'I've never liked the Psalms...': Part 1.

On the face of it, church music and the psalms should be a perfect match.

I mean, the Bible actually has songs in it already - pre-made! They even have musical directions! (albeit inscrutable ones. I take it that 'according to Gittith' was one lisping psalmist's way of saying 'let there be rock!' But I digress.) Best of all, if someone comes to nitpick over the theological emphases of your song you can hit them with a somersaulting double-roundhouse 'It's in the Bible, suckah!' Five hundred points!

But, by and large, songs based directly on the Psalms are pretty rubbish. Why is this? As fair dinkum Bible songs they should be so great, but I personally usually find them a little odd and off-putting. Now, whilst this may say more about me vs. the psalms than it does about our church music, I think there's something here worth thinking about.

My initial thought is that this is probably related to the issue of translation. Language is flexible, and texts can be translated into other languages. However, there is inevitably some loss of meaning. This problem is compounded when it comes to translating poetry, where how something is written is just as important (if not more!) as the actual content. I suspect we feel this meaning loss more acutely when we try to adapt the Psalms (which are Hebrew poetry, and follow the rules of Hebrew poetry) into whatever kind of musical style church music is (what musical genre would you say church music actually is? Is it kind of early nineties middle-of-the-road soft pop/rock? Doesn't seem like a bilious enough description...). I reckon not enough thinking is being done about how the fact that a Psalm is a Hebrew song shapes its meaning, and what sort of features of 'modern' music might be equivalents to those the features of Hebrew music which the song depends on for its meaning. I think that assuming that something that used to be a song (when it was in Hebrew, before Christ) will automatically transfer across and effortlessly slide into the Western, 20th Century conception of what a song is.

So I think this is actually an optimistic post. Psalms should make for great songs, if we think a little bit harder about what translation actually is. More to come.

Image from http://dlibrary.acu.edu.au/research/theology/ejournal/Issue2/John_Thornhill.htm