The 1912 Psalter

Although the UPCNA no longer exists as a separate denomination, its liturgical impact is with us still. This church body was the primary mover behind the 1912 Psalter, a join project of several Reformed denominations, mostly in the US.

It began as an effort to update the UPCNA's previous Psalter of 1887. (The UPCNA was an exclusive psalm-singing church until 1925.) The resulting Psalter employed a diversity of metres as compared to the old Scottish Psalter of 1650, Sternhold and Hopkins, and Tate and Brady. Unfortunately the tunes chosen as settings for the texts were very largely limited to those composed in the previous generation or so. Many of these were not particularly strong melodies and eventually went into deserved oblivion. (The Genevan Psalter went unrepresented.)

The 1912 Psalter formed the nucleus of the Christian Reformed Church's Psalter Hymnal, and influenced the Orthodox Presbyterian Church's Trinity Hymnal (now shared with the Presbyterian Church in America) and a number of other hymnals published by the Reformed Church in America and the Presbyterian Church (USA) and its predecessor bodies.