Genevan Tunes

A bit of history.

The year was 1505. You lived at that time in the town of Belfort, in what would later become the nation of France. You were a Christian, because everybody there was a Christian. You were baptised into the church when you were a baby, as your father and grandfather had been, and as your own children were.

The Church, and the Christian faith, was an ever-present mystery to you. You knew there was something holy about it, that it was different than your everyday life, and that God was to be held in honor and reverence; and if the truths of the gospel had never taken root in you, and the Person of the Lord Jesus had never really made himself known to you, you probably were not alone. Your neighbours all had roughly the same experience as you. You heard the bells ringing on Sunday morning and you got yourself out into the street with the rest of the populace and headed for the cathedral where mass was celebrated.

You entered into the cathedral and were, if you were paying attention, struck by the awe and majesty of the place, with its soaring vaulted ceiling, with it’s magnificent statuary and stained glass, all depicting biblical stories or characters, or saints from history. You gathered in the sanctuary with the others and heard the choir singing a Latin anthem, which was beautiful, but like everything else here, incomprehensible to you, since you did not speak Latin. You spoke French.

God appeared to speak in Latin. When the priest delivered his exhortation, he did so in a language you did not understand. When he did the mass, all the mysterious stuff with bowing and incantations and bread and wine, it was in a language unknown to you, and it was all done up front while you watched from the gallery. Toward the end of the service, you rose with the congregation and moved to the front, where a priest put a wafer of symbolic bread in your mouth. Then you left and went home. You were silent from the moment you walked into the building till the moment you walked out again. There was NO interaction with God, no hearing of his word in your own language, no knowledgeable participation on your part. The whole thing was, as I said, a deep and ever-present mystery. This was the sum and substance of your Christian faith.

When the mighty wind of the Spirit began flowing through Europe shortly after this, waking up men like Martin Luther and John Calvin, these men and others recognised that the Latin mass was a great detriment to the piety of the people. If faith came by hearing the Word of God, as the Bible said it did, how could people have faith without actually hearing it in their own language? They began to seek out ways to address this problem.

One of the ways upon which both Luther and Calvin seized was this; if the people were going to grow in faith, they needed to have that word not only in their ears but also in their mouths. They both started taking the word of God and setting it to music. Calvin hired three different men over the course of about twenty years to write singable tunes and to set the Psalms to those tunes. His musicians started in 1539 in Strasbourg and finished in Geneva in 1562, having completed songs that enabled the people of God to sing all the psalms in their own language.

What an engine this proved to be for the Christian faith! It required of the worshipper active participation in the body, where the worshipper was no longer passive. He was involved, and vitally so. It taught people the Scriptures in their own language. It gave people Christian courage. There is nothing like vigorous congregational song to encourage people in the faith, especially when the contents of those songs are from the songs God wrote. The Spirit took these labors and moved mightily through them, bringing a great many people to an active and vital faith in the Lord Jesus.

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The Genevan tunes, as the songs of John Calvin’s musicians came to be known, were masterpieces of simplicity. They were written to be sung in unison, the whole congregation on the same note, singing the same thing. There would be anywhere from four to twelve lines of music you as a congregant would need to master (…which is not hard at all to do. A modern worship song has at least that many, and they are not metered like the Genevans.) The only note values were quarter notes and half notes. And they sensibly thought through how wide of a range a congregation is capable of singing (From middle C to D) and stuck to this formula like glue. I do not think they varied much at all. All the songs were written in that range. All men, both basses and tenors, can reach those notes without hurting themselves. All ladies can, too. D may be a stretch for a low alto, or a low bass, but just a stretch. Not impossible.

A side note, one that makes Genevans infinitely more appealing to modern people who are aware of some of the evil currents of our own day; they highlight the male voice. Men can lift their voices and sing these songs. They cannot do this with almost any modern music. Even the folks who have rediscovered the gospel of grace, and who make songs about it, sing in a feminine voice. I have sat and listened to whole services in Reformed Baptist circles, in Charismatic circles, in modern Mennonite circles, In Bible Church circles, where men were never allowed to lift their voice above a G. Women’s voices dominate. Not so with the Genevans.

The Genevan tunes were far more likely to move in stairsteps (G-A-B-C-D) than in large intervals (G-C-E-A), which made it much easier to learn phrases. This feature connected the music back to the history of the church, for Gregorian Chants had been around a long time by then, and that music moved in a similar way.

The great musicians who arose in the protestant era, Bach, Handel, Beethoven, etc., changed the musical palates of the world. We adopted time signatures. We adopted key signatures. And the Genevans were leftovers of a bygone era, for they had neither time nor key signatures. They operate in modes, which is why they fall so strange on the modern ear. If a modern person is going to learn to love Genevan tunes, he is going to have to relearn a way of doing music that is no longer native soil to him. Most folks are unwilling to spend that kind of effort.

This is one of the reasons I have set about to retune the poetry of the songs that accompany the old Genevan tunes. I still want the Church to sing the Psalms, and to do so heartily, as to the Lord. So, I am hoping to provide them with tunes that enable this to happen.

Many of the Genevan tunes are still magnificent. Once you know the way of Genevans, it is no wonder they still have their staunch defenders.

Here is Psalm 2 Genevan. I absolutely love this song. My version of these words was one of the last ones I made, because it was hard to bring myself to try to improve upon something so manifestly great.