Psalm 24

Lili Boulanger’s audacious setting of Psalm 24 would not have won her the Prix de Rome. Having so painstakingly developed the academic technique required to win the prize, the stipend that went with it and the right of residence at the Villa Medici in Rome, she promptly dropped it. On her first visit to the Villa Medici in 1914, before the outbreak of the First World War compelled her to return to Paris, while developing her own way of writing for voices she took refuge in instrumental music. She turned first to the piano for D’un vieux jardin and D’un jardin clair - poetic impressions inspired perhaps by the view from the window of the room she was rarely well enough to leave - and then to violin and piano for an attractive little salon piece called Cortège. On her return to the Villa Medici in 1916, with the War in its second year and the composer in no mood for either poetry or frivolity, she wrote the first two of her three completed psalm settings, the short but stark Psaume 24, “La terre appartient à l’Eternel,” and the fiercely protesting Psaume 129, “Ils m’ont assez opprimé.”

Psaume 24 is no ordinary hymn of praise to “the King of glory.” Scored for four-part chorus, brass, timpani, harp and organ and set in a modal kind of E minor, it is more like an act of defiance. There is no easy splendour in either the dissonant harmonies based on piled-up fifths - a device to be adopted for the soundtracks of the Hollywood biblical epics decades later - or the primitive scoring for brass. Much of the choral writing, which is confined at first to male voices (including solo tenor), is either aggressively severe or distantly modal. It is only with the entry of sopranos and altos on “Portes, élevez vos têtes,” that the composer applies more conventional colouring. The enriched harmonies are retained in the final section which, propelled by a rhythmic ostinato on brass and organ, accelerates to its emphatically affirmative conclusion.