Genevan Psalter

Calvin did not simply prefer plain church music, he removed an entire category of it. Geneva's churches took their organs out of service under the Reformation, and Calvin's own writing on worship treats elaborate polyphony as a danger rather than an ornament: music that draws the ear to its own complexity, he argued, pulls attention away from the words being sung and toward the skill of the singers performing them. His remedy was not silence but a specific, disciplined alternative. Every psalm would be set to a single unadorned melodic line, sung by the whole congregation together in unison, in French rather than Latin, with no instrument and no trained choir standing between the worshiper and the text.

This broke sharply with the century's other reformers as much as with Rome. Martin Luther wrote original hymn texts of his own and kept a role for the organ in Lutheran churches; Huldrych Zwingli, further to the theological left in Zurich, removed music from congregational worship almost entirely rather than reshape it. Calvin's position sat between the two: song belonged in worship, but only the biblical psalms themselves, in a form every member of the congregation, literate or not, trained singer or not, could learn and carry. The Genevan Psalter was the practical instrument of that theology, commissioned expressly to give a congregation something to sing rather than something to listen to, and the discipline of unaccompanied unison psalm singing it established held across Reformed churches for roughly two centuries after Calvin's own death.

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.