Rensselaer Union, Volume 9, Number 12, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 7 December 1876 — The Old Hundredth. [ARTICLE]

The Old Hundredth.

Tins unique psalm tune first appeared in John Calvin’s “ French Psalter,” published at Geneva in 1543, as the “ proper tune" to the 134th Psalm. Guilleaume Franc was musical editor of this work. He was a master in music, yet all that will be found in ordinary musical history regarding him is that he was an “ obscure musician of Strasbourg of the sixteenth century.” The Church owes him not a few of her finest melodies. A melody in Luther’s great psalter, published from 1524 to 1560, seems to have suggested the ideas of this inimitable choral. One ot Luther’s hymns of eight unequal lines, which was set to a melody of the Moravian or Waldensian early Church, contains the elements of the Old Hundredth. But these were reset and remodeled by Franc, who left Strasbourg and became "canteur” dr precentor to Theodore Beta at Lausanne. He subsequently settled and died at Geneva, leaving as his imperishable monument the music of the “ French Psalter.” The music was afterwards adapted to the Hundredth Psalm in the first “ English Psalter” ever published, edited by John Calvin, and printed for the use of the congregation of Englishspeaking refugees at Geneva in 1556, of which at that time John Knox was minister. The musical editor of the psalter was Claude Goudimel, of Rome, who suffered martyrdom at Lvons at the time of the massacre of St. Bartholomew because he had set the English psalms to music. The Genevan-English* psalter was reprinted in 1563-’4, by “John Day, over the pump in Aldgate,” and Andrew Hart, in Edinburg, and laid the foundation of the psalmody of the Protestant churches of the world. The words of this psalter contained first thirty-seven Esalms written by Sternhold ana Hopins, the remainder being written by ten of the refugees at Geneva. William Keith, from Aberdeen, wrote the Hundredth Psalm. The psalter, words and music, was for sometime universally used by the Protestant churches of England and Scotland. When Oliver Cromwell Sit the Westminster General Assembly of vines to prepare a new version of the psalms in common meter, for the use of the churches, the Parliament sanctioned it, the English Church at once adopted it, but the Scottish people rebelled on the ground that they had already a better psalter of their own. Cromwell had to come to a compromise with the hardy Scots. (The only other compromise he ever maae in his life was with Cameron, of Lochiel, when he and his army got bewildered in the wilds of Lochaber.) This compromise was that in Scotland a 3 umber of their favorite psalms from le old psalter might be published as second editions. This was done, and the music is thus called “old”—the Old First, Old Forty-fourth, Old Hundred and Thirty.fourth, Old Hundred and Thirty-seventh, etc.— Boston Transcript.