A Music of Necessity

PETER URPETH investigates the tradition of Gaelic Psalmody in the Free Church

Salm Volume 2, available on Ridge Records Label

IT IS NOT everyday that a writer gets the chance to ask a Free Church minister if he’d be comfortable performing at the next Glastonbury Festival. And it’s an even rarer day that the same writer would be met with a response – albeit a cautious one – in the affirmative.

But then Rev. Dr. I D Campbell, minister of the Free Church in Back, Isle of Lewis, to whom this somewhat flippant question was posed, is a prominent part of a project that is surely one of the most significant and unexpected flourishings of Gaelic culture in recent years.

With performances over the last year in Liverpool Cathedral, Paris’s Notre Dame Cathedral, at a church in Alabama, USA, and at the opening of the new Scottish Parliament building – not to mention recording and releasing two CDs on Runrig’s Ridge Records label – the ‘Salm’ project has reached audiences usually considered far beyond the scope of Free Church Psalmody.

This week it was announced that the music that academics now believe crossed the Atlantic with the Hebridean forefathers to inform the development of psalm singing among the Black communities of the southern United States, is coming home. A Presbyterian choir from Alabama is set to perform in Scotland in January with dates at Back Free Church (15th), with Runrig at Glasgow Royal Concert Hall (Tuesday 18th), and in the Celtic Connections Festival in Glasgow Cathedral (21st).

Last year stellar jazz man, academic and stalwart of the Duke Ellington Orchestra, trumpeter Professor Willy Ruff, visited Back Church during recordings of the first volume of ‘Salm’, and in further pursuance of his claim that Scottish Presbyterian psalmody had influenced the psalm precenting styles common to workers on the vast cotton plantations of the southern United States.

“One does not have to be a Christian to feel the power of this music, one only has to be aware of human emotion and the shared need for expression of the human spirit in music, in community, to know that this is not the music of artifice.”

Although originally intended by organiser Calum Martin to be a fundraising CD for Stornoway’s Bethesda Hospice, the recordings have acted as a focus of new attention on what remains one of the very last surviving truly unique musical forms in the UK, and its influence on the survival of the Gaelic language and culture cannot, likewise, be underestimated.

The temptation as a writer on music is to step into the long line of writers who have attempted and failed to describe the nature as well as the form of Gaelic Psalmody. The barest explanation is that the lines of the psalm are sung to a chosen melody by a solo voice, the precentor, who is then joined by the congregation.

The melodic lines between the precentor and the congregation often overlap and shift in relationship to each other. The melodies are heavy embellished and take their rhythm from the words themselves. But that is far enough as description goes – if you haven’t heard Psalmody, well, ‘go listen’.

To witness Gaelic psalmody in its proper setting, in the Gaelic Free Church, sung by Gaelic speakers with a lifetime of knowledge and experience of psalmody, lead by one of their own number, is to witness a profound spiritual happening.

One does not have to be a Christian to feel the power of this music, one only has to be aware of human emotion and the shared need for expression of the human spirit in music, in community, to know that this is not the music of artifice. It is a music that is somehow locked to the austerity of the land and the struggles of the people, a music formed by events and necessity as opposed to fashion and frivolity, harsh, true and sustaining.

“The psalmody remains, of course, a true democratic form, devoid of formats that reward with praise those more skilled as performers.”

While the music lover may wish to evangelise on behalf of this music, openness and exposure to the outside world has historically – perhaps understandably, given the wider world’s willingness to indulge in stereotypes and clichés – been a subject of some reticence among Free Church members.

Reams may already have been written about the success of the ‘Salm’ project, but many fewer words have been spent examining the subtle changes in attitude in the Free Church that have enabled this project to go forward in confidence. In the past the Free Church frowned on the arts, false idols and false beauty – maybe okay for the young, but such egotistical creativity was not the stuff of Free Church members, and more than one new adherent forsook his pipes for devotion to the Faith.

The psalmody remains, of course, a true democratic form, devoid of formats that reward with praise those more skilled as performers. It is part of Gaelic’s great oral tradition.

In a break with this writer’s normal practice, the following is a word-by-word extract account of an interview with the Rev Dr I D Campbell on these very issues, reported in this format as a means of avoiding any ambiguity. It is ironic, and may be a bold suggestion on my behalf, that Rev Campbell’s proposal that the project marks a recognition of the Church’s broader role in the preservation of Gaelic culture sets the Free Church apart as having Scotland’s most progressive attitude toward the arts among its churches.

First I asked Rev Campbell why this flourishing of interest had occurred, and why the Church seems to give it support?

ID: There are a lot of things feeding into the whole issue and I mean it’s very much a church thing and it’s very much a Gaelic thing. At one level the church’s priority is not with a language, on the other hand the church has to do everything it can to preserve the best of its tradition and especially when something is so cultural (which of course is the other element or strand in it) and could disappear very quickly, so it is good to make the effort to try and preserve it.

“The Free Church has managed to preserve Gaelic medium religious worship from a time long before Gaelic medium was being spoken about in education circles.”

PU: The sleeve notes to the second ‘Salm’ CD contain a very interesting suggestion: “whatever similarities exist between our style and others, it is a precious musical and spiritual heritage, and we can hope that by sharing it with you, we can nurture and promote a genuinely authentic World Music.” Does this reflect a change in attitude in the Free Church, up to quite recently this could not have happened, it would have been viewed as theologically problematic by some in the Church.

ID: I think that there has certainly been a long tradition, as long as recording equipment has been available, of recording Gaelic psalm singing for different purposes. But this latest CD was done not only to capture the singing but to record the genre in as clear and as professional a way as possible. So perhaps in a changing world and with a changing outlook the Church is realising that there are other reasons for preserving it. Not just so that people can listen to it for worshipful purpose but preserving it as a scientific exercise and analysing it and comparing it with other forms of singing.

PU: Do you have a problem with this becoming, in a way, ‘entertainment’.

ID: Well, obviously, the natural context of Gaelic psalm singing is in Gaelic church services. The Free Church has managed to preserve Gaelic medium religious worship from a time long before Gaelic medium was being spoken about in education circles. We had the opportunity to go to Paris to sing Gaelic psalms there and I know that some people were a bit ‘iffy’ about performing Gaelic psalm singing to an audience. On the other hand we recognize that there is a legitimate cultural dimension to it, it is not just a religious phenomena it is a cultural phenomena and I don’t see anything wrong with trying to preserve a cultural form of this kind in different contexts and sharing it with other people. I don’t think it is ‘entertainment’ as such, although in some ways maybe it is the best kind of entertainment available.

PU: Well, it’s entertainment in so far as some people, a good many people, will buy the CD out of musical interest instead of as an extension of worship…

ID: Yes, I don’t think there is anything wrong with that as I think it can be listened to at that level and appreciated at that level.

PU: Is it possible to locate a moment of origin for this music? The Free Church has not been around forever but this form of music is uniquely associated with the Free Church. Where and how did it originate as a form?

ID: Well over the course of the 19th century and the emergence of the Free Church and with the emergence of a strong and fervent evangelical movement in the island, coupled with the lack of availability of written scriptures – and, perhaps, the lack of ability of people to read – I can understand how the form became established and strengthened.

Over the course of the 20th century it was preserved through there being a numerically strong church in the Highlands and Islands. The whole dynamics of that are changing now with the church base receding quite a bit and congregations becoming numerically weaker, so now we are into a sort of preservative mode, where we are trying to maintain the best of it although it is still being used in many places.

But we can see places where it developed and we can speculate on reasons as to why it became established in that way but I’m not so sure that we can give it an origin. There is constant research going on comparing it not only with the Black Gospel tradition but also with the Ethiopian Coptic tradition, so on one level it would not surprise me at all to discover that the practice of having someone mouthing words that then a congregation repeated can be found in different contexts but I’m not so sure that anybody has been able to pinpoint it with any accuracy.

PU: In terms of the Free Church the psalms have a unique, even central role in the process of worship.

ID: Yes, the basic principal is that Free Church worship is ‘Word’ based, but by that I mean it is firmly anchored in the written word of scripture so that becomes not just our rule book but also the material we use for worship. That extends not just to reading the scriptures and teaching them in the sense of explaining them and applying them to everyday life, but to vocalising and the actual singing of prayers taken straight from the pages of the Bible.

That makes us a bit eccentric nowadays because so many new forms of written song are being used in different churches. On the other hand, a lot of the new songs and hymns that are being used elsewhere just don’t have the depth of feeling and the ability to marry theology and personal experience together in the way the psalms do, and I think that has always been the strength of the psalms. There is a wide range of emotions expressed there that make them very suitable for use.

Plus, there is the fact that for people who have grown up in that tradition, people who have been singing these same materials from the Bible week in week out they are lodged in the memory and the heart – and so they are, in a sense, carrying that around with them at all times.

‘Salm’ Volume 2 is available on the  Ridge Records Label.

© Peter Urpeth, 2004

Related Link

• Ridge Records website