ABSTRACT
In 1597, the Genevan preacher Simon Goulart issued a curious compilation of Psalms and spiritual songs, the Cinquante pseaumes de David avec la musique à cinq parties d’Orlande de Lasso, Vingt autres pseaumes à cinq et six parties, par divers excellents musiciens de nostre temps. In this collection Goulart replaced the original Italian, French, German, or Latin text of selected works by Orlando di Lasso and other Renaissance composers with French translations of the Psalms. The book was hardly the first to attempt a spiritual reformation of contemporary music, a process that can be traced in various forms and places throughout the sixteenth century. But Goulart’s print and a few others are remarkable for their explicit dependence on the language of Psalms as the vehicle for such spiritual transformations and for the eloquence of its preface, in which the editor gives voice to some compelling ideas about music and spiritual practice. Books like the Cinquante pseaumes, in brief, can teach us something about the Psalms and how they were imagined as texts and as sounding experiences by a particular group of believers during the sixteenth century. Taking books like Goulart’s as a point of entry into this acoustical-spiritual world, this essay will consider the idiosyncratic musical Psalmody found here in a series of related contexts: as part of a larger story of forms domestic devotion among the Calvinists, as a segment in the story of how sixteenth-century listeners heard the proper relation of text and tone, and finally as a measure of the power of printed books to shape the reception of the music they contained. But before we turn to each of these themes, we should first pause to learn more about the Cinquante pseaumes and their editor.
