One of my daughters has Psalm 100 for memory work at school this week (at our Christian school, the children memorize a psalm each week).  After singing it during family worship, I got to thinking about the fact that there is another Genevan tune usually referred to as the Old Hundredth.  This is the tune usually associated with “Praise God From Whom All Blessings Flow.”  If you can sing that doxology, you can sing Genevan tunes!  But that’s not the tune found with Psalm 100 in the CanRC Book of Praise.  I was wondering where things got mixed up.  How come we don’t sing the Old Hundredth with Psalm 100?  I remember an organist once led a CanRC church to do exactly that, and I don’t even know if anyone else noticed.

At any rate, I checked the 1565 Genevan Psalter available online here, and it appears to me that the tune in the Book of Praise is in fact the Real Old Hundredth.  The question that I have, and maybe someone musical out there can answer, is:  how did the tune for Psalm 134 come to be associated with Psalm 100, so that today people refer to it as the Old Hundredth?  I suspect that it has to do with Scotland.

3 responses to “Psalm 100 in the Genevan Psalter”

  1. Our German Psalter (Jorissen) has the original, so it probably is a “Scottish glitch”… But even here, the “Old Hundreth” tune fits the German words, which is nice.

  2. Uri Brito says:

    Also, check out genevanpsalter.com

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