Justin Appel

Dear Friends,

Having recently conducted daily choral Evensong during a choral residency program, I have Anglican pointed psalms on the brain.

If you are not familiar with this approach, it’s really quite simple. These ‘pointed’ psalm settings take their cues from older plainchant psalm tones, but use a pleasing four-part harmonization. Each verse of the psalm is divided into two halves, most often matching the parallelism in the Hebrew poetry. In most Anglican psalm tones, each half of the verse is further divided into two parts, yielding a common division of four ‘quarters’ for every verse. As a result, Anglican pointed psalms are a bit more elaborate the the Latin psalms you would hear at a monastery. Instead of hearing two ‘tenor’ notes — that is, the single note on which most of the text would be chanted — you actually get four such moments of sustained chanting, with a short melodic formula to wrap up each section.

If we were to write this out this formula, the typical Anglican pointed psalm tone would be formatted like this, if each note were to be assigned a number:

1………….2, 3, 4; 5…………6, 7, 8, 9, 10;

10………….9, 8, 7; 6…………5, 4, 3, 2, 1

In fact, choristers are used to learning new psalm tones by chanting them to numbers in this fashion. It’s a simple way to learn the pattern without bothering with text!

In the midst of these melodies, the text of the psalm verse needs to be divided up and assigned, or ‘pointed’, to these notes. It all sounds a bit complicated, but actually the process is straightforward and repetitious, with enough flexibility to match changes in the text. (Click the ‘View original post’ link to see the video.)

This mornings assigned psalms, Psalm 128, 129 and 130 can all be heard in the following live recording at Merton College, Oxford, and are heard here without any organ, and chanted in the Anglican fashion.

I hope this helps you appreciate these chanted psalms a bit more!

Yours in Christ,
Justin