Psalms in the Early Modern World

Linda Phyllis Austern, Kari Boyd McBride

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317073987
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

Psalms in the Early Modern World is the first book to explore the use, interpretation, development, translation, and influence of the Psalms in the Atlantic world, 1400-1800. In the age of Reformation, when religious concerns drove political, social, cultural, economic, and scientific discourse, the Bible was the supreme document, and the Psalms were arguably its most important book.The Psalms played a central role in arbitrating the salient debates of the day, including but scarcely limited to the nature of power and the legitimacy of rule; the proper role and purpose of nations; the justification for holy war and the godliness of peace; and the relationship of individual and community to God. Contributors to the collection follow these debates around the Atlantic world, to pre- and post-Hispanic translators in Latin America, colonists in New England, mystics in Spain, the French court during the religious wars, and both Protestants and Catholics in England. Psalms in the Early Modern World showcases essays by scholars from literature, history, music, and religious studies, all of whom have expertise in the use and influence of Psalms in the early modern world. The collection reaches beyond national and confessional boundaries and to look at the ways in which Psalms touched nearly every person living in early modern Europe and any place in the world that Europeans took their cultural practices.

PART 1
Communities of Worship

Chapter 1

Listening to the Psalms among the Huguenots: Simon Goulart as Music Editor1

Richard Freedman

In 1597, the Genevan preacher Simon Goulart issued a curious compilation of Psalms and spiritual songs, the Cinquante pseaumes de David avec la musique à cinq parties d’Orlande de Lasso, Vingt autres pseaumes à cinq et six parties, par divers excellents musiciens de nostre temps. In this collection Goulart replaced the original Italian, French, German, or Latin text of selected works by Orlando di Lasso and other Renaissance composers with French translations of the Psalms. The book was hardly the first to attempt a spiritual reformation of contemporary music, a process that can be traced in various forms and places throughout the sixteenth century. But Goulart’s print and a few others are remarkable for their explicit dependence on the language of Psalms as the vehicle for such spiritual transformations and for the eloquence of its preface, in which the editor gives voice to some compelling ideas about music and spiritual practice. Books like the Cinquante pseaumes, in brief, can teach us something about the Psalms and how they were imagined as texts and as sounding experiences by a particular group of believers during the sixteenth century. Taking books like Goulart’s as a point of entry into this acoustical-spiritual world, this essay will consider the idiosyncratic musical Psalmody found here in a series of related contexts: as part of a larger story of forms domestic devotion among the Calvinists, as a segment in the story of how sixteenth-century listeners heard the proper relation of text and tone, and finally as a measure of the power of printed books to shape the reception of the music they contained. But before we turn to each of these themes, we should first pause to learn more about the Cinquante pseaumes and their editor.

Simon Goulart—Calvinist Editor

Originally from the town of Senlis (not far from the famous French cathedral town of Beauvais), by 1566 Goulart settled in Calvin’s Geneva as a preacher. He eventually rose to prominence as a member of the civic elites, serving also as a leading figure in the governance of the Calvinist church. But in addition to his official roles, Goulart also wrote on a wide range of spiritual topics and devoted considerable energy to the redaction of literature for pious Protestant readers. His tastes ranged far and wide, from the philosophical writings of Seneca to the Essays of Montaigne.2 Goulart’s expurgated version of the creation story, La Sepmaine, by the humanist Guillaume de Saluste Du Bartas, assimilates that great cyclic poem to the rhetoric of Calvinist piety.3 He prepared prose commentaries on Biblical quotations (in the Quarante tableaux de la morte of 1607) and even published some of his own spiritual sonnets (in Bernard de Montmeja’s Poèmes chrestiennes of 1574).4 In these and other ways, Goulart’s writings figure centrally in a movement (especially strong during the 1570s and 1580s) among Protestant authors who sought to appropriate the language of pulpit oratory and of the devotional tradition as a means of spiritual expression in their work.

Simon Goulart was also keenly interested in music, both despite and on account of the adversity that surrounded him on all fronts. “Ten years ago,” he reports in the preface to the Cinquante pseaumes,

in order to satisfy the worthy wish of some honorable men, I accommodated the text of the Psalms of David to some French, Italian, and German songs, as well as some Latin motets of Orlande de Lassus, prince of musicians of our century. Since that time, this entire project has remained hidden in the chaos of sufferings that have extended far and wide [see transcription and translation as Document 1, below].5

Of course, Goulart’s Calvinist readers would have understood only too well the breadth and depth of the “sufferings” endured by French Protestants in the years following massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day in 1572. Goulart does not dwell on the particulars of these events, no more than he identifies the “honorable men” who originally prompted him to undertake the project. Instead he draws us further into a private domain, even into the clutter of his study, where early in 1576 he “found” many of the pieces suddenly, “while moving certain papers:”

Nevertheless it has come to pass, without my being able to say how, that at the beginning of this year, while moving certain papers, I found many pieces of the collection, which, upon review by some friend, it gave them the desire to see this first volume brought to light. Their entreaty gave me over promptly (and perhaps too soon) to promise them I would do so. I now report to them: the project is done.

As this passage suggestions, the Cinquante pseaumes were not only the product of long gestation, they also were the result some collaborative effort. First prompted by the “worthy wish” of “honorable men,” Goulart later presented his newly recovered Psalms for review by “some friend” before offering them to the Protestant public. But there is still more to the layered story of the Cinquante pseaumes, he continues, for in addition to 50 compositions by Lasso, Goulart has also acquired 20 other pieces, “some made expressly in conjunction with the music that sets them, and some accommodated to the harmonies of secular chansons by some other professors of music.” Apparently of these pieces were sent to Goulart by their composers, including one who preferred to remain anonymous (“who for good reason, I judge, did not wish to reveal himself—nor did I have the curiosity to inquire, even though I was not ignorant of the place of his residence”), and also some Psalm tune arrangements he received directly from the composer Alfonso Flores in the Calvinist city of Nîmes,6

([and] who has started to put his hand to all of the Psalms of David, has bound himself to combine in each of these the ecclesiastical melody in one of the voices, and retain the tune almost plainly in all of the others), has generously sent me from Nîmes in Languedoc some pretty samples: [he has] decided to pursue this, if he finds a patron. In order to let these works be known I have included three pieces of his making in this first collection.

With the help of these and other musicians, he continues, Goulart hoped to edit two further volumes like the Cinquante pseaumes, thus completing a full cycle of 150 Psalms.

As it happened, the two additional volumes of Lasso “Psalms” were never published, and so the Cinquante pseaumes stands as the last of their type prepared during Goulart’s long career as an editor of music books for pious readers. In many of these publications, as in the Cinquante pseaumes, secular music by leading composers of the day was reformed for use by Protestant musicians and their listeners. These books of contrafacta (as such re-inscribed works are called) included chanson albums by Toulouse composers Anthoine de Bertrand and Guillaume Boni,7 among others. But the music of Orlando di Lasso, a musician of international standing whose works enjoyed an especially wide and avid readership through the medium of print, was for Goulart and other Huguenot editors an object of intense interest. In 1576, for instance, the Genevan editor prepared the Thrésor de musique d’Orlande de Lassus, a collection of contrafacta that was itself based upon an important retrospective of Lasso’s French secular music recently issued in collaboration with the composer’s French partners, Adrian Le Roy and Robert Ballard. In 1582 and 1594 Goulart revised and expanded this massive set, which eventually encompassed over a hundred compositions for four, five, and six voices—with some Italian madrigals and Latin motets alongside the French chansons.8

Goulart’s Thrèsor d’Orlande de Lassus project of 1576 (with revised editions appearing in 1582 and 1594), as well as his sets of revisions based on chansons by Guillaume Boni and Antoine de Bertrand, took single imprints as their basis. In the Cinquante pseaumes, by contrast, Goulart brought together music by several composers (mainly Lasso, but joined by a range of Italian, Flemish, and even Spanish masters), and from a wide range of printed sources. His selections of music by Lasso stand as a measure of Lasso’s versatility as a composer, and of the long legacy of printed music books that brought his works before the musical public. Here we find Psalm contrafacta of 18 Italian madrigals, 15 German lieder, 12 French chansons, and 4 Latin motets, works that first appeared in a very wide range of printed books spanning three decades (1555 to 1584) and spanning, too, the geographical breadth of Lasso’s record of publication (from Venice, Rome, Louvain, Paris, and Munich). Inasmuch as Lasso’s music was frequently reprinted during his lifetime, it often is not possible to say with certainly exactly which books served as Goulart’s principle sources for his borrowings.9 Goulart’s hints about his work as having started “about a decade ago” nevertheless appear to be consistent with the range of dates known for the first appearance of the Lasso compositions (since the last of them appeared in 1584). The pattern of publication and borrowing for the remaining pieces in the Cinquante pseaumes is both more and less certain than that of the pieces by Lasso. On one hand, four of the five contrafacta based on madrigals (pieces Nos. 65, 67, 68, and 70) appeared close together in a single print, the Harmonia celeste, a collection of madrigals for four, five, six, and seven voices issued in 1589 by the Antwerp partnership of Pierre Phalèse and Jean Bellere. This book was edited by the Flemish composer Andreas Pevernage, a Catholic composer elsewhere represented in the Cinquante pseaumes by a setting of Psalm 103 in which the Genevan melody is used as the basis of the polyphony (see Table 1.1 for a listing of contents of the Cinquante pseaumes). There are other polyphonic pieces based on Genevan melodies, too, a number of them unique to this print.10

In each of his contrafacta projects Goulart appropriated familiar (and worldly) sounds for special spiritual purposes: “In removing certain words and accommodating them (as well as it has been possible) to the Music,” he explained in the preface to the Thrésor de musique d’Orlande de Lassus of 1576, “I have rendered these chansons for the most part honest and Christian. . . .”11 This same moralizing tone, in which the persuasive effects of music upon its listeners are permitted only so long as they are tied to an appropriately devotional text, of course, enjoyed long circulation in Calvinist writings on music, language, and spirituality. We should also recall that the ascription to music of such metaphysical effects as the transport of the soul and the restoration of human society had long been a subtext of Calvinist thought on song and spirituality. Already in the first printed edition of the Genevan Psalter (in 1543), Calvin wrote of music “that it has a secret and almost incredible power to move our hearts in one way or another.”12 Yet along with this recognition of the spir...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Musical Examples
• Notes on Contributors
• Prefatory Note
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1 Communities of Worship
• Part 2 Contested Grounds of Authority
• Part 3 Psalmic Voice(s)
• Part 4 Generic Innovation
• Bibliography
• Index