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The very first melodies I learned to play as a five year old were the tunes of the Genevan Psalter. In her guest bedroom my grandmother had a tiny 3 octave Magnus chord organ under her bed. I would pull the thing out and play from her music books with numbered melodies and chord button accompaniment. My grandmother would often sing along with these Psalms in the background. I soon started dreaming of learning to play the piano and a few years later my parents enrolled me in lessons and they traded a case of beer for an old birdcage piano that was put in the basement of our house. The thing was never in tune and I quickly acquired the skill of piano repair, but it also opened up a great venue of self-expression. With the help of my piano teacher, a church organist in a reformed church, I discovered Mozart, Bach, Mendelssohn and later Blues and Jazz piano. 

 

My parents had a huge collection of compact cassette tapes, and among these there were two tapes with The Beatles and one with Elton John on it. This was the only music I wanted to listen to at that time. Many Saturday mornings I could be found on the couch in the living room, equipped with a set of headphones, air-guitar and air-piano, lip-syncing along with all my heart. The way John Lennon sang, Elton John’s piano skills and the overall instrumental orchestration had a profound effect on my musical endeavours. At that time of course I had no clue about these guys lifestyle and spiritual beliefs.

 

As a teenager I became less and less interested in the music in church. The organ playing was boring, slow and of low quality. Some of the melodies of the Psalms seemed to make no sense at all and many people didn’t sing them right. What was even worse to me is that the singers lacked emotion and it seemed that they didn’t even belief the words they were singing. In my own music making I taught myself to play guitar and I started playing bass guitar in a rock band. On the piano I pursued Beethoven, Grieg, Debussy and Rachmaninov.

 

In my later teenage years I experienced a spiritual rebirth, this was in an Evangelical/Pentecostal environment where I also discovered contemporary praise and worship music. This new faith, combined with this new finally gave me a way to express what I believed and how I felt about God. Making music became a way of prayer for me, a way to connect to God, a way to bring joy to the people around me.  The psalms and hymns in the Reformed church however, still didn’t work for me in that way. After high school I failed an audition for Music College so instead I pursued religious studies at a Reformed Bible College. At this college I was put in charge of the worship music for morning devotions and school assemblies. I learned to play countless different worship songs, but I still resisted the Genevan Psalms as out of touch and stylistically obsolete.

 

When I immigrated to Canada to marry the love of my life we settled in Hamilton. In accordance to my father-in-law’s wishes and in line with my wife’s upbringing we became members of the Canadian Reformed church. Singing along in church out of the Book of Praise, I finally sensed that the Spirit behind these tunes was the very same as the one I connected to in contemporary worship music. Both the Holy Spirit and the words of Scripture gave expression to this music. After being invited to accompany the services I challenged myself to learn to play these Psalms applying all my musical skills and emotional expression, just like the other music I was used to performing before. What started of as improvising on fly, turned into penciling in chord notation in my Book of Praise and ultimately turned into writing out full piano arrangements for the Psalms. Over the past nine years I have been publishing music books containing these arrangements and sharing them with various piano players in my church community. Improving my skills and abilities in composition over time I have finally completed arrangements for all 150 Psalms.

 

Many music books with organ music for the Genevan melodies exist, but to the best of my knowledge nobody has ever published a complete set