Early church music consisted of plainsong chants, one notable pioneer being St. Gregory, father of Gregorian chant. Simplified Anglican chant has made it easy to sing the psalms, which historically predate early church music by centuries, were the hymns sung by David and the tribes of Israel. Essentially, both the psalms and chants are sung prayers.

Every church has a particular tradition of chanting the psalms. The Sundays after Epiphany are from January 7th through February 11th. For the sake of simplicity, and to improve our chanting experience, we will be using the same responsorial setting every Sunday throughout Epiphany. This setting consists of two parts: a responsorial refrain and the chant tones. The refrain, based on the hymn “How bright appears the morning star,” was designed to be very familiar. That not only helps us (the choir) but also the congregation to join us in singing the psalms. The chant tones are taken directly from a setting we have sung in the tradition we’ve been used to singing over the past years. It is simple enough to sing parts if desired, but the range of the melody (the soprano line) is accessible by all sections.

But, hey! Don’t take my word for it. See for yourself.

Let’s walk through the Psalm (72:1-7,10-14) as we will sing it on January 7.

1. Refrain intro on organ
2. Refrain (Choir)
3. Refrain (Congregation and Choir)
4. Verses 1-4 (Choir or soloist)
5. Refrain
6. Verses 5-8,10
7. Refrain
8. Verses 11-14
9. Refrain

Please notice I added separator lines to make it easy to know where you are on the page. The chant tones are in two parts, designed for pairs of verses. We are singing four verses to keep the psalm as short as possible. The verses are numbered and there is a symbol (Ɍ) to indicate when to sing the Refrain. I added a note to remind you not to turn back to page one for verse 11.

To learn the chant tones, I suggest you first sing them on “la” and then practice the first verse, repeating each phrase several times until you can memorize the melody. Once you are comfortable with the sequence, only then proceed to the other verses. I’ll be adding Psalm 29 to the Psalm section on the Rehearsal Tracks page soon.

One final suggestion for the beginnings of the verses that are monotonal (staying on the same pitch) is to remember that the guiding impetus is the natural inflection of speech paired with the stress of the important words and accented syllables. For example, verse one begins with:
Give the King your
The important words are “Give” and “King”. Both words are single syllable words so you needn’t worry about accented syllables in this example. We give more weight to the important words, meaning we give less weight to the article “the” and the possessive pronoun “your”. Also, because we are reading phrases, we know that “the” should be pronounced “thə” (schwa, or “uh”) and not “thē” (long “ee”) because the next sound is the consonant “K” in “King”. Paying attention to important words and accents forces us to read the text with meaning. Only when we can speak the text with meaning and intent can we ever hope to be “together”. No directing in the world can ever substitute for that necessary, cerebral process. The way we give less weight to words less important is to spend less time on them when we chant. The difference between how we stress important and less important words in normal speech is moderate and not exaggerated. It’s the same in chant, to help the listener better comprehend the text. After all, isn’t the purpose of speech and sung text, communication?
“Give the King your” is an incomplete thought (the sentence continues) plus the impetus is to move to the next important word in the text “justice”. So also should we continue to the next tone and not linger on the lesser important word “your”. We, as a choir, can learn to feel these things together and create the ensemble so that the directing gently prods us in the way we all can already sense. Of course, rehearsal is how we get there. Let’s agree to work smart, not hard.

(Please note: The scripture readings will not be on “The Baptism of Our Lord” but, instead, The First Sunday after Epiphany, so the psalm had to be changed.)