Since I've been reading about Samuel Coleridge-Taylor lately, particularly his well-known Hiawatha cantata cycle, I felt like looking around for some other pieces he wrote I hadn't heard of before.
So he wrote other choral works and I found out he set Psalm 137. If you just want to hear the performance and read the score stick with this. If you want to read a brief commentary read past the break.
He did set that famous last verse about the babies, the one that many clergy and liturgists have advised you don't set because of how incendiary the closing line of Psalm 137 is for wishing for payback to the Babylonians killing babies against stones. Now if you read biblical scholarship you may have come across an idea proposed by Niels Peter Lemche that this psalm was about revenge against Seleucid imperial repression via cultural memory, but I mention that in passing. I'm not a minimalist myself (I've enjoyed books on biblical literature by a number of maximalists but I don't want to bore you with all that insider baseball about ways of interpreting biblical texts). I got off on this rabbit trail because there's a case to be made that the controversial concluding final line of Psalm 137 is the reason the psalm text was even written, and how you approach setting the text has to bear this in mind.
Now about Coleridge-Taylor's setting itself, it's mournful and Victorian and in B minor. I like the way he expands the relatively short text by way of additive setting. He starts with a fragment of the famous opening lines sung by a soloist. Then the chorus enters and takes several passes at adding more and more of the text with each pass. What's compelling about this approach is Coleridge-Taylor replicates in music aspects of parallelism and additive recontextualizing repetition that is part of poetics in the Psalms (I should mention that I'm going through Robert Alter's translation and commentary on them, the price for the book is pretty good in paperback, hardback and e-book).
Psalms can have abrupt changes of tone and content that form critics have concluded are indications of this or that psalm being stitched together. Not generally the case for Psalm 137 but I mention this because in musical settings abrupt mood shifts are conventional. Coleridge-Taylor has a broadly ABA form to reflect the sorrow of exile in minor and the memory of pre-exilic pre-conquest Jerusalem in major. That's a conventional way to set the text but it works. I like this setting. I'm including a link to the public domain score so you can queue it up and read it along side a recorded performance.
A friend of mine told me that it's generally rare for composers to set the final verse pronouncing a blessing on those who would kill Babylonian babies by smashing their heads against stones. Coleridge-Taylor set that verse. Props to the composer for being willing to set the most controversial verse in the text. If you're going to set the text I think you should set the whole thing.
Reprising the minor material for the final section is conventional but good. I like that the sorrow of loss is brought back even into the wish for vengeance. It creates an ambivalence in the setting that I think is good.
Coleridge-Taylor was clearly good at counterpoint and this comes across clearly in his imitative procedures. This can be heard (and seen) as an abstract form of text-painting in which the flowing waters of the river are mimicked by the rivulets of different voices declaiming the text about being by the waters of Babylon. Text-painting got a very bad rap in the long 19th century for being stupid, artless and literalist. I'm reading a book on the decline and revival of Haydn's reputation since his death into the 20th century so I'm reading up on how Romantic era critics and composers slammed Papa Haydn for childish naivete and literalism. Text painting was (and still is) a thing you do in choral settings but there are more and less abstract ways of text-painting approaches. The Coleridge-Taylor use of imitative counterpoint to emulate flowing water is what I'd call on the abstract side of the scale. Haydn's infamous "light" setting in The Creation with a blazing C major is at the opposite end of being very literal text-painting but both the subtle and blunt approach to text painting work great if you're a composer like Franz Joseph Haydn or, in this case, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor.
After a couple of generations of having integral serialists shoved down our music theoretical throats in educational settings I'm more than happy to share a psalm setting composed by a black British protege of Charles Stanford back in the day when composers had no qualms about writing actual tunes.
I could have probably written more but this is Labor Day weekend and I have other projects going IRL.
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