Psalmodic Adaptation as Musical Translation

Abstract

The psalmodic adaptation of classical music constitutes a distinctive creative act in instances in which we find adapters not simply importing excerpts essentially unchanged (a chiefly curatorial service), but making substantive musical decisions to bridge the gap dividing art music from psalmody. This chapter explores such “translational actions,” unfolding in four phases. The first concerns low-level decisions, involving rhythm, ornamentation, and texture. The second centers on syntactic challenges that arise in drawing brief excerpts from larger works (negotiating European passages that begin and end in different keys, for instance). The third focuses on “purposeful substitution”: the replacement of musical effects inappropriate to psalmody with wholly different effects calculated to achieve comparable goals. The fourth explores adaptations that challenge the very notion of a one-to-one correspondence between “excerpt” and “psalm tune”: tunes that draw on more than one European movement, say, or adjacent pairs of tunes drawn from a common source.