Musical Notes

Hello OCBC family,
 “Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth! Serve the Lord with gladness! Come into his presence with singing!” (Psalm 100:1-2).

This is a very powerful psalm, no doubts about this. Even classical composers used this psalm for many of their compositions. Felix Mendelssohn, Heinrich Schütz, and Leonard Berstein created wonderful pieces of this psalm to bring glory to God, to be thankful for his faithfulness.
But let us focus on the setting that we are more familiar with. The hymn that we know very well is “All People That on Earth Do Dwell” by Willaim Kethe.

William Kethe was from Scotland, but we do not know the year of his birth or the date of his death. What we know from history is that he left the island to go to the continent because of the hard persecution that Queen Mary had in England in the late 1550s. Kethe was protestant, and his life was in danger.

He spent time in Geneva, where he works as one of the scholars that created the English-language Geneva Bible (1560). But also, he wrote many psalms in metrical form. Let me share with you what a metrical psalm is.
According to the dictionary, “A metrical psalm is a version of a psalm from the Bible that has been rewritten into rhyming, metered verse, typically intended to be sung as a hymn. Essentially, it's a way of adapting the prose of the psalms into a form that's suitable for congregational singing.”

This form of worship style was very popular among reformers and Calvinist tradition, and William Kethe started his own collection of metrical psalms, and the first one that he wrote was the 23rd Psalm. But his most popular one is the metrical version of Psalm 100.

“All people that on earth do dwell,
Sing to the Lord with cheerful voice;
Him serve with fear, His praise forth-tell;
Come ye before Him and rejoice.”

The melody was composed by Louis Bourgeois, a French musician. He went to Geneva while Calvin was living there and Louis became the cantor of St. Pierre and St. Gervais, which is to say he was music director there under the pastoral leadership of Calvin. He prepared choristers to teach the congregation new tunes of psalms. The popular melody that we know is called, “The Old 100th” because is related to the lyrics of William Kethe, and even if this melody is used for another psalms setting or even for the popular Doxology, we still call this melody “The Old 100th.”

Let us praise our Lord with this Psalm, from the version in your Bible or singing Kethe’s metrical setting.

“O enter then his gates with praise,
Approach with joy his courts unto;
Praise, laud, and bless his name always,
For it is seemly so to do.”
​
In His service,
Israel