26 PART 1 | FROM COLONIZATION THROUGH THE CIVIL WAR
PSALMBOOKS IN ENGLISH
Both Anglicans and Puritans were enthusiastic congregational singers. Their pre-
ferred psalter (book of metrical psalms) was The Whole Booke of Psalmes, Collected
into Englishe Meter (London, 1562), versifi ed by Thomas Sternhold and John Hopkins,
until 1696, when Nicholas Brady and Nahum Tate produced their New Version of the
Psalms of David. (The earlier work was then dubbed the “Old Version.”) Both psalters
turned the psalms into popular poetry, using rhyme and some of the same sim-
ple verse structures as the secular folk ballads that circulated in oral tradition (see
chapter 2). These metrical psalms—the texts in the Old Testament Book of Psalms,
versifi ed in English and published in psalters—were to play a key role in American
sacred music making through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
The Pilgrims, who arrived in 1620 at Plymouth, Massachusetts, sang from a psal-
ter translated by the Reverend Henry Ainsworth, a clergyman who had brought out
The Book of Psalms: Englished Both in Prose and Metre in Amsterdam in 1612. Although
its verses and tunes differed considerably from those of the “Old Version,” the so-
called Ainsworth Psalter shared several traits with the earlier book: its pocket size
made it easily portable; it printed a tune with each psalm text so that those who
read music could sing the tunes directly from the psalter; and it included far fewer
tunes (39) than psalms (150). The fi rst and last of these traits are true of all psalters
that circulated in New England from then on. Ainsworth didn’t need as many tunes
as psalms because the psalms were cast in standard verse forms, or meters, so wor-
shipers could sing many different texts to the same tune. As an art, then, music
played only a secondary role in early New England psalm singing.
The bone-simple Old Hundred (LG 1.2) is one of the tunes in Ainsworth’s psal-
ter. Also found in the Church of England’s “Old Version” and many English and
American sacred tunebooks since, Old Hundred traces its origin back to the 1550s
and early French Calvinist psalm singing. It is commonly attributed to Louis Bour-
geois, who compiled the music for a psalter Calvin himself published in Geneva in- The tune is brief and straightforward enough to be perfect congregational
fare, as proved by its continued use in Protestant worship today as the Doxology.
No element is more basic to Western music than melody, and centuries of continu-
ous use mark Old Hundred as a good tune. The music consists of four phrases of
equal length. The shapes of the phrases differ, but their rhythm is almost iden-
tical. Melodic movement is neatly balanced between conjunct (stepwise) motion
and disjunct motion (skipping to a note other than an adjacent one), and between
melodic rise and fall. Most of the motion is stepwise, but in each phrase, at least
one skip occurs: a rising fourth in the fi rst two phrases and
a falling third in the next. In the last phrase, three skips of
a third take place, two falling and one rising. That phrase,
which also beg ins w ith an upward leap of a fi fth to the mel-
ody’s highest note, is by far the most active and serves as
the melody’s climax.
Calvinist doctrine dictated that psalm singing in
church services should be in unison: a monophonic ren-
dition of the plain melody only. The homophonic har-
monized version heard here might have been sung by
Puritan settlers in New England outside of church, as part
of recreational music making.
LG 1.2K The psalm tune Old
Hundred, fi rst published in
Geneva in 1561, supplied
the music for Henry
Ainsworth’s version of
Psalm 100 in 1612.172028_01_018-043_r2_mr.indd 26 23/01/13 9:50 AM