Psalm 51 on Wednesday night went well, I thought: the congregation sang their response and the choir led well. There were even some positive comments after the service!
For this morning’s service I wanted to keep things simple — fitting in the extra music for Ash Wednesday had already squished our rehearsal time a bit. So I decided we’d do the same thing, using a metrical version of Psalm 32 and an appropriate congregational response.
I had originally thought to go with the Isaac Watts paraphrase of the psalm but in the end settled on Sternhold and Hopkins; I don’t entirely remember why. That runs to eleven stanzas in Common Metre (CM) and a response after every verse would have added 50% to the length, so I looked at the version in the Common Worship: Daily Prayer Psalter to see when to add the responses. I settled on Caithness as a tune because I know the choir know reasonably well, but not so well that singing different words than they’re used to will be disconcerting.
Here’s the response we used:
As with Psalm 51 on Wednesday, the notes in the response are the same as the last line that the choir sings, which makes it easier for the congregation to pick things up. Again, I thought it went well. It’s very hard to hear from the organ but I’m told the congregation did sing the response. I was glad to have chosen something simple, as in the end the usual weeknight rehearsal was cancelled due to illness and we only had the pre-service rehearsal this morning to work on this psalm. It was certainly very different from the setting of Psalm 32 that London Gallery Quire sang this evening at Manor Road United Reformed Church, but still appropriately cheerful, I think. More on the Manor Road service in another post!
Next week is Psalm 121, one of my favourites. The plan is to use the non-metrical Common Worship text this time, set to a lovely little chant by Phocion Henley, with, (guess what?) a congregational response based on the last line. We started learning it this morning, and the tune seems fairly solid but fitting the words to it will be more difficult. I’ll be sure to update with further details!
