Psalm Singing in the Reformation

Alec Ryrie describes the role that Psalm-singing played in the Scottish Reformation:

"The praying and the singing of the Psalms as a means of cementing religious identity was one of the most distinctive features of Reformed Protestantism across Europe.  Metrical Psalms were a form of music which was irreproachable even to the dourest Reformed theologian.  They became a badge of Reformed identity, and their texts were peculiarly well suited to peoples under persecution.  When Adam Wallace's Bible was finally taken from him, he spent the night before his execution 'in singing, and lauding God...having learned the Psalter of David without book, to his consolation.'  George Buchanan, imprisoned in Portugal by the Inquisition, passed his time by composing metrical Psalms.  When the Edinburgh Protestant Elizabeth Adamsoun was on her deathbed, in about 1556, she asked her companions to sing Psalm 103, which she said had first taught her soul 'to taste of the mercy of my God.'" (Ryrie, The Origins of the Scottish Reformation, 122)

John Calvin's love of the Psalms was characteristic of this continental movement:

"Certainly as things are," Calvin explains, "the prayers of the faithful are so cold, that we ought to be ashamed and dismayed.  The psalms can incite us to lift up our hearts to God and move us to an ardor in invoking and exalting with praises the glory of his Name." (Calvin quoted in Boulton, Life in God, 34)

Matthew Myers Boulton goes on to describe broad qualities of this movement:

"...for many in the sixteenth-century reform movements, the psalms became identified as the music of the people, God's Word once only accessible to a few, now sung by one and all.  Indeed, in an era when women's voices were prominently heard in public worship only in convents, and children's voices only in specialist choirs, the joyous roar in Genevan churches rose from the entire assembly, men, women, and children singing together - with children often leading the way, teaching the adults the new psalms, a method Calvin recommended.  Both the music and the singing practices met with enthusiastic acceptance, as well as enthusiastic resistance, well beyond Geneva: Queen Elizabeth I is said to have dubbed the new psalms "Genevan jigs."  For both adherents and detractors, psalm singing became a distinctive signature of the Reformed movements.  Soon after the complete Genevan Psalter was published, the congregation at Saint-Pierre was singing through the entire Psalter in twenty-five weeks of public worship, or roughly twice a year - a clip of more than thirty stanzas per week." (Boulton 35)

The re-discovery of the Bible is a well-known point of unity among the European reform movements of the 16th century.  What interests me is the re-discovery of singing the Bible, and the role that played in forming the identities of these familial groups in the midst of hardship.  Whatever one may say about the power of singing or of music, it is a powerful way to experience a text in community at the same time.  It builds unity.  It establishes shared vision.