Audio is in Gaelic, Text is in English. When the band Radiohead did a tour in 2025, a recording of Gaelic psalm singing was part of the pre-show playlist. Other musicians like Craig Armstrong and Martyn Bennett have also explored it in their music. It moves and fascinates people. How did this style of singing begin? And how does it work musically? Musician Calum Martin has a particular interest in Gaelic psalm singing, its origins and how it has evolved. In our conversation, he talks about how the “long tunes” in the Scottish Psalter were Gaelicised and adapted and how he believes it evolved in the Gaelic speaking community. He also touches on similarities with singing in the Coptic Ethiopian Church (another style of heterophonic music). This is where two or more performers play or sing the same melody simultaneously, but each person adds their own slight variations. Here is a link to a YouTube video of music of the Egyptian Coptic Church. Calum also talks of the time he collaborated with singers from Alabama, and the theory popularised by Musicologist and Yale University Professor Willie Ruff, that Gaelic psalmody influenced African America church music. What started Ruff down this path was his friend, the musician Dizzy Gillespie, saying that some African American congregations in the Deep South sang hymns in Gaelic. I link to a Vimeo documentary about the subject called “A Conjoining of Ancient Song” below. It’s fascinating and moving. There’s also some footage of a Muscogee (Creek) congregation lining-out, which Ruff argued was brought into their culture in a similar way. It should be noted that this theory is disputed, with other academics such as Terry Miller arguing that the practice of 'lining out' in both Hebridean and African-American traditions is a vestige of an older English practice that has long since disappeared in England. Michael Newton’s writing on the socio-linguistic profile of Cape Fear Gaeldom is really worth reading if you are interested in this area. Michael writes : In another account from 1829, the town of Fayetteville was said to be such a strong bastion of Gaelic speech that even public servants needed to be able to speak the language (and presumably read and write it); “The number of these Highlanders and their descendants, who still retain almost exclusively their native language, is so considerable, that a clerk who understands Gaelic, forms a necessary part of the Post-office establishment.” Calum’s parents were living in Glasgow when he was born, and the family returned home when he was four years old, to Calanais on the Isle of Lewis. It was at that young age that he went to church with his grandfather and heard this particular form of worship. His grandfather was a precentor in the congregation at Calanais. As the psalms are sung unaccompanied, a precentor stands at the front of the congregation, they give the starting pitch and lead the congregation in vocal harmony. The word “precentor” is from the Latin and means “the one who sings before.” Here is a short example of Gaelic psalm singing which Calum recorded, so you can hear this particular style of unaccompanied singing - Psalm 133, recorded in Stornoway. Here are edited extracts of Calum’s answers, translated from Gaelic. CALUM MARTIN ON GAELIC PSALM SINGING My grandfather was taking me to the Gaelic services, and at that time, it is little wonder it was soaking into me, because at the age of four I could not yet read Gaelic. This was before I went to school… I was hearing the psalms, and it was little wonder it was just entered into my mind. …I asked my grandfather — do you remember a different way from how we do it now? — and he said, No, not on this island; the way we do it today is the way they always did it. But something happened, I would say, around Nineteen Hundred. As for what kind of style this was, what was different about it from English — because the remarkable thing is, all the tunes we have in Gaelic are taken from the English ones. Every single one of them is in the Psalter. When the Gaelic psalms were first composed, they used what were called the long tunes, and there were only six of them. They were sung in a way where those who oversaw the music in the church wanted to keep things regularised. Before that, it was what they called “lining out”, and that still happens in America in certain places, though they use hymns rather than psalms. Well, at first there were only six of them — six tunes, as I said, going back many years, hundreds of years. It came out of those six tunes. Only two or three of them are used today. Wait now — “Stilt,” that one isn’t used anymore. Well, that was a tune from that time. “French” — that one is still used. “Old London” — yes, well, that one is gone, not used anymore. It’s “New London” now. The psalms are composed in what is called ballad metre — now, we are all familiar with that today — eight six eight six — ‘The Lord’s my shepherd, I’ll not want, He makes me down to lie, in pastures green He leadeth me, the quiet waters by.’ That is common metre, and that is what is used today. And the melodies we have in the psalms come from the soprano line. So today, in the churches, four-part harmony — SATB, soprano, alto, tenor, bass — all those settings are in the church in what they would call the Scottish Psalter. And there are many other things to think about — well, how did the congregations start using it? At that time, in the villages, there was family worship, morning and evening, in every home. Even people who were not Christians at all would have it, and that is where we learned. You know, people ask — where did you learn? Well, there would be a singing school — I remember the singing school… when I was a teenager, where we would learn the tunes at school. We didn’t have television then. So that is where all the lads would go on a Friday evening to learn the tunes. But it was in the family worship that most people learned. The English-speaking churches would do it as a choir. What Gaelic singing is, is an old style, old tradition — Seann Nòs — that was brought into the church. It’s a tradition that we were able to bring into the church — that is what happened. The grace notes - everything - has been incorporated. Many people ask - why is it that Catholics don’t do it? Well, the reason they don’t is that it was never part of their tradition. They relied heavily on choirs, and their worship was in Latin. They didn’t have Gaelic (in church) until the seventies, though they do have a great interest in the seann nòs tradition. At that time, the people in the north had seann nòs in their very bones — so what happened? They…began adding a great many grace notes to everything. A grace note is something you add to the main note. If you were doing it in English: da, da, da, da — those are four notes, plain four notes. But think now about the first one — the grace notes circling around it. What it is: there’s the acciaccatura, the appoggiatura — those are the technical names. There’s music in the thing. Simply notes that people feel. So right now, in the psalms, there are what you might call signpost notes — that is what you have in Gaelic singing. But around those signpost notes, a great many grace notes are taking place….what the Gaels do - they add to it. They make it slow, slow, slow, and then they add the grace notes in. There is something within us that wants to do it in the seann nòs style. Someone started it. Now, was it a minister who began it? Who knows? But the thing is, Iain, this is going on throughout the world. Others will say, “Oh well, this is remarkably similar to the Ethiopian church, the Coptic Church.” People say, “Oh, perhaps Gaels went over there and they learnt from them.” But I would say — and this is very much my own view — that there is something called community singing going on in every place in the world. So the way they would do grace notes over in Ethiopia… Get full access to gaelic.blog at www.gaelic.blog/subscribe
