I’m writing a brief series recommending different recordings of excellent sacred music in English. Last time I introduced several thoughts and recommended more than a dozen recordings of hymns and anthems. Today I want to recommend a handful of choral recordings of the Psalms in English. Again, my list will not be exhaustive, and I hope that the readers will contribute a few of their own preferred recordings (unlike last time).
One of the styles of psalm settings I have grown to love over the years is that of Anglican Psalm chant. You can see that my selections are heavily weighted toward this style of singing psalms. Anglican Psalm chant was developed during the English Reformation, and flows out of the Latin plainchant tradition. Each verse or so are sung to a harmonized melody of either 7, 14, 21, or 28 bars. The choir loosely sings several words on the 1st, 4th, 8th, and 11th notes of each melody line. The other words are distributed on the remaining notes. Every psalm ends with the Gloria Patri. This gives the church a way of singing the Psalm as written in any version of the English Bible (i.e., not in metered paraphrases, as it is other Reformation traditions). Of course, I am not implying that this is the only acceptable method of singing psalms, but this seems to me to be the one that has the most easily available recordings in English (given the Anglican tradition of excellent choirs, as well as their influence and resources, this makes sense).1
Recordings of the Psalms
About Ryan Martin
Ryan Martin is pastor of the First Baptist Church of Granite Falls, Minnesota. Prior to that, he served as the associate pastor of Bethany Bible Church in Hendersonville, North Carolina. He is on the board of directors of Religious Affections Ministries. Ryan received his undergraduate degree at Northland Baptist Bible College, and has received further training from Central Baptist Theological Seminary of Minneapolis, Minn. (M.Div., 2004; Ph.D., 2013). He was ordained in 2009 at Bible Baptist Church of Elk River, Minn. (now Otsego, Minn.). He has a wife and children too. Ryan is the associate editor of Hymns to the Living God (Religious Affections Ministries, 2017). He contributed to the Jonathan Edwards Encyclopedia (Eerdmans, 2017) and is the author of Understanding Affections in the Theology of Jonathan Edwards: "The High Exercises of Divine Love" (T&T Clark, 2018).
- Unfortunately, at this state, the best recordings of psalms in English come only from this “Anglican psalm chant” tradition. A few small Reformed outfits are putting together recordings in that tradition, but those are harder to get one’s hands on and I am not as familiar with those particular albums. Of course, if one expanded the scope of our selections outside of settings in English, there would be many more selections to recommend. [↩]