The New Plainsong Psalter

Yesterday I picked up my copy of The New Plainsong Psalter recently written by Christopher Ku, Organ Scholar at Trinity College, and published by ABC. It's meant to be an updated version of Healey Willan's The Canadian Psalter. The Willan Psalter provided Gregorian Chant tones in modern notation (rather than square-note) and pointed the text of the BCP Psalter to be chanted. He also included an appendix with some music for solemn Offices (marriage, burial, evensong, etc.). Ku followed the same approach, providing modern-notation for the tones, but pointed the modern liturgical translation of the psalms (the one found in the BAS as well as the '79 American BCP). Ku did not provide an appendix with music for the Offices, which is too bad in my opinion, but certainly pointing 150 Psalms is work enough!

The closest comparison to draw is with The Plainsong Psalter published by (the American) Church Publishing. Both use the same text, which is a child of the 16th Century Coverdale Psalter that has been in use in Anglican Prayerbooks for literally centuries. The Coverdale Psalter was revised for the American '79 BCP to be more faithful to the Hebrew (Coverdale translated into English from a Latin translation of a Greek translation of the Hebrew original!) The 1970's revision also made the text sound much more modern--eliminating archaic words and constructions and returning to a more plain-spoken style.

The two biggest problems with The Plainsong Psalter, however, are first that the book is too physically big to be used in worship, so liturgy planners are constantly photocopying out pages to make materials to actually sing from in worship. The second problem is the the method of pointing the psalms in the book uses diacritic marks that cannot be conveniently reproduced on a word processor.

Ku's edition, on the other hand, is convenient to hold in the hand or stuff into a pew. It also uses marks that are much easier to reproduce in Word. It is not just a reference book--this piece is meant to be a book to worship with!

I'm much impressed and hope this inspires more parishes to chant the Psalms. There is a spirituality to psalm chanting that is simply too valuable to forget.

-t