Finding Their Voices - Amherst College

Ravenscroft’s The Whole Booke of Psalms, known colloquially as the Ravenscroft
Psalter, featured largely original four-part compositions by the compiler, but also
contained occasional works by such well-known composers as John Dowland, Thomas
Tomkins, Giles Farnaby, and Thomas Morley. 178 Although the book contained music for
four vocal parts, it always indicated which was the melody, or in its terms “plainsong.”
Since early American congregations had few if any trained musicians, the congregation
likely sang only this main melody. Although the Admonition gave a rough guide
indicating which psalms fit to which meter, there was still enough variety to cause some
confusion. A second edition of the psalm-book, edited by the president of Harvard
University, was published in 1651. It featured much more streamlined versification, most
of the psalms fitting into only a few simple categories.
In practice, the shift to the text-only Bay Psalm Book from books with written
music severely limited the number of discrete tunes used in worship. Without any
written musical reference to be used while reading the text, congregations were forced to
rely on a few popular memorized tunes, assigned to each selection based on the meter of
the text. As time went on and those familiar with using past psalters passed away, psalmsinging
became an entirely oral tradition, new members of the church learning melodies
and performance practices solely from hearing the singing of older members of the
congregation. As a result, each church developed their own “strains” of popular tunes,
resulting in variations of the same “tune” sung differently from one church to the next.
Even singers in the same congregation would have slightly varying ideas of how a
melody should go, resulting in an odd kind of heterophony during congregational singing.
This came to be regarded as a serious problem, and eventually led to a new movement
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178 Thomas Ravenscroft, The Whole Booke of Psalms (London: For the Company of Stationers, 1621).
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