Today’s song from Sing Praise is “O Lord, you are the centre of my life”, a cantor-and-chorus setting of Psalm 16 by Paul Inwood. I found the tune rather difficult to sing, but that may just be a matter of unfamiliarity, as the style is very much that of the Catholic rather than Anglican use of the Psalms. Indeed an online biography of Paul Inwood confirms him as a Catholic composer.
There are three verses for cantor, being fairly close paraphrases of verses 1, 2 and 7-11 of the psalm. The psalmist asks God to be his refuge, praises him for his counsel (guidance), and asks to be shown the path of life and to be rescued from death. The chorus is “O Lord, you are the centre of my life: I will always praise you, I will always serve you, I will always keep you in my sight” which does not appear to be a quotation from the same psalm but complements it. God works with people on a covenant basis: he offers his gifts of grace (such as protection, guidance and eventually eternal life) and in return expects our praise and humble service.
I also found the tune very difficult to sing. The style of Cantor-and-response for the Psalms doesn’t lend itself to easy singing, because the Cantor’s part is necessarily irregular – necessarily because the Psalter (whether Grail or Anglican) was not written in metrical form. “Anglican Chant” has died out in almost all churches nowadays, but really it is as good as this kind of Cantor-and-response which has replaced it. To me the really sad thing is that the sentiments of the Psalm are not expressed in memorable phrases, so they don’t stay in the mind – the point of a hymn is to enable one to learn the sentiments so that they can be a help in time of need, but this kind of hymn doesn’t really do that. I was also quite disappointed that the one memorable phrase of the hymn – “Lord you are the centre of my life” – was not actually part of the Psalm at all!
I also found the appearance of the C-major chord unsatisfying in this hymn. One might suppose the hymn is in C-minor with a “tierce de Picardie” at the end – and that would have worked, but actually the hymn is in E-flat major throughout (one can tell by the absence of B-naturals in melody and harmony, except in the single place in the second half of the verse where the modulation takes it briefly into C-minor – but this is clearly a transitory chord rather than the tonic of the piece).