Gaelic Psalm singing

Gaelic Psalm singing

Gaelic-speaking congregations of the Presbyterian church confine their congregational praise to the singing of metrical Psalms. This dates from the Reformation in Scotland in 1560, when one of the requirements of reform was that ordinary people should not be deprived of participation in church worship, hitherto the prerogative of clergy and church choirs. For this purpose the Psalms of David, as part of Holy Scripture, were chosen as texts. The folk tunes of British and European origin were chosen for melodies. The psalms were translated into metre, and the metre chosen was that common to those folk songs, especially the English and Scottish ballads. They were in the form of four-line stanzas (derived from the ‘fourteener’ couplets), in a pattern of 4+3, 4+3 (or 8.6.8.6). This rhythmic pattern is very familiar now, especially to congregations of the Presbyterian church, but also to the rest of the English-speaking world. But those who attempted to translate the metrical Psalms into Gaelic probably did not appreciate how difficult their work was to be. The ballad — or Common — metre was not familiar to them (only in very recent times are any poems in Common Metre to be found in Gaelic within a culture where sung poems could be regarded as ancient).

The first 50 psalms appeared in 1659, and the Synod of Argyll produced the full compass of 150 in 1694, following a pause in the work until the Revolution of 1688. How to introduce these texts to the reformed congregations was a problem. On publication of ‘the first fifty’, the Synod of Argyll decreed that ‘because of the people's unacquaintaince with the said Psalms that therefore so much as is to be sung at a time be first read and briefly explained, that the people join in singing them with the better understanding.’ The practice that developed was to have a line chanted, then repeated by the congregation to the selected tune. The standard practice now is for a person to read a portion of the Psalm, to announce how much is to be sung, then read the first two lines. The precentor then starts on his chosen tune and the congregation joins in gradually for the first two lines, having easily committed that much to memory. He chants, or precents the next single line, the congregation sings it, and similarly with the last line of the stanza. Two, three or four stanzas will be sung, and after the first verse each line is precented before being sung by the congregation.

Congregations may have been accustomed to hearing several notes to the syllable from pre-Reformation church choirs, which may account in part for the introduction of ornamentation. The singing may have been slow because of unfamiliarity with the words, and that would make the use of ornamentation more tempting (the tempo used would have to accommodate everyone's understanding of the words as they were being repeated). Whatever the reason, ornamentation became very common throughout Scotland, to the extent that strong measures had to be taken to get rid of it. As well as this, enthusiastic members of the congregation would join the precentor in the last few syllables of his chant, which was meant to be solo. In Gaelic congregations it was thought that the congregations found common metre so bare and unattractive that they slowed down their singing and added extra notes to make the performance more to their liking.

If there was a scarcity of verbal texts, the scarcity of melodic texts would be equally significant. Melodies had to be learned by ear and repeated from memory, and this would give scope for the use of the native modal idiom. The pentatonic scale, the flattened seventh, and a general vagueness of interpretation of the major and minor scales led to changes in the original written forms of the melodies, thus leading to deviations from those. The tune DUNDEE is an example of how the melody became adapted to the native mode. Placing it in the key of G minor, F# is replaced by F throughout, and the second phrase is quite different from the melody as written in most psalters, for example in The Scottish Psalmody (Edinburgh, 1991) compiled by the Free Church of Scotland, where it is indicated that the tune is the same as in the Scottish Psalter of 1929.

It will be difficult for those accustomed to the straightforward singing of Psalm 23 to the tune CRIMOND, or of Psalm 121 (‘I to the hills will lift mine eyes’*) to the tune FRENCH to imagine what this procedure was like, even without the addition of ornamentation of the melody. Scots people protested that they had no difficulty in reading; but there was also a scarcity of books. Even when texts became available, the practice of reading the line persisted in many congregations, in spite of protests against it. A virtue had come to be made of necessity.

The phenomenon of the Gaelic ‘Long Tunes’, for which strange origins were found in 19th-century accounts, is probably explained by the discovery by uninitiated observers of a combination of all those features that have been described. Slow singing, a merging of the precented part with the congregational part, ornamentation and changes from the written melody, all contributed to the distinctive style of singing metrical psalms. Long after musical reformers had got rid of them elsewhere, they persisted in Gaelic-speaking congregations. There are some congregations of the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland who still use ‘putting out the line’ in English singing (Campbell, 2005), but it is only in Gaelic-speaking congregations of the Church of Scotland and the Free and Free Presbyterian Churches that it is more generally used nowadays.

About twenty tunes have been popular in Gaelic-speaking congregations over the last century. There was plenty of opportunity to learn the tunes. Family worship was conducted morning and evening, and a few verses would be sung each time, at least in households where singing was enjoyed. If people went to church only on Sundays, there were three singings then in the morning and evening services; and although it was customary for church members only — those who had experienced a ‘born again’ conversion — to attend mid-week prayer-meetings, three or four singings would take place there. Male heads of households and church members led the praise, but knowing the tunes well was virtually unavoidable. No effort was ever made to suit the tune to the sentiment of the psalm. In fact, precentors seldom knew the name of the tune they were singing: but COLESHILL, DUNDEE, and WALSALL were traditionally chosen for various stages of the twice-yearly communion services to parts of Psalms 116 and 118, with STORNOWAY, MONTROSE or TORWOOD for the final praise to the last three stanzas of Psalm 72.

There is now a certain amount of prestige attached to the practice of precenting which was lacking when the School of Scottish Studies, University of Edinburgh, published Gaelic Psalms from Lewis in 1975, or before the BBC began to use outside broadcasts for a monthly Gaelic Service in the 1960s. Two CDs of Psalm-singing recorded in 2003 in Back Free Church in Lewis sold very quickly; a third, illustrating similarities to the singing of congregations in Alabama, USA, has been equally popular.

The Gaelic words of the metrical psalms have remained unchanged since 1694. The chants and tunes of the Gaelic Psalms have become somewhat standardised, and with the decline of the use of Gaelic in the pulpit, the spontaneity which contributed to the beauty of Gaelic psalm-singing is disappearing. There is not nearly so much ornamentation as there used to be. There are now competitions at the annual Gaelic musical festival, the Royal National Mod, for singing verses of a Psalm in Gaelic, with precenting. Having to be taught the style, with ornamentation, makes the spontaneity even less. Access to the tradition as it used to be is very easy, however, and all it needs to reproduce it is a group of singers with an enthusiastic precentor.

Morag MacLeod

Further Reading and Listening

1. The booklet accompanying Gaelic Psalms from Lewis, [CDTRAX 9006, Greentrax Recordings Limited] may be consulted for more information in a condensed form.
2. To listen to 26 tunes currently used in Gaelic-speaking congregations, Salm volumes 1 and 2 [RR024 and RR031, Ridge Recordings] are an excellent source.
3. Norman Campbell, Reading the Line (Stornoway: the author, 2005).