Gaelic psalm singing
music genre
Gaelic psalm singing, or Gaelic psalmody (Scottish Gaelic: Salmadaireachd), is a tradition of exclusive psalmody in the Scottish Gaelic language found in Presbyterian churches in the Western Isles of Scotland. It is a form of Gaelic music.
Structure and style
The psalms are sung unaccompanied, in a style known as "lining out" or "precenting the line," in which the leader of the performance, or "precentor," sings a line, after which the rest of the congregation follows, with each member allowed to embellish the melody as they wish, in a free heterophonic fashion. The style of Gaelic psalm singing is influenced by piobaireachd music native to the Scottish Highlands, with frequent and distinctive use of ornamentation and grace notes.
History
The practice of lining out psalms was common in England and lowland Scotland in the 17th century. In 1644, the Westminster Assembly mandated its use as an official form of worship but there is evidence that it was a folk custom in English Protestant churches even before then. In 1659, the book of psalms was translated into Gaelic for the first time, and it is believed that the Highlanders began to sing the psalms at this point. Lacking their own tunes, they used melodies composed in England and lowland Scotland for the psalms, though these were embellished through the use of grace-notes and ornamentation to the point where German musician Joseph Mainzer, who published a study of Gaelic psalm singing in 1844, thought that the original tunes they were based on could barely be detected.
Gaelic psalmody was historically practiced in regions in which Gaelic-speaking Protestants migrated, including the Cape Fear river valley in North Carolina (where it persisted until about the 1860s when most of the distinctively Gaelic cultural features in the region disappeared) and Nova Scotia, which received a huge number of migrants from the Highlands and islands and where Gaelic continues to be spoken to this day. Lined out singing was the main form of worship throughout colonial America and the early United States, as English, lowland Scottish, and Ulster-Scots immigrants would all have utilized the style.
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