Calvin did not write the Genevan Psalter's tunes himself. He commissioned them, first from Guillaume Franc and later, for the bulk of the 1551 edition, from the composer Louis Bourgeois, whom he had brought to Geneva specifically to set the psalms in a style plain enough for an untrained congregation to sing from memory. The two men then fell out over exactly that plainness. Bourgeois revised some of the existing melodies and their notation without first asking the city's magistrates, who in Geneva held real civil authority over what the church published, and he was arrested for the unauthorized change. Calvin intervened personally to get him released, a small, telling episode in how tightly Geneva's civil and religious authorities were bound together under Calvin's own reforms, where a composer's notation choices were a matter for the city council and not for the composer alone.
The complete psalter appeared in 1562, all one hundred fifty psalms set across one hundred twenty five melodies, translated into French verse by the poet Clement Marot and, after his death, by Theodore Beza. Its afterlife has outrun the controversy that produced it and outrun Calvinism itself. One tune from Bourgeois's 1551 contribution, now called the Old Hundredth, was carried into English psalters as the setting for Psalm 100, All People That on Earth Do Dwell, and became the standard tune for the Doxology sung in Protestant churches of many traditions that have never used the rest of the Genevan Psalter at all. A melody written for a congregation forbidden its own organ is now sung, more than four and a half centuries later, in churches that never adopted that restriction.