modern treatment of the psalms currently is Isaac Everett's Emergent Psalter, but then I am also very fond of the ancient plainchant settings. The chant blog contains resources to help you if you are interested in learning them. They are very singable and yet link us to some incredibly ancient music. Yet they can also be used in more modern ways. Some people would probably hate the fact that I quite like chanting them over electronica but it works!