Psalms and Prayer Turned into Music

This week we also started to talk about the Psalms as well as prayer found in the Bible that has been turned into music.  Focusing on the Psalms and how important they are to this class the Bible and Music as a whole was one thing, as many of the lectures we have previously had, have covered the Psalms for each topic.  The book of Psalms plays a central role to the class and maybe is the most important book of the Bible for this particular class.  Many of the Psalms have been turned into hymns and songs that are sung weekly in churches around the globe.  While we can talk about the Psalms and how they are set to music, we focused mainly on the parts that maybe are left out and other texts that are added, as all of the Psalms have been set to music at some point.  As we look at different pieces of music to see what has been added or changed from the Psalm and as a result you get a massive amount of compositions that can come from the same Psalm and you can get many different versions.  You can have pieces that maybe leave out the violence that is shown in that particular Psalm depending on maybe what audience they are targeting and so on and so forth.  Also in the Psalms it includes a lot of David complaining towards God and maybe that it not touched on as much in some music as it displays doubt and anger towards God at times.  Then we also looked at were composer’s took parts of Psalms and added other texts to the music pieces to create a new composition that can have a new meaning and what and why did they chose to put the texts together.  The Psalms have also been set to every style and genre of music imaginable and are not just meant for any one style or genre.  They are meant for anyone and everyone and you can see this in the music that has been created as such.  We also talked some about how prayer in the Bible has been turned into music.  The example we used was the Lord’s prayer being turned into music by different composers and musicians.  Another example that I found was in Habakkuk and in Chapter three Habakkuk’s prayer, if you read chapter three at the end it says in the ESV translation, “To the choirmaster: with stringed instruments.” which leads me to believe that this prayer maybe was set to music at the time and sung, leading back to how prayer has been turned into music and sung long ago, and it’s interesting to think how maybe prayer was done during this time in the Bible, did they sing there prayers maybe?  It was just something I found interesting and tied back to what we had talked about previously in the first few weeks of class.