Witvliet on worship

I've been reading John Witvliet's Worship Seeking Understanding, which consists of a series of previously published essays gathered into one volume. The most interesting of these for me is "The Spirituality of the Psalter in Calvin's Geneva." Witvliet notes that the Genevan Psalter was compiled over a period of decades, so that up until two years before Calvin's death Genevan Christians had access to only a partial psalter for liturgical use.

It is interesting to note which psalms were translated and versified first.

Almost all of the first psalms set in metrical form were either wisdom psalms or psalms of confession. This is perhaps a natural result of the placement of sung psalmody immediately following the prayer of confession in the Genevan liturgy. The other striking pattern in the early metrical psalms is the predominance of psalms that either lament or reflect on trouble caused by the psalmist's enemy. In fact, this tendency is so marked that psalms of praise are strikingly underrepresented. Only three of the twenty-two texts in the 1539 Psalter are psalms of praise (p. 208).

We all know of the ubiquitous "praise and worship" genre. Perhaps we need to acquaint ourselves with the "lament and confess" genre.