The psalms in vernacular verse translation were of central importance to Protestant worship, from the Reformation onwards. On the European continent, the standard text used for singing the psalms was the Genevan Psalter, a French metrical translation that was completed by Clément Marot and Théodore de Bèze and published in Geneva in 1562.Footnote 1 Immensely popular with the Reformed churches of many countries, it was translated into dozens of languages in the early modern period. Dutch was one of these languages: a complete translation of the versified psalms, with all the Genevan melodies, was made by Petrus Dathenus (Petrus Datheen, c1531–1588) and published in 1566 with the title De Psalmen Davids, ende ander lofsanghen, wt den Francoyschen dichte in Nederlandschen overghesett.Footnote 2 Following its acceptance by Dutch synods in the sixteenth century, this became the standard psalter for the Dutch-speaking congregations of the Calvinist Church until 1773, when the text was replaced but the melodies preserved.Footnote 3
The European contexts for translation and publication of the Genevan Psalter are well known, with recent studies focusing on their circulation around Western Europe and even Turkey.Footnote 4 However, there has been almost no mention in scholarly literature of four major translations that were published in or for South and Southeast Asia by the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, or VOC) during the eighteenth century. The complete text by Petrus Dathenus, with all the Genevan melodies, was translated into and printed in Portuguese (1703, 1763, 1768 and 1778) and Malay (1735), as were excerpts in Tamil (1755) and Sinhala (1755, 1768), for use in the Malay-Indonesian Archipelago and Sri Lanka. Several psalters represent the beginnings of Western music printing in Colombo and Jakarta (then known as Batavia), and give examples of some transcultural applications of different solmization systems; as such, they are significant artefacts in the entwined global histories of European music and colonialism. The production of these translated psalters was part and parcel of Dutch colonial expansion and trade, and their music had a lasting cultural legacy: in parts of eastern Indonesia, the original Genevan melodies are known to have been sung up to the early twentieth century.
One of the few scholars to have written about these psalters was the distinguished librarian and book historian Katharine Smith Diehl (1906–1989).Footnote 5 Diehl is known to musicology primarily as a hymnologist and the compiler of an index to hymn tunes, yet it is for her work as a bibliographer and her pioneering research on the history of printing in South and Southeast Asia that she achieved renown, within the fields of library science and book history.Footnote 6 Her research was undertaken exclusively in the libraries of India, Sri Lanka and Indonesia, affording her more detailed and insightful perspectives than those developed from the study of European-based sources alone.Footnote 7 Before her death, Diehl prepared a monumental nine-volume study entitled ‘Printers and Printing in the East Indies to 1850’, but only the first volume has been published to date: Batavia, in 1990.Footnote 8 Diehl devoted a small but significant portion of this first volume to the discussion of music, providing valuable data for the cultural history of this colonial metropolis.Footnote 9
The archival work that Diehl undertook in Sri Lanka is particularly valuable to the present-day historian because it was carried out shortly before conflict restricted the access of researchers to local archives and libraries. In 1970–1971 she located copies of Tamil and Sinhala translations of excerpts from the Genevan Psalter in the Colombo Museum Library and the Ceylon Branch Royal Asiatic Society Library respectively and described them in an article that was published in 1972.Footnote 10 While the copy of the Tamil publication that she located was complete, only around one quarter of the Sinhala work remained.Footnote 11 In the Ceylon National Archives (now the Department of National Archives, Sri Lanka), she also found the title-page of a 1776 Colombo reprint of a 1773 Dutch-language Genevan Psalter, but the rest of the book was missing.Footnote 12 For six months in 1972 she undertook archival research in Jakarta, returning to the United States at the end of that year.Footnote 13 She examined and reported on early printed works held in the National Library of Indonesia, at least one of which has since been lost.
Diehl's fine attention to details contained in the archival records and early modern published accounts revealed bibliographic references to several publications that were not held in Sri Lankan or Indonesian libraries at the time. In the 1972 article she quoted an early eighteenth-century description of the publication in Java of psalters in Portuguese and Malay translations, but noted that ‘neither of these editions is described as containing music’.Footnote 14 In the subsequent published volume Printers and Printing (Batavia), written after her archival work in Jakarta, she discussed references to the printing of a Portuguese psalter with music notation (although she does not mention seeing an actual copy), but expressed surprise that ‘reference has not been seen to a psalter in [the] Malay language with notes’.Footnote 15 She continued: ‘Portuguese, Tamil, and Singhalese early music editions are known. It is a pity not to find a Malay-language music edition in transliteration. (In arabic [sic] letters composition would have had to be completely reverse – a bit much to expect of even the finest scholars.)’Footnote 16
Recent research has revealed that a romanized Malay translation of the entire Genevan Psalter was indeed produced in the early eighteenth century, and republished several times in the nineteenth century. Extant copies of the Malay psalter – and also the Portuguese psalter, which contains music notation – have been located in European and American libraries, and descriptions of them are presented here. This article pays homage to the work of Katharine Smith Diehl; it examines the history of the Genevan Psalter in eighteenth-century Indonesia and Sri Lanka and discusses complete translations of this work (with music notation) into Portuguese and Malay, and excerpts in Tamil and Sinhala, extant copies of which are held in the British Library, the Cambridge University Library, the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (The Hague), the Library of the University of Leiden and The Oliveira Lima Library (Catholic University of America, Washington, D. C.). While a critical analysis of the actual translated texts, their metrical forms and their settings to the Genevan melodies awaits the work of comparative linguists, this article will explore the psalters' production, use and circulation, as far as the easternmost islands of the Malay-Indonesian Archipelago and as late as the early twentieth century. Of course, it is important not to view the indigenous societies of eighteenth-century Indonesia and Sri Lanka as some kind of homogeneous cultural group, undifferentiated by historians as a monolithic subaltern under Dutch colonial rule. The enormous cultural diversity within each of these colonies, as well as major differences between them on a regional level, illustrates the sheer obstacles encountered by colonialists who sought to impose standardized forms of cultural practice upon local societies. And yet the uniformity of the Genevan Psalter translations produced in these territories indicates that Dutch religious functionaries did attempt to acculturate Christianized societies to a regularized form of musical and religious expression, as demonstrated by the surviving sources.
Psalms and Portuguese-Speaking Protestants
By the late sixteenth century, the entire Book of Psalms would have been sung on a weekly basis, in Latin, as part of the liturgy of the Catholic Divine Office in established churches and religious communities in Asian colonial outposts of the Iberian empires, including the cities of Goa, Malacca (Melaka), Macau and Manila.Footnote 17 From the beginning of the seventeenth century, the English and Dutch East India Companies made frequent voyages to South and Southeast Asia, and the predominantly Protestant English and Dutch mariners and traders sang psalms regularly, in vernacular translation.Footnote 18 The Catholic context of Christian evangelization in Southeast Asia during the early modern period has been studied extensively, but the Protestant dimension is less well known.Footnote 19 In fact, Protestant evangelization in these regions is generally considered not to have begun in earnest and on a large scale until the nineteenth century; the early modern Dutch East India Company, for instance, appeared to exhibit little interest in propagating religion, at least in comparison to the colonizing forces of Spain and Portugal. However, as Barbara Watson Andaya has recently shown, the VOC – whose charter of 1623 mandated the maintenance of ‘public belief’ (that is, reformed Calvinism) – fostered more missionary activity in the early modern Malay-Indonesian Archipelago than has hitherto been recognized. Ministers tending to the spiritual needs of Dutch traders, bureaucrats and soldiers extended their brief to include local communities. Still, Andaya notes that ‘Company [VOC] directors were never willing to place evangelization ahead of commerce, and had no interest in converting those whose beliefs were well established, including Buddhists and Muslims’.Footnote 20 Protestant ministers of religion initially focused on converting Catholics and animists throughout areas of Dutch influence in the East Indies.Footnote 21
When Dutch and English trading companies arrived in Southeast Asia, at the dawn of the seventeenth century, they found small but significant indigenous Catholic communities, mostly Portuguese-speaking, on a number of islands as well as in and around Melaka. Following the seizure of several Portuguese outposts by the VOC, Dutch ministers worked to convert these local Catholics to Protestantism.Footnote 22 Leonard Andaya has called these communities, which were located from the western to the eastern islands of the archipelago, the ‘Portuguese tribe’. Members of this group had little or no direct Portuguese ancestry; according to Andaya, ‘they spoke a creole form of the Portuguese language, practiced Christianity with a heavy overlay of native beliefs, and dressed in European clothes adapted to local conditions…. In reality they formed a unique cultural entity and became one of the numerous suku or ethnic groups/tribes that inhabited the archipelago in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.’Footnote 23
It was for members of this community that in 1703 the entire Genevan Psalter with music was published at Batavia (Jakarta) in Portuguese translation (see Figure 1): Os CL. Psalmos d'el rey e propheta David: como taõbem os Canticos espirituaes usados ’na Igreja Reformada Belgica, Compostos para uso d'a Igreja Portuguesa ’nesta cidade de BATAVIA em JAVA MAYOR.Footnote 24 It contained 621 pages of musical notation, and as such is one of the largest and most significant publications of European music in early modern Southeast Asia. It appears also to be the very first published translation of the Genevan Psalter with music notation into Portuguese – this, significantly, being accomplished in Southeast Asia.Footnote 25 This psalter was probably mainly destined for the use of congregations at the two Lusophone Protestant churches of Batavia: the Binnenkerk and the Buitenkerk. According to Hendrik Niemeijer, ‘the Reformed Church in Batavia had around 5,000 members by 1700, most of them Portuguese-speaking Mardijkers’.Footnote 26 (‘Mardijker’ referred to freed slaves and their descendants.Footnote 27) The Portuguese-speaking Mardijker community was prominent in Batavia for most of the eighteenth century, but towards the end of that time it began to be assimilated into the local Indonesian Christian community; Taylor writes that on the death of the last minister to the Portuguese church in 1808, ‘services and catechism classes in Portuguese ceased’.Footnote 28 The Portuguese psalter may also have been used by Portuguese-speaking Christians in Melaka and eastern Indonesia, but further documentation awaits unearthing to demonstrate how widely this book was disseminated.
Jacobo op den Akker, Os CL. Psalmos d'el rey e propheta David: como taõbem os Canticos espirituaes usados ’na Igreja Reformada Belgica, Compostos para uso d'a Igreja Portuguesa ’nesta cidade de BATAVIA em JAVA MAYOR, por Jacobo op den Akker, Ministro pregador d'o S. Euangelho ’na Igreja d'a mesma cidade (Batavia [Jakarta]: Andre Lamberto Lodero, 1703), title-page and first page of Psalm 1. The earliest known example of Western staff notation printed in Southeast Asia. Cambridge University Library (F170.e.17.1). Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library
The Portuguese psalter's text was translated by Jacob op den Akker, probably from the Dutch version by Dathenus, and was completed on 12 May 1702.Footnote 29 One thousand copies were printed, for which ‘30 reams of [the Dutch East India] Company's paper was available free, at Batavia [Jakarta]’.Footnote 30 Interestingly, the final digit in the publication date of 1703 on the title-page of the Cambridge University Library copy is printed as ‘2’, but looks as if it has been altered by hand to ‘3’. The Genevan melodies for Psalms 1 to 150, with the Portuguese translation underlaid, are reproduced in full (pages 1–603), followed directly by: ‘A Ley de Deus. Exod. 20: 1–17’ (the Ten Commandments, pages 603–605); ‘Cantico de Maria. Luc. 1: vs 46–55’ (Magnificat, 606–608); ‘Cantico de Zacharias.Luc. 1. vs. 68–79’ (Song of Zachariah (Benedictus), 608–610); ‘Cantico de Simeaõ. Luc. 2: vs. 29–32’ (Song of Simeon (Nunc dimittis), 611); ‘Padre Nosso. Matth. 6: vs. 9–13’ (The Lord's Prayer, 611–615); ‘Simbolo d'os Apostolos’ (the Apostles’ Creed, 616–618); ‘Cantiga pera pela Manhaa [sic; manhã]’ (Morning Canticle, 618–620); and ‘Cantiga pera a noite’ (Evening Canticle, 620–621).
The next publication at Batavia known to have contained music was also in Portuguese, a formulary entitled A Sancta Cea de Jesu Cristo Senhor, e Salvador nosso Proposta em sua verdadeira preparaçao Actual uso, e Exercicio despois de seu uso Por hum Soliloquio, com a Alma, e aplicada a os animos dos membros da Igreja Reformada como taõbem Alguns Psalmos, e Hymnos, que ordinariemente sob, e despois de sua celebraçao se cantaõ (Batavia: Henrico Welzing and Allardo Fronenbroek, 1723). This source was noted by Diehl to be extant and present in the National Library of Indonesia in 1972, but it cannot now be located.Footnote 31 It included twelve Psalms (23, 25, 32, 42, 51, 62:1, 81:12, 95:2, 100, 103, 111 and 116) and two canticles (Magnificat and Nunc dimittis); Diehl observed that ‘score was melody only, [and] the language was Southeast Asian Portuguese. Whatever melody was assigned to a text in the approved Dutch-language church books was used here.’Footnote 32 Besides the 1703 psalter and the 1723 formulary, no other Portuguese-texted music scores are yet known to have been printed in Batavia during the eighteenth century, although other Portuguese-language publications (mostly religious texts, including Bible translations) were certainly produced there.Footnote 33
There were Portuguese-speaking Protestant communities across the Indian Ocean in Sri Lanka; the Portuguese psalter was reprinted verbatim some three times by the VOC press at Colombo in 1763, 1768 and 1778, for members of the Reformed Church on the island.Footnote 34 The Portuguese psalters printed in Colombo were evidently sent to Batavia: the Swedish naturalist Carl Peter Thunberg (1743–1828), who visited Batavia in 1775, states that he procured there a copy of ‘Os CL Psalmos David, or the Portugueze Psalm book set to Music, used in India, printed at Colombo, 8vo’ (in this context ‘India’ presumably means ‘East Indies’). He continues: ‘The latest edition is that of 1778; and was sent to me from Batavia after my return home.’Footnote 35 Thunberg's bibliographic information suggests that Portuguese psalters circulated regularly between Colombo and Batavia, that they were still in use by local congregations in Batavia as late as 1778 and that they were considered valued objects that could be collected by travellers or sent to correspondents.
Psalms in Tamil and Sinhala
In Sri Lanka, psalms were translated into Tamil and Sinhala, again from the Dutch text of Dathenus. According to Tilak Kularatne, in a recent study of the history of printing in Sri Lanka,
the first Sinhala hymn booklet containing metrical arrangements of the Lord's Prayer, the Ten Commandments, Psalm 23, first and second verses of the Psalm 51 and the Canticle of Simeon, was prepared in 1723 by Mudaliyars Anthony Perera and Louis de Saram; verse and music was by Petrus Dathenus. This was purified from spelling mistakes and enlarged by Mathias Wermelskircher and printed in Colombo in 1755, introducing graphic printing for musical notation. A second and enlarged edition printed in 1768 states that it was first prepared by Konijn in 1723 with the help of the two scholars mentioned above. Perhaps all this was the result of Governor Augustine Rumpf's suggestion ‘to train if possible the Sinhalese to psalm-singing’.Footnote 36
Printing was introduced to Sri Lanka in 1736,Footnote 37 and so the 1723 ‘booklet’ was probably a manuscript, unless it had been printed elsewhere. Three copies of this 1755 Sinhala publication, Singalees gezangboekje, are held at the Library of the University of Leiden.Footnote 38 The use of ‘Modliaars’ (mudaliyar was a title given to indigenous officials) on the title-page indicates that the translators Anthony Perera and Louis de Saram were Sri Lankan men; their sixteenth-century ancestors had probably converted to Catholicism under Portuguese colonial rule in Sri Lanka, and their seventeenth-century forebears to Protestantism under Dutch rule. This book contains musical settings of the Lord's Prayer (1r–4r), the Ten Commandments (4v–[6r]), Psalm 23 ([6v–7r]), the first and second verses of Psalm 51 ([7v–8r]) and the Canticle of Simeon (Nunc dimittis, [8r–v]) (see title-page given as Figure 2); it appears to be the first known printed work to combine Western staff notation with Sinhala characters. The Lord's Prayer (Figure 2, right-hand image) is set to the melody known as Vater unser in Himmelreich, published by Valentin Schumann in his Geistliche Lieder (Leipzig, 1539), a popular Lutheran tune that was made famous by J. S. Bach and others. However, there are differences in the pitches of the penultimate phrase compared to the 1539 version.Footnote 39
Anthony Perera, Louis de Saram and Mathias Wermelskircher, Singalees-gezangboekje, behelfende het Gebed des Heeren. De tien geboden. Psalm drie en-twintig. Psalm een en-vyftig, het eerste en tweede vers. Mitsgaders den Lofzang Simeons (Colombo: in 's Comps: gewoone-Drukkery … door Johann Bernhardt Arnhardt, 1755), title-page and f. 1r. The earliest known printing of Western staff notation with Sinhala characters. Leiden University Library, 114 B 47. Used by permission
More psalms in Tamil and Sinhala scripts were printed at Colombo in 1755 and 1768 respectively (see Figures 3–6).Footnote 40 It appears that the Genevan melodies have been reproduced exactly, and the text fashioned to fit the notes. The Tamil volume (1755), whose Dutch title reads Eenige Psalmen des Koninglyken Prophete Davids, en andere Lofzangen, contains musical settings of Psalms 1, 22, 23, 24, 47, 51, 68, 69, 90, 100, 103, 110, 117, 118, 121 and 122, the Magnificat, the Canticle of Zechariah (Benedictus), the Canticle of Simeon (Nunc dimittis), the Ten Commandments, the Apostles’ Creed and The Lord's Prayer.Footnote 41 The Sinhala volume (1768), whose Dutch title reads Singaleesche Psalmen en Lofzangen, contains musical settings of Psalms 1, 2, 6, 23, 24, 25, 51, 86, 103 and 116, the Ten Commandments, The Lord's Prayer and the Song of Simeon (Nunc dimittis).Footnote 42 In an article of 1943 Edmund Peiris wrote of the 1768 Sinhala psalter that ‘these hymns [sic] are just rough rhymed prose and the plain music of psalm recitals tacked together. They do not seem to have ever caught the fancy of the Sinhalese people; but, as far as the printing went, the work deserves much praise’.Footnote 43
Philippus de Melho, Eenige PSALMEN des Koninglyken Prophete DAVIDS, en andere LOFZANGEN, uyt den Nederduytschen in Tamulschen Digte overgeset door PHILIPPUS DE MELHO, Bedienaar des H. Evangeliums in d. Gemeente JESU CHRISTI te Jaffanapatnam; en uitgegeven naar gewoone Kerkorder (Colombo: in 's Comps: gewoone Drukkery. Door Johann Bernhardt Arnhardt, 1755), title-pages in Dutch and Tamil. Tamil translation of excerpts from the Genevan Psalter. Cambridge University Library (item no. 1 in 7837.d.2). Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library
Melho, Eenige PSALMEN des Koninglyken Prophete DAVIDS, musical scale with the South Asian solmization syllables (sa, re, ga, ma, pa, da, ni, sa …) and first page of Psalm 1. This copy appears to have Philippus de Melho's signature pasted beneath the demonstrations of the scale, on the left-hand page. Cambridge University Library (item no. 1 in 7837.d.2). Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library
Sigisbertus Abrahamsz Bronsveld, SINGALEESCHE PSALMEN en LOFZANGEN Op de gewoone Zangmaate onzer Kerke overgezet en bereimd, en Tot stigtinge der Singaleesche Christenen, Met volle Toestemminge Van de Hooge Overheid deeses Eilands, nu merkelyk vermeerderd en verbeterd, op nieuw in ’t ligt gegeeven onder opzigt van Sigisbertus Abrahamsz Bronsveld Bedienaar des H. Evangeliums, en Rector in ’t Colombo's Kweekschool (Colombo: in 's Comps: Boekdrukkery door Johann Frederik Christoph Dornheim, 1768), title pages in Dutch and Sinhala. Sinhala translation of excerpts from the Genevan Psalter. Cambridge University Library (item no. 2 in 7837.d.2). Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library
Sigisbertus Abrahamsz Bronsveld, SINGALEESCHE PSALMEN en LOFZANGEN, musical scale with transliterated European solmization syllables (ut, re, mi, pa, sol, la, si, ut …) and first page of Psalm 1. Cambridge University Library (item no. 2 in 7837.d.2). Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library
The Tamil and Sinhala psalters were intended for use by Sri Lankan Christians who spoke those languages (possibly including some converts from Hinduism and Buddhism), and they contain demonstrations of musical scales (seen in Figures 4 and 6). The ascending and descending scales with the syllables printed beneath appear to reflect local awareness of certain analogies between the functions of European and South Asian solmization systems.Footnote 44 In fact, the Tamil version (1755) clearly uses the South Asian solmization syllables sa, re, ga, ma, pa, da, ni, sa, which are printed here in place of ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la, si, ut. On the other hand, the Sinhala version (1768) transliterates the European solmization syllables: ut, re, mi, pa, sol, la, si, ut. Notably, fa is rendered as pa, since this was the closest consonantal sound in the language.Footnote 45
In the Tamil version, the use of indigenous solmization syllables by translator Philippus de Melho (1723–1790) to name the notes of the European diatonic scale could be seen as evidence of an attempt to bring European and South Asian systems of music theory and practice into empathetic dialogue; by combining the European system of staff notation with the musical nomenclature of South Asia, he seems to make a symbolic gesture towards a desire for intercultural compatibility. (However, South Asian ragas constitute a kind of musical structure that is markedly different from European scales, given that they incorporate melodic gestures and affective detail.) More light can be shone on this matter when it emerges that Melho himself, despite his Portuguese name, was a Sri Lankan Tamil man; he was ‘the first native who was admitted to the office of Minister of the Dutch Reformed Church in Ceylon’ and was widely renowned as a theologian, translator and philologist.Footnote 46 He was probably raised on the South Asian solmization system, and perhaps saw it as a direct, transferable counterpart to the European syllables, as devised by Guido of Arezzo. Given this fascinating display of cross-cultural empathy, it is curious that the Sinhala version published thirteen years later uses transliterated European solmization syllables rather than indigenous syllables, especially since Sinhala music theory today makes use of the regular South Asian system sa, re, ga, ma, pa, da, ni, sa. Two simple explanations could be that the translator of this volume, Sigisbertus Abrahamsz Bronsveld (1723–1769), was unaware of Sinhala music theory, or that he regarded it as being inappropriate for use in the psalter.
Translation and Theological Transactions in the Malay-Speaking World
Of the numerous psalters printed in Colombo, we know from Thunberg's writings that at least one copy of a Portuguese edition was sent to Batavia, as mentioned earlier. Portuguese had become an important trade language in the Southeast Asian region from the sixteenth century, but Malay (Bahasa Melayu) was far more widely spoken, and this made it highly attractive to Protestant missionaries, who began translating the Bible into Malay. This was in fact the first language into which the Bible had been translated outside of Europe and the Middle East.Footnote 47 The first translation of the entire Bible into Malay was completed in 1701 and published in Roman script at Amsterdam in 1733, and in Jawi (Arabic script used for Malay) at Batavia in 1758.Footnote 48 From the early seventeenth century onwards, various books of the Bible – mostly the Psalms, the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles – had been translated into Malay prose, and circulated in both manuscript and print.Footnote 49 Some of these texts became objects of intercultural exchange in theological discussions between Dutch traders and local Malay rulers. The many prophets common to both Judaeo-Christian and Islamic traditions were focal points of these dialogues, as can be seen in an exchange in April 1632, when Anthonij Caen discussed Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Moses with a twenty-two-year-old ruler in the Sultanate of Gowa (Makassar, Sulawesi); the young Muslim prince then requested that Caen ask the Church Council in Batavia to send him a copy of a Bible in Hebrew, and Caen presented him with a Malay translation of some psalms.Footnote 50
Given the long history of the translation of psalms into Malay (spanning more than four centuries), it is important to consider some significant aspects of their nomenclature. In 1652 Justus Heurn and Jan van Hasel published in Amsterdam a diglot Dutch–Malay edition of the Book of Psalms, and at this point, the term ‘psalm’ (which derives via Latin from the Greek psalmos, itself a translation of the Hebrew word mizmor) was translated into Malay simply as ‘psalm’.Footnote 51 From the early eighteenth century, however, the Christian Arabic term for ‘psalm’, mazmur, was applied in Malay by many translators. Given that the Malay language is widely spoken in the Islamic world and contains many loanwords from Arabic, the adoption of this term by translators was by no means extraordinary. Yet other terms in Malay were by this time also associated with ‘psalm’: in the first published English–Malay dictionary (1701) Thomas Bowrey (c1650–1713) gave two definitions, ‘nianee poojee’ (today nyanyian puji, or hymn of praise) and ‘Zāboor’ (Zabūr).Footnote 52Zabūr is an Arabic term which appears in the Qur'ān (Sura 4:163 and Sura 17:55), referring to the scriptures revealed by God to the Prophet Daud (King David).Footnote 53
Throughout the eighteenth century, ‘psalm’ was generally rendered in Malay-speaking Christian contexts as mazmur, until Protestant Christian missionaries in the Malay-speaking world began to make use of the qur'ānic term Zabūr in the nineteenth century.Footnote 54 This was an evangelistic strategy that had many long-lasting ramifications, arguably contributing to interfaith tensions in modern-day Malaysia, including controversies and legal rulings over the right of Malay-speaking Christians to use the word ‘Allah’ to refer to God.Footnote 55 William Marsden (1754–1836), in his Malay dictionary of 1812 (widely considered the first ‘modern’ Malay dictionary), listed both Zabūr and mazmur for ‘psalm’, giving mazmur the additional definition of ‘canticle’, possibly owing to the fact that psalters in Malay translation included the canticles.Footnote 56 The following discussion relates primarily to translations of versified psalms, generally termed mazmur.
Malay Psalters
Besides prose translations, the psalms were paraphased into rhyming Malay verse from the late seventeenth century onwards. Again, these versified translations were made from the Dutch text by Dathenus.Footnote 57 Many versions of the rympsalmen were published, and they also circulated in manuscript formFootnote 58: they were listed and discussed by the Swiss linguist George Henrik Werndly (1694–1744) in his grammar of Malay, Maleische Spraakkunst (Amsterdam, 1736).Footnote 59 The most famous version of versified rhyming psalms in Malay was made by Werndly himself, and this was printed with all the melodies of the Genevan Psalter at Amsterdam in 1735 (see Figure 7): Sji'r segala Mazmūr2 Da-ūd, dán pūdji2-an jang lâjin.Footnote 60 (In Malay, plurals are made through duplication (for example, mazmur-mazmur) and are usually written with an Arabic ‘2’ at the end of the word (that is, mazmur2). The title-page of the 1735 publication shows an original Arabic ‘2’; the modern form is oriented ninety degrees anticlockwise.) The title translates as Syair: All the Psalms of David, and Other Hymns [or Praises].
George Henrik Werndly, Sji‘r segala Mazmūr2-Da-ūd, dan pūdji2-an jang lâjin (Amsterdam: R. dan DJ. Wetyistejn, Pe
ara–Kompanija, 1735), title-page and first page of psalms. Malay translation of the entire Genevan Psalter. Cambridge University Library (item no. 3 in BSS.680.D31). Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library
It is significant that Werndly chose to use the Malay term sji'r (now syair), which represents a very important poetic (or musicopoetic) genre within Malay classical literature, to head the title of this translated psalter.Footnote 61 The Malay literary genre syair, whose name derives from the Arabic shi'r (‘poetry’ or ‘verse’), is considered to have been created by the Sufi mystic Hamzah al-Fansuri, who lived in northern Sumatra in the sixteenth century.Footnote 62 The Malay syair dealt with lofty spiritual topics, and were defined as polar opposites to the Malay genres nyanyi (worldly songs) and pantun (rhyming verses). Werndly appears to have recognized the spiritual quality of this classical genre from Islamic Malay culture, and to have adopted the form and inserted Christian content. The many forms of rhyming genres in traditional Malay literature, especially pantun and syair, must have appeared strongly analogous to metrical verse from European traditions, and thus provided missionaries and translators with a basis for the cross-cultural application of textual content in the form of metrical psalms and, later, hymns.
The Malay psalter of 1735 is a quarto publication that contains 184 pages of music notation. The Genevan melodies for the Psalms, underlaid with the Malay text, appear on pages 1–178; these are followed by the Ten Commandments (178–179), the Magnificat (179), the Song of Zechariah (180), the Song of Simeon (180), The Lord's Prayer (181), the Apostles’ Creed (182–183) and several prayers (183–184). Although it was printed in Amsterdam, Werndly's Malay psalter was clearly exported to the East Indies: in 1775 Thunberg collected a copy in Batavia, along with the Portuguese psalter mentioned earlier, and took it with him to Sweden.Footnote 63 The copy held at the Cambridge University Library (within the Bible Society's Library) is part of a bound volume whose spine reads ‘USED AT AMBOYNA [Ambon, Maluku]’.Footnote 64 No reprints of the Malay version in the second half of the eighteenth century are known (unlike the Portuguese psalter), but it was republished in Haarlem in 1822 and 1824, with slightly different Malay titles, and then again in the city of Zaltbommel in 1864, this time containing a short Preface demonstrating the musical scale in staff notation (the solmization syllables are given as ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la, si, ut).Footnote 65 Again, the nineteenth-century reprints contain all the melodies of the Genevan Psalter.
A range of evidence attests to these Malay psalters’ widespread use over many decades in various parts of Indonesia. They were used by Malay-speaking Christians in port cities on Java's north coast, the Lesser Sunda Islands (including West Timor and Rote) and the eastern islands of Maluku (the Moluccas), especially Ambon, throughout the nineteenth century. Thomas van den End and Jan S. Aritonang state that Werndly's rhymed psalms remained the standard version of the Malay Psalter until 1908, when a more modern version of the text was composed.Footnote 66 The longevity of this publication speaks to its centrality to community worship amongst local Protestant congregations. From an early point in the Dutch colonial period, psalms were sung regularly in schools established by the Dutch government, and teachers were given strict instructions about the use and care of the psalters.Footnote 67 As Jean Gelman Taylor points out, the 1684 school regulations for Batavia state that teachers must read ‘without stumbling, write in a good hand, sing the Psalms of David well, and be able to do arithmetic passably’.Footnote 68 Government reports of visits in the 1750s to churches and schools in islands in the eastern archipelago refer to the presence of psalters, and one report mentions the need for a cupboard for books in West Timor.Footnote 69 Diehl writes that ‘the people sang, just as did others of that era, by having somebody “line out” the melody’ (that is, the worship leader would sing a line of melody and it would be repeated by the congregation).Footnote 70 Although the Genevan Psalter was set to four-part harmony in Europe, there has yet to emerge documentary evidence to show that harmonic settings were sung in the Malay-Indonesian Archipelago; still, this remains a possibility.
The question of how local singers responded to the Western diatonic scale introduced by the Dutch Reformed Church, and how or whether they reconciled it to the indigenous scales of Indonesia – as embodied in gamelan tuning systems – remains unresolved. Documentary evidence of the interaction between different musical systems within Christianized communities, before the age of sound recording, can provide little detail beyond generalized comment in this regard. If psalms were ‘lined out’ by a solo singer, then repeated monophonically by a congregation, it seems feasible that the singers would adhere to the tuning system with which they were most familiar, whether this was one imposed from outside or cultivated within oral tradition. However, when the psalms were performed with instrumental accompaniment, chiefly the organ, the musical expectations of a worship leader or pedagogical impulses of a schoolteacher would have leaned towards shaping singers’ intonation in accordance with the European diatonic scale.
Regulations and inventories may give some normative indication of the desired use of these texts, but there are some reports of the performance of psalm-singing. Here letters and travelogues become important sources of information, although the perspectives of the writers (some of them missionaries themselves) must be taken into account. Several nineteenth-century travelogues and letters by Britons attest to the use of Malay psalters and hymnals in the Dutch East Indies.Footnote 71 When Daniel Tyerman and George Bennet travelled around the world to inspect the work of the London Missionary Society, they stopped at Java in 1825; on 22 July they visited a village called Depock (Depok), outside Batavia, which was inhabited by 180 Malay Protestants ‘of all ages’. Following an inspection of the local chapel, they reported: ‘In the school-house we found a Malay version of the Psalms, adapted to music; also several excellent forms of prayer, and catechisms. Most of the children, thirty-nine in number, are well acquainted with the latter, and are duly taught the former.’Footnote 72 This Malay psalter would probably have been the 1735 or 1822 publication of Werndly's translation. Another testimonial concerns hymns as well as psalms: the British geologist Joseph Beete Jukes (1811–1869), serving as a naturalist on an expedition, included an intriguing reference to Malay psalms and hymns in his account of a visit to Coupang (Kupang), West Timor, on 2 September 1843:
The schoolmaster produced a few Malay hymn-books, and seating himself at a small pedal organ, he made them sing some hymns and psalms. The hymn-books had an appearance of considerable antiquity, and the musical notation under the words was of that ancient kind that in England one only sees in old manuscript music in cathedrals, the long notes[,] or ‘breves,’ being of a square form. The children sang very fairly, and seemed very docile and attentive. The Dutch clergyman here has taken much trouble with the Malay inhabitants, many of whom are Christians.Footnote 73
It is probable that the ‘ancient kind’ of notation Jukes describes is a reference to the void (‘white’) notation used in all the publications of the psalter that have been discussed so far. Yet given his comment that ‘the hymn-books had an appearance of considerable antiquity’, it is possible that these books could also have been the 1735 publication of Werndly's Malay translation of the Genevan Psalter, or (more likely) the 1822 or 1824 Haarlem reprints. Another possibility was a more recent publication, but one that still used the ‘old’ form of void notation: a songbook printed in Batavia in 1828, Kitab njanji2an. This included sixty-one hymns (njanji2an), psalms (Mazmur2) with Genevan melodies (some of which seem to have different rhythms, which may be deliberate alterations, or mistakes) and sacred songs.Footnote 74
The way these printed musical commodities entered into indigenous patterns of preservation is poignantly illustrated by a fragment of a nineteenth-century print of the Malay psalter, which survives bound in indigenous bark covers; according to Annabel Gallop, this is ‘currently held in the Volkenkunde Museum in Leiden, but it was found/acquired in the Sangihe-Talaud islands, between Maluku and Mindanao’, demonstrating the broad geographical reach of the psalters’ circulation.Footnote 75 The indigenous form of binding seems to reflect the care taken by local communities in eastern Indonesia to safeguard these imported texts, and is symbolic of the cultural appropriation of the psalters by the people who used them. Numerous Genevan Psalters in Dutch also circulated in Asia during the early modern period; few copies remain, but Diehl located in Jakarta a 1738 copy (printed in Dordrecht) of the Dathenus Dutch-language Genevan Psalter.Footnote 76 Dutch-language psalters were also printed in Sri Lanka in the late eighteenth century, on at least two occasions, in 1772 and 1776.Footnote 77
Conclusion
The translations of the Genevan Psalter into local languages, produced in or for eighteenth-century Indonesia and Sri Lanka, are remarkable examples of musical artefacts that emerged from intersections between multiple cultures: these were Protestant texts translated into Portuguese (a language traditionally associated with Catholicism), Tamil (associated with Hinduism), Sinhala (associated with Buddhism) and Malay (associated with Islam), with Swiss melodies, printed by the presses of the Dutch East India Company in two major port cities of Java and Sri Lanka, for use by Asian and Eurasian communities. From Geneva to Jakarta, and as far as the Sangihe-Taulud Islands in eastern Indonesia, the melodies of the Calvinist church spread throughout Christian communities in societies under Dutch colonial rule. Of course, this affected a small sector of society; in the Malay-Indonesian Archipelago, for instance, the Christian population was less than one per cent by the end of the eighteenth century.Footnote 78 By contrast, the numbers of Christians recorded by the Dutch in low-country Sri Lanka in 1722 amounted to twenty-one per cent.Footnote 79
European influences on the musics of the Malay-Indonesian Archipelago and Sri Lanka have been examined from many perspectives, but the impact of the relatively simple melodies of the Genevan Psalter, bringing with them the European solmization syllables and the diatonic scale system, must have had a deep influence on the minority Christian populations. Sung every week in liturgical and devotional contexts by multiple generations of indigenous Protestant Christians, the Genevan melodies would arguably have entered the musical consciousness and aesthetic disposition of these communities. Today, after more than a century of recorded sound and radio, not to mention the introduction of new forms of sacred music that displaced the Genevan melodies, it is almost impossible to trace exactly how these musical forms were infused within local music cultures that were predominantly oral. Yet through the study of printed and manuscript ephemera from the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, we can begin to identify the roots and construct a historical soundscape of an imported musical tradition that was imposed on or embraced by minority communities of indigenous Christians in colonial Indonesia and Sri Lanka.
