In honor of "42 to go..."

In honor of reaching the "42 more psalms to typeset" mark, I'd like to offer you all to take a look at the entry for the 42nd Psalm: GENEVAN 42

There have been a couple of secondary and tertiary aims to this project. One of these has been to make "fasola-friendly" music from repertories outside the historic/traditional shape-note repertoire (including denominational hymnody) available to shape-note singers.

Another one of these has been to re-pair tunes titled for a given text with the text for which they were originally intended. Readily apparent examples of these include "Ninety-Fifth" and "Old Hundredth" -- two well known tunes to fasola singers, but which are not commonly paired with paraphrases of the 95th or 100th psalms. In this collection, an effort has been made to restore these historical pairings, to allow modern singers to sing these psalms in a way not entirely dissimilar from how protestants would have sung from the Genevan Psalter nearly 500 years ago.

The tune below is an intersection of both of these intents. GENEVAN 42 is a tune found in a number of denominational hymnals, generally paired with the text "Comfort, comfort, ye my people" -- a metrical paraphrase of the 40th chapter of Isaiah. In accordance with the above, I elected to adopt the tune, and outfit it with a paraphrase of the 42nd Psalm, as the tune appeared in Bourgeois' tunebook. The principal issue was that no paraphrase of Psalm 42 was readily available in the uncommon meter of the tune, 8.7.8.7.7.7.8.8.

Well, needs must, and foolhardiness allowed me to try my hand at a metrical paraphrase of the psalm in this strange meter. Let me know what you think, or if you can foresee any manner of improving either tune or text!