Psalm 27 Chant
You are my light and my refuge,
Who should I fear?
One thing (One thing)
One thing (One thing)
One thing I ask of you.
To behold your Sweetness
And gaze on your Palace
Shelter me
Raise me up!
You are my light and my refuge,
Who should I fear?
One thing (One thing)
One thing (One thing)
One thing I ask of you.
To dwell in the house of the Lord
All the days of my life.
Psalm 27 Chant by Carly Lesser (Ketzirah)
is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
This chant started coming to me after a wedding, when I was riding the subway back to my hotel. The only thing I really had to amuse myself was my phone with no internet connection. I ended up looking at a copy of Psalms translated by Robert Alter
In a week I’ve gone through three iterations, and I think this is the one! I think this could easily be used as a responsive/Kirtan-style chant. It also works as a personal chant with just one voice singing it — at least I think so. You can vary the amount of repetition and loop back around several times, depending on your situation.
My intent would be that the line, “To dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life” would be the very last line of the song and only sung when you are trying to wrap up the song. It would be a cue to everyone singing with you that you were closing the chant. I think one call-and-response and then all together for a final time, or two call-and-response singings of the line would work really well.
You tell me? Does it work? Have you used it? If you used it, what did people think?
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I have never heard this as a chant. Can you recommend a recording? @LookingGlass22
@LookingGlass22 — were you not able to see the audio player on the post? Here's a link to the file on Sound Cloud: http://soundcloud.com/peelapom/psalm-27-version-3 The chant doesn't include all the words to Psalm 27, just enough to capture the idea.