A Conversation About Psalm Singing with Brittany Hurd

John Ahern: Thanks for doing this interview, Brittany. I wanted to begin with a simple question: Why did you start Canticlear?

Brittany Hurd: I started it partially because I got a brain tumor and partially because I was upset that nobody else was doing it. It was when Alastair Roberts started his daily Bible reading and lectionary that I got kind of irritated that nobody was doing something similar with the Psalms. So I decided I would do that. And since it was the beginning of the pandemic, it seemed like a great time. Except I still had a full-time job, so it was not so great a time, actually. So I had to table that for a while. 

But I ended up with a brain tumor that took my eyesight, so I needed something to do while I was in the hospital and found that much of what passed the time well was singing. And happily, I have been in the church my entire life. So I had quite an arsenal of hymns at my disposal. Not nearly as many Psalms, though. And so that brought the idea of the project back to me. Then Susannah Black Roberts, now Alastair’s wife, who is also a friend of mine, pushed me to actually put this into action.

John Ahern: You mentioned Alastair was doing the daily lectionary, and you said you were annoyed that nobody was doing that with the Psalms. But to much of evangelical Christianity, that wouldn't be an obvious source of annoyance. Why should the Psalms be treated differently? Why Psalms in particular? Is that something that you're interested in singing?

Brittany Hurd: Well, in this particular case it was because the Psalms are involved in the daily lectionary reading, so that was the original inspiration for it. Also, my church music background contains a lot of Psalms. I went to school in Idaho and they are very big on singing the metrical Psalms in the church community there in Moscow. During my time at New Saint Andrews, we got a new music professor, and he was super big on the Psalms, to say nothing of Dr. [Peter] Leithart, who was my theology professor, and also a big proponent of Psalm singing and Psalm chanting in particular. So I have three big influences: the metrical Psalms with both my home church and then out at school, the through-composed Psalms with Dr. David Erb, the professor of music there at New Saint Andrews, and then Psalm chant with Dr. Leithart and James Jordan and a lot of the Theopolis guys.

John Ahern: So when you were in the hospital, why was it that you felt dissatisfied with merely being familiar with the hymns? What did you feel was lacking in not being able to bring to mind the Psalms and have music for that as well?

Brittany Hurd: It was less that I felt dissatisfied and more almost guilty (although I don't think technically you should feel guilty for only knowing hymns, because hymns are great). But there were a couple of metrical Psalms in the mix that would continually come to me. But a lot of times I thought, “Oh man, I wish that I had the Psalms always in my head rather than just man-made hymns.” And I think that is a primary reason why I've been digging into this so voraciously. I suppose when you have a big health event, it serves us so many different kinds of wake-up calls. So this was one of the many things where I said, “Oh, I should be doing this.” Of primary importance—and this is something that all three, James Jordan, Dr. Leithart, and Dr. Erb, are all about—when you are singing the Psalms, especially to chant or to through composition as Dr. Erb likes to do, you're singing the actual words of scripture with no paraphrasing, no forced rhymes, no “Yoda speak,” that sort of thing. So what could be better than that? So that is definitely high on my list for “Why the Psalms?”

John Ahern: Yes. Now, for our audience who may not be as familiar with these categories, could you give us an explanation of “metrical”? You mentioned metrical, chanting, and through-composition. So what are each of those? What do they look like?

Brittany Hurd: Yeah. A  metrical Psalm will look a lot like any hymn that you're used to singing. All of the verses of the Psalms will be put to poetry. So it all has a nice rhythm to it and is usually rhymed in just about four lines for each musical verse, if not the verse as it's laid out in scripture

John Ahern: Paraphrased, then? Not a literal translation?

Brittany Hurd: Paraphrase. And then through-composition: we'll take a little snatch of melody that we might call a motive, and put the text to music, matching the music to the text as-is. And that is not only musically matching it, but matching it in tone and emotion. So the music is constantly changing throughout, which makes it a little bit difficult for congregations to sing. And with chant, you have a couple of short melodies that you fit the words into the music. So you'll have what they call a reciting tone, which is the first note of the small musical phrase, and you usually put most of the text to that first tone and then move through the rest as far as the metrical emphasis.

John Ahern: That's great. Now, which do you specialize in over at your channel?

Brittany Hurd: I'm trying to specialize in Psalm chant because that is the quickest way to learn all the Psalms musically. The melody tends to be pretty simple, so anyone can learn it. And since it's repeated so much, you can find different emphasis in it as you go through.

John Ahern: You can do literally the text of the Bible.

Brittany Hurd: You're literally using the text of the Bible as you would with through-composition. 

John Ahern: As you said, there's less of a learning curve than with the through-composition, right? 

Brittany Hurd: Absolutely. For me, not so much because I quit piano when I was 12, and you have—

John Ahern: To accompany yourself.

Brittany Hurd: Yeah, I have to accompany myself. It’s surprising how difficult it is to learn 20 chords. It is very simple to learn just the melody to it—so as long as you've got somebody who can accompany you. Hopefully my channel will serve to help folks in that way.

John Ahern: Now, when most people hear “Chant”—when they hear your YouTube videos, of course, they will be disarmed and immediately fall in love with what they're hearing—but when most people hear the word “chant,” they get a bit scared away by the connotations. There's kind of a weird factor there, unless they grew up, of course, in the Anglican tradition, or Catholic tradition, or Lutheran tradition that maybe still does it. But unless you have grown up with it, it seems like something that most people in 2024 wouldn't just naturally be interested in doing unless they were LARPing. So how would you pitch what you're doing to those people?

Brittany Hurd: Well, I called it Canticlear for a reason, using the Latin word for “singing” and the English word “clear.” I want the music to be both clear and beautiful. And when I say “beautiful” and “clear,” I mean not just in recording quality or the sound of my voice or the playing of music, but also in the manner in which it's communicated. So it should be understandable—audibly understandable, but also emotionally understandable. You might say, in the theater world where I come from, you want to understand—you want the audience to understand—the action behind what you're saying. And so that's where I'm trying to come to. 

And to your point about the way what people tend to think of chant, they tend to think it's either sort of ethereal, something that you might hear—and it's beautiful—from King's College Choir, Cambridge. But it's not very understandable unless you actually know what they're saying because of how wonderfully resonant the space is. Or it's in some industrial chapel somewhere, and it's a bunch of people just kind of droning along, and we want neither of those things. So I'm attempting to chant the Psalms in a musical-theater style, which kind of baffles people a little bit, but I think it makes sense of what I'm doing when you listen.

John Ahern: Yes. You preempted my next question, which was precisely that truly unique aspect you’re offering to this space is not just that you're doing it on YouTube, but that you're using a music theater voice, music theater diction. I am so used to hearing these chants as like, a line of a Psalm spoken with this kind of British diction, the “Queen's English,” or as you say, the mumbling of an aging mainline congregation. And you're just doing it with a kind of clear, straightforward American accent, and you're doing it with a voice that is pleasantly trained but also not operatic. And I assume those are all intentional decisions. So what are some of the intentions there?

Brittany Hurd: Well, partly it's just what I like to hear myself. I was searching around for something that I could listen to that I would be able to clearly hear what they were saying, and it would sound like they knew what they were saying. That might exist somewhere, but I wasn't able to find it. And so I think that's my primary reason. Also, it's in line with my training: my voice teacher in high school, anytime I would try, I’d probably do a few classical pieces, and she would say, “Okay, I'll get you an operatic aria. But your voice is really suited to musical theater, so can we mostly work on that?” Which is really a blessing because a lot of voice teachers will say, “No, classical or nothing.” So it really is, I guess, a personal preference thing. But I think the musical theater as an art form has really nailed communicating fully through song. As immensely talented and well-trained as opera singers are, the emphasis tends to be on technique rather than on effect, I guess. I think the emphasis in musical theater is on the effect of the product.

John Ahern: And it also seems like you're not sacrificing your identity as an American to do it in that way. There's something about traditional European opera sound that really is not built for American English. It's adopting the habits and customs of Germans and Italians, basically. But there is a distinctively American way of communicating deep emotion that isn't pop music. And it does seem like,suddenly, when you put it that way, music theater is the natural choice there.

Brittany Hurd: Musical theater is America's greatest gift to the world, if you ask me. I have a friend who's of very similar musical theater taste to me, and we used to joke that Americans were really more suited to musical theater than the English (even though they do put on good productions), because the English, being so reserved, can't really do the emotional bombast that a lot of lot musical theater requires.

John Ahern: Let's not forget about Gilbert and Sullivan.

Brittany Hurd: That's right.

John Ahern: Let me ask you a little bit about how this has personally affected your devotional practice. One thing that we've already mentioned about Psalms is that they are historically the bedrock foundation of Christian piety, personal piety, personal devotion, but also corporate worship. They sang them, specifically singing Psalms, not just reading them quietly to themselves. So do you have any thoughts on that? How has doing Canticlear affected your devotional life?

Brittany Hurd: It's become quite a part of my devotional practice, but separate, I guess, from the sort of morning prayer devotional bit of my day, because just having to repeat it so many times. I have to memorize it before I even record. Since I'm blind, I can't actually read it while I'm singing it. So I have to fully memorize every Psalm, which can be challenging when it's over 25 verses. So I have to repeat it so many times that I notice patterns that I wouldn't have otherwise noticed, maybe a repeated theme stated in different ways, anywhere from five to 20 times in the course of the Psalm. 

It might just be the ones I've chosen thus far, but it really brings home the faithfulness of the Lord. I mean the Psalmists, all of them—however many there are—are continually coming back to lovingkindness, the merciful goodness of the Lord, and what some call covenant faithfulness. And that is an immense help when you're going through it, because a thing that I realized on my own health journey, if you will, is that we tend to want to see where the narrative is going. It's like, “Okay, where am I in this story now? And so what can I expect around this corner?” But I realized that the reason that we should pay attention to narrative in scripture and the lives of our fellow saints is not so that we know what's coming next, but so that we should be reading the right stories, as it were, so we have a constant reminder that the Lord is faithful. However this story that I'm in right now is going to turn out, the Lord is faithful and good. That's what the Psalmists continually go back to over and over and over again, and it bowls me over every time.

John Ahern: That's one thing I was noticing recently: a lot of Christians who do traditional worship and sing hymns, who might think they have “arrived”, are actually still quite allergic to negative emotions sung in worship. And one of the things that any book on the Psalms will point out near the very beginning is that, actually, a majority of them are despondent or in an imprecatory mode that is generally on the negative side of the emotional spectrum. And that's something that just never gets explored almost at all in hymns.

Brittany Hurd: Yeah, you have the “Be Still My Souls” and the ones like that. But one thing that the Psalms do repeatedly is that, by putting what we might call negative emotions on display, they're also teaching us how to deal with them. The Psalmist is not just ranting on Twitter about it. He's going to the Lord and saying, “Look, this is what's going on with me, and you keep telling me you're good. So do something about it.” And we often find that he does, and we should expect that he will.

John Ahern: That’s fascinating that you're having to memorize all of them first. One of the things that you see in all of the various different apologies for Psalm singing—I'm thinking of Spurgeon, Calvin, and then going back throughout the Middle Ages to the various monastic apologies for Psalm singing—what they all mean is “memorize.” They don't have this vision of recreationally singing, although that's quite nice. It's lovely to recreationally sing the Psalms. That's something we need to do more often. But what they mean is—for instance, in Psalm 119, when it says, “Bind it to your fingers and put it in your heart; hide it in your heart”—these are all idioms for memorizing. That's what these are for. It’s a design feature. And so I find that fascinating that you're having to do that.

Brittany Hurd: The music lends itself to that too. Anytime I hear now even a paraphrase or a different translation of the Psalms that I've recorded, I think, “Hey, that's the one.” And it just plays in my head.

John Ahern: It drags the rest of the Psalm with it.

Brittany Hurd: People who have listened to Handel’s Messiah, this happens to them all the time too. They hear something from Isaiah, and all of a sudden there's a full chorus in their head singing that verse.

John Ahern: What are some of the resources that you're using to do the chanting? There are different options out there that exist. What do you use?

Brittany Hurd: Yeah, so I'm using the Anglican Chant Psalter, the green one [Alec Wyton, 1987]. And that is just because that's what we used at New Saint Andrews when we would do morning prayer sometimes. But my Anglican congregation is using the new Book of Common Prayer for the Anglican Church in North America [2019]. So I wanted to be able to serve them first. So I'm actually repointing the text to the Psalm tone, which is its own exceptional exercise for both devotion and English practice. 

John Ahern: It's very, very tough to do that.

Brittany Hurd: I started out doing it as close to the exact same sort of breaks as the Anglican Chant Psalter. And then I realized it was actually more straightforward for me to just go it alone.

John Ahern: Let's backtrack really fast: What is pointing?

Brittany Hurd: Pointing would be deciding where to put the musical emphasis on the line. Which words are going to land on the new note? There's only a few notes to play with, so you have to decide which words are going to get that stronger emphasis. And that's what pointing is.

John Ahern: Yeah. Okay. So there's that green one, and then you use the text of the new ACNA Book of Common Prayer. Do you use other resources? Is that the main one?

Brittany Hurd: Yeah, so that's the main one for the sort of performance aspect, you might say. But I also am using Ian Hamilton's new commentary on the Psalms to help with the structure because I have to memorize it. It's easier to know what the structure is, and then also so I know what sort of musical variation I might want to add. I'm not super talented at the piano, so largely that has to be dynamics—playing loud or soft. And with what kind of strength I'm attacking the line, you might say. And just to know more about the Psalms, it's great. 

So I began this project with the Psalms that were most helpful to me while going through all my surgeries and all that sort of thing. And then I've just started using a book called Psalms for Trials by Lindsey Tollefson. And so I'm going through that one in order. I used that as a devotional during my recovery. I found it quite helpful. And then after that, it would be—I don't know—catch as catch can. Whatever suits my fancy or whoever pays me the most on Patreon.

John Ahern: Gotcha. Okay. There's one more thing I was going to ask. I imagine your pace—I mean, it's amazing that you've already put out as much as you already have, but your pace has to be fairly slow. Or how long do you think it's going to take you to get through the whole Psalter?

Brittany Hurd: My goal is to get to the point where I can put up one a week, but I think an interim goal might have to be one every two weeks, which would take me somewhere between three and five years, I guess, to get through the Psalter, because I'm not going to do Psalm 119 all at once. I'll do that in 24 sections.

John Ahern: Awesome. Well, that sounds phenomenal. Thanks for your time!

Brittany Hurd is the creator of Canticlear. She lives in Michigan.