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The Genevan Psalter in Eighteenth-Century Indonesia and Sri Lanka

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 August 2014

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Abstract

The spread of Protestant Christianity to Indonesia and Sri Lanka in the early modern period involved large-scale translation projects and, from the beginning of the eighteenth century, the publication of metrical psalms in languages spoken by local communities: Portuguese, Malay, Tamil and Sinhala. Selected psalms from the Genevan Psalter, as well as complete versions, were translated and published in South and Southeast Asia on several occasions in the eighteenth century, representing the earliest printing of Western staff notation in Jakarta and Colombo. These psalters were issued in numerous editions, and some were prefaced with a short explanation of the musical scale. Christian communities in Indonesia and Sri Lanka appear to have used the psalters regularly in religious devotions and services. This article explores the processes involved in the translation, production and distribution of these psalters, considering musical and cultural aspects of their adoption into local communities.

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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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.

Figure 1 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

Figure 2 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

Figure 3 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

Figure 4 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

Figure 5 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

Figure 6 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].

Figure 7 George Henrik Werndly, Sji‘r segala Mazmūr2-Da-ūd, dan pūdji2-an jang lâjin (Amsterdam: R. dan DJ. Wetyistejn, Peara–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.

References

1 Marot, Clément and de Bèze, Théodore, Les pseaumes mis en rime françoise, par Clément Marot, & Théodore de Bèze (Geneva: par Thomas Courteau, pour Antoine Vincent, 1562)Google Scholar. On the cultural contexts surrounding the role of the psalms in Calvinist worship and theology see Trocmé-Latter, Daniel, ‘The Psalms as a Mark of Protestantism: The Introduction of Liturgical Psalm-Singing in Geneva’, Plainsong and Medieval Music 20/2 (2011), 145163CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Slenk, Howard and Luth, Jan R., in Nicholas Temperley and others, ‘Psalms, Metrical’, in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, second edition, ed. Sadie, Stanley and Tyrrell, John (London: Macmillan, 2001), volume 20, 490Google Scholar.

3 Slenk and Luth, in Temperley, ‘Psalms, Metrical’, 492.

4 For recent studies on the Genevan Psalter see Eckhard Grunewald, Jürgens, Henning P. and Luth, Jan R., eds, Der Genfer Psalter und seine Rezeption in Deutschland, der Schweiz und den Niederlanden: 16.–18. Jahrhundert (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2004)Google Scholar, and Haug, Judith I., Der Genfer Psalter in den Niederlanden, Deutschland, England und dem Osmanischen Reich (16.–18. Jahrhundert) (Tutzing: Schneider, 2010)Google Scholar. Haug discusses the fourteen psalms that were translated by Ali Ufkî (1610–c1675) in Der Genfer Psalter, 481–578; the melodies are written in Western staff notation from right to left, with the first verse of the Turkish text underlaid. The manuscript is held in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Suppl. Turc 472. Ali Ufkî was born in Lvov, Poland (his original name was Wojciech Bobowski, latinized as Albertus Bobovius) and was captured by Ottoman forces at an early age and taken to Istanbul, where he converted to Islam. Wright, Owen, ‘Ufkî, ‘Alī’, in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, second edition, ed. Sadie, Stanley and Tyrrell, John (London: Macmillan, 2001), volume 26, 34Google Scholar. For a study and facsimile of Ali Ufkî's Turkish translations of the first fourteen psalms from the Genevan Psalter see Behar, Cem, Ali Ufkî ve Mezmurlar (Istanbul: Pan, 1990)Google Scholar.

5 For a biography of Diehl see Dempsey, Deon, ‘Diehl, Katharine Smith (1906–1989)’, Dictionary of American Library Biography: Second Supplement, ed. Davis, Donald G. Jr, volume 3 (Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited, 2003), 7679Google Scholar.

6 Two of her best-known publications are Diehl, Katharine Smith, Hymns and Tunes: An Index (New York: Scarecrow, 1966)Google Scholar, and Katharine Smith Diehl, assisted in the Oriental Languages by Sircar, Hemendra Kumar, Early Indian Imprints (New York: Scarecrow, 1964)Google Scholar.

7 Diehl states: ‘Unlike most studies based on manuscript or printed sources, no archives or libraries in Europe have been used. Except for one publication, every early Southeast Asian imprint [studied here] has been handled somewhere in Asia. A few of the very earliest do not exist in Asia; I found photocopies there. In some instances only a single copy remains anywhere.’ Diehl, Katharine Smith, Printers and Printing in the East Indies: Volume 1, Batavia (New Rochelle: Aristide D. Caratzas, 1990), viiiGoogle Scholar.

8 Diehl, Printers and Printing. The titles of all nine volumes are listed on the publisher's website (<http://caratzas.com/index.cfm?category=31>), and are as follows: 1. Batavia; 2. Europeans and Ceylon, from 1505; 3. Jesuits, Lutherans, and the Printing Press in South India; 4. Bombay Presidency and the Printing Press; 5. Persian, Arabic, and Urdu Printing in Bengal, from 1778; 6. The Press Beyond Calcutta – North and East; 7. Scholarship and Education in Bengal; 8. Four Studies: Madrasis, Armenians, Words, Music; 9. A Comprehensive and Systematic Bibliography. I have sent several enquiries about this work to the publisher, but have not yet received any further information. The Katharine Smith Diehl Papers, covering approximately the period 1965–1980, are held at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin; boxes 1–3, 5–7 and 10–14 contain drafts and typescripts of ‘Printers and Printing’.

9 In Diehl, Printers and Printing, music is frequently discussed in chapter 7 (‘The Church: The Things that Are God's’, 229–306) and chapter 10 (‘Recreation: Its Influences with the Cities and Presses’, 343–361); about half of the sources for chapter 7 and all of them for chapter 10 date from the nineteenth century. It is possible that the unpublished volumes of ‘Printers and Printing’ may yield seminal data for the history of musical transitions to European colonialism in the eastern Indian Ocean region. For a social and cultural history of Batavia see Taylor, Jean Gelman, The Social World of Batavia, second edition (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009)Google Scholar.

10 Diehl, Katharine Smith, ‘The Dutch Press in Ceylon, 1734–96’, The Library Quarterly 42/3 (1972), 329342Google Scholar. For a recent study of this subject see Kularatne, Tilak, History of Printing and Publishing in Ceylon, 1736–1912 (Dehiwala: author, 2006)Google Scholar.

11 Diehl, ‘The Dutch Press in Ceylon’, 336. The first page of music (Psalm 1) from this publication is reproduced in Peiris, Edmund, ‘Sinhalese Christian Literature of the XVIIth and XVIIIth Centuries’, Journal of the Ceylon Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 35 (1943)Google Scholar, plate II between pages 170 and 171, and also in Kularatne, History of Printing and Publishing in Ceylon, plate VIII between pages 28 and 29.

12 Diehl, ‘The Dutch Press in Ceylon’, 336, 338. These three psalters appear to be listed in a nineteenth-century British colonial listing of publications made by the Dutch in Sri Lanka: Nos 20, 33 and 37 in Ondaatje, P. J., ‘A Tabular List of Original Works and Translations, Published by the Late Dutch Government of Ceylon at Their Printing Press at Colombo’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland 1/1–2 (1865), 142143Google Scholar. The 1776 publication is listed by Ondaatje as 1773; this is perhaps because the approval on the verso of the title-page is dated 1773. Diehl, ‘The Dutch Press in Ceylon’, 338.

13 Dempsey, ‘Diehl, Katharine Smith (1906–1989)’, 78; Diehl, Printers and Printing, 361.

14 Diehl, ‘The Dutch Press in Ceylon’, 336. The work she quotes is François Valentyn (1666–1727), Oud en nieuw Oost-Indiën, vervattende een naaukeurige en uitvoerige verhandelinge van Nederlands mogentheyd in die gewesten, benevens eene wydluftige beschryvinge der Moluccos, Amboina, Banda, Timor, en Solor, Java, en alle de eylanden onder dezelve landbestieringen behoorende, het Nederlands comptoir op Suratte, en de levens der Groote Mogols, five volumes in eight (Te Dordrecht, Amsterdam: by Joannes van Braam, Gerard Onder de Linden, 1724–1726), volume 4, part 2 (entitled Zaaken van den Godsdienst op het Eyland Java … (1726)), 86–94.

15 Diehl, Printers and Printing, 16–17 (archival references), 269 (quotation).

16 Diehl, Printers and Printing, 269. The Malay language is traditionally written in Arabic script (known as Jawi script in Malay contexts), but since the late sixteenth century it has also been expressed in romanized form. See Collins, James T., Malay, World Language of the Ages: A Sketch of Its History (Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, 1996)Google Scholar. Roman script (known in Malay as rumi) is now used for everyday purposes in most Malay-speaking countries, although Jawi script remains a valuable cultural currency, especially in Islamic contexts.

17 See Coelho, Victor Anand, ‘Music in New Worlds’, in The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Music, ed. Butt, John and Carter, Tim (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 88110CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Liturgical music within Catholic institutions in the early modern Philippines is discussed in Irving, D. R. M., Colonial Counterpoint: Music in Early Modern Manila (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 157194CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The role of psalms in the Jesuit mission to Japan in the late sixteenth century is discussed in López-Gay, Jesús, La liturgia en la misión del Japón del siglo XVI (Rome: Libreria dell'Università Gregoriana, 1970), 54, 63, 68, 131–132, 174, 176, 290Google Scholar.

18 On the singing of psalms by English mariners see Woodfield, Ian, English Musicians in the Age of Exploration (Stuyvesant: Pendragon, 1995), 4148Google Scholar. The English East India Company's first factory (trading post) was established in 1603 at Bantam (Banten), on the west coast of Java, and psalms were sung at daily services and at the setting of watches by the factors (the name given to the men who worked at the East India Company's trading posts). See Woodfield, English Musicians, 229 and 231. (The Genevan Psalter was not widely used in England, which had its own psalters (organized by Thomas Sternhold and John Hopkins), although some melodies were borrowed from the Genevan tradition. See Temperley, ‘Psalms, Metrical’.) In the (in)famous execution of English factors by the Dutch at Ambon in 1623, an event that became known throughout Europe as the Ambon Massacre, the condemned men sang psalms on the eve of their execution, and one of the factors wrote a personal testimony in a psalter that was returned to London. See Woodfield, English Musicians, 232. Diehl notes that Dutch ships carried numerous psalters, such as the Trincomale, whose inventory of 1789 (held at the Ceylon National Archives (Department of National Archives, Sri Lanka)) included ‘32 Psalters with locks, and 133 Psalters leather bound’: ‘The Dutch Press in Ceylon’, 336. Christoph Schweitzer, who was in Sri Lanka between 1676 and 1682, noted the singing of psalms by Dutch residents. See Woodfield, English Musicians, 241, and Christoph Frick and Christoph Schweitzer, A Relation of Two Several Voyages Made into the East-Indies, by Christopher Fryke, Surg. and Christopher Schewitzer [sic]: The whole Containing an Exact Account of the Customs, Dispositions, Manners, Religion, &c. of the several Kingdoms and Dominions in Those Parts of the World in General: But in a More Particular Manner, Describing Those Countries Which are under the Power and Government of the Dutch. Done out of the Dutch by S. L. (London: for printed [sic] D. Brown, S. Crouch, J. Knapton, R. Knaplock, J. Wyate, B. Took and S. Buckley, 1700), 300.

19 For studies of Catholic evangelization in Southeast Asia see Alberts, Tara, Conflict and Conversion: Catholicism in Southeast Asia, 1500–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Irving, Colonial Counterpoint.

20 Andaya, Barbara Watson, ‘Between Empires and Emporia: The Economics of Christianization in Early Modern Southeast Asia’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 53/1–2 (2010), 377Google Scholar.

21 End and Aritonang write that ‘at the beginning of the nineteenth century, indigenous Protestant Christians numbered about 40,000 (as compared to about 16,000 in 1605)’; together with Catholics, approximately 0.7 per cent of the people in the Indonesian Archipelago were Christian, whereas around eighty-five per cent were Muslim, from a population estimated at around seven million. See den End, Th. van and Aritonang, Jan S., ‘1800–2005: A National Overview’, in A History of Christianity in Indonesia, ed. Aritonang, Jan Sihar and Steenbrink, Karel (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 141Google Scholar. The foundation of many evangelistic societies in the nineteenth century would bring a new wave of missionaries to this region.

22 See Barbara Watson Andaya, ‘Between Empires and Emporia’, 378–380.

23 Andaya, Leonard Y., ‘The Portuguese Tribe in the Malay-Indonesian Archipelago in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, in The Portuguese and the Pacific, ed. Dutra, Francis A. and dos Santos, João Camilo (Santa Barbara: Center for Portuguese Studies, University of California Santa Barbara, 1995), 129Google Scholar.

24 den Akker, Jacobo op, 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)Google Scholar. Extant copies are recorded in the British Library, Cambridge University Library, Württembergische Landesbibliothek (Stuttgart), Koninklijke Bibliotheek (The Hague) and Bibliotheek Universiteit Leiden.

25 According to Darlow, T. H. and Moule, H. F., the first published version of the psalter in Portuguese was included in O Livro da oraçaõ commum e administraçaõ dos sacramentos e outros ritos, & ceremonias da igreja, conforme o uso da Igreja da Inglaterra: juntamente com o Salterio ou Salmos de David (Oxford: Na Estampa do Teatro, 1695)Google Scholar; this was ‘intended, apparently, for use in Portuguese-speaking congregations in communion with the Church of England in the East Indies’. However, it contains no music. (Extant copies are held in the Cambridge University Library.) Darlow and Moule also note that ‘in 1703 there appeared at Batavia an octavo edition of a metrical version of the Psalter, with Canticles etc. and liturgical matter, prepared by J. op den Akker … with the music’, but do not give a separate entry for it. See Darlow, T. H. and Moule, H. F., Historical Catalogue of the Printed Editions of Holy Scripture in the Library of the British and Foreign Bible Society, two volumes (London: The Bible House, 1911), volume 2, 1233Google Scholar.

26 Niemeijer, Hendrik E., ‘The Free Asian Christian Community and Poverty in Pre-Modern Batavia’, in Jakarta–Batavia: Socio-Cultural Essays, ed. Grijns, Kees and Nas, Peter J. M. (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2000), 85Google Scholar.

27 Taylor writes that ‘Mardijkers … is an old Dutch rendering of the Portuguese version of Maharddhika (Sanskrit for “great man,” “high and mighty”) and which acquired in Indonesia the meaning of free(d) person’. Taylor, The Social World of Batavia, 47.

28 Taylor, The Social World of Batavia, 49.

29 Diehl, ‘The Dutch Press in Ceylon’, 336.

30 Diehl, Printers and Printing, 17. Original text: ‘Tot het drucken van 1000 p Portugeese Psalmboeken, 100 riemen druk Papier te schenken … 12 Mei 1702.’ van Kunsten en Wetenschappen, Bataviaasch Genootschap, Realia, Register op de generale resolutiën van het kasteel Batavia. 1632–1805 (Leiden: Gualth. Kolff, 1882), volume 1, 208Google Scholar. François Valentyn (1666–1727) also reported on the publication of this psalter in his Oud en nieuw Oost-Indiën, volume 4, part 2 (Zaaken van den Godsdienst op het Eyland Java … (1726)), 89, 92, 94.

31 Diehl, Printers and Printing, 18. I asked my former graduate student Jenny McCallum to search for it in April 2012 when she was undertaking archival research in Jakarta. However, while a card existed in the catalogue, the book could not be located by the staff.

32 She continues: ‘There was no inclination at the time to adapt local melodies to Christian ritual in the Dutch Reformed Church. It has required 250 more years to accomplish that.’ Diehl, Printers and Printing, 18. This attitude reflects strict Calvinist views about what kinds of music could be acceptable for worship; for Calvin, the monophonic singing of the Psalms, in vernacular languages, was the most ideal music for public worship. See Trocmé-Latter, ‘The Psalms as a Mark of Protestantism’, 151. By contrast, Catholic missionaries (especially the Jesuits) in the Philippines and Latin America accommodated many kinds of indigenous music within the devotional and liturgical practices of their mission communities. See Irving, Colonial Counterpoint, 121–127.

33 Old and New Testaments in Portuguese were printed at Batavia in 1748 and 1773 respectively. See Diehl, Printers and Printing, 257.

34 These three editions were: (1) den Akker, Jacobus op, Os CL Psalmos d'el rey e propheta David. Como taõbem outros canticos espirituaes uzadas ’na igreja reformada (Colombo: P. Bruwaart, 1763)Google Scholar. Copies are recorded at the British Library, the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (The Hague) and the Bibliotheek Universiteit Leiden; (2) den Akker, Jacobus op, Os CL Psalmos d'el Rey y Profeta David: e outros canticos espirituaes: ’na Igreja Reformada Belgica usados: em a lingua Portuguesa compostos, A quarta impressaõ [fourth printing] (Colombo: Johann Fredrik Christoph Dornheim, 1768)Google Scholar. Copies are recorded at the Universiteitsbibliotheek Utrecht and the Oliveira Lima Library (Catholic University of America, Washington, D. C.); (3) den Akker, Jacobus op, Os CL psalmos d'el rey e propheta David, como taõbem outros canticos espirituaes uzadas ’na Igreja Reformada (Colombo: Johann Fredrik Christoph Dornheim, impressor de Illustra Companhia ’na cidade, 1778Google Scholar). Copies are recorded at the British Library, the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (The Hague) and the Bibliotheek Universiteit Leiden. The 1768 print is already listed as the fourth edition; if the first edition was the Batavia print of 1703, then at least one more remains to be found.

35 He adds: ‘All these printed books in the Malay and Portugueze tongue, I presented to the Royal Academy at Upsal [Uppsala], in whose library they are kept, as also several other scarce and valuable books, printed in the Cingalese, Malay, and Tamullish [sic] languages.’ Thunberg, Carl Peter, Travels in Europe, Africa, and Asia: Performed between the Years 1770 and 1779, three volumes (London: W. Richardson[, 1793–1795]), volume 2, 230Google Scholar.

36 Kularatne, History of Printing and Publishing in Ceylon, 23. The reference to Rumpf comes from Peiris, ‘Sinhalese Christian Literature’, 171.

37 Kularatne, Tilak, ‘Introduction of Printing to Sri Lanka (Ceylon): The Dutch Press in Ceylon (1736–1796)’, Libri 45/2 (1995), 6577CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

38 Perera, Anth, de Saram, Louis and Wermelskircher, Mathias, 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)Google Scholar. Held at Leiden University Library (shelfmarks 114 B 47, 877 G 10 and 1497 C 45).

39 For the original melody (Dorian) of 1539 see Leaver, Robin A., Luther's Liturgical Music: Principles and Implications (Grand Rapids, MI, and Cambridge: William B. Eerdmans, 2007), 132Google Scholar.

40 de Melho, Philippus, 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)Google Scholar; Bronsveld, Sigisbertus Abrahamsz, 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)Google Scholar. These publications are discussed in Diehl, ‘The Dutch Press in Ceylon’, 336–338. Complete original copies are located in the Cambridge University Library, where the two works are bound together in Rare Books volume 7837.d.2. Extant copies are also held by other institutions. Diehl states that these two publications ‘are the earliest examples of music [that is, music in European staff notation] with words in the local languages to have issued from any press east of the Indus River – as far east as the Philippines and Japan’. Diehl, ‘The Dutch Press in Ceylon’, 339. Note that in my article ‘The Dissemination and Use of European Music Books in Early Modern Asia’, Early Music History 28 (2009), 39–59, I discussed examples of Western staff notation being printed in Japan (1605) and China (1723), but asserted that similar activity did not take place in other parts of Asia until the mid-nineteenth century (53). At that stage I had not encountered the psalters from Indonesia and Sri Lanka, or the work of Diehl.

41 These are listed (except for Psalm 24) in Diehl, ‘The Dutch Press in Ceylon’, 337; the copy in the Cambridge University Library (item no. 1 in 7837.d.2) contains contemporaneous handwritten Arabic numerals above each psalm, and Dutch titles for the other works.

42 The copy that Diehl examined in Colombo was incomplete, containing ‘approximately one-fourth of the text’; however, the copy in the Cambridge University Library (item no. 2 in 7837.d.2) appears to be complete.

43 Peiris, ‘Sinhalese Christian Literature’, 171.

44 European observation of and speculation on analogies between different Eurasian solmization systems in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were discussed in my Jerome Roche Prize Lecture ‘Global Gamut: Encounters of Scale Systems in the Early Modern World’, given at the Royal Musical Association Annual Research Students’ Conference at the University of Hull on 7 January 2012.

45 Thanks to Jim Sykes and Natasha Senanayake for transliterating these Tamil and Sinhala characters.

46 For a biography of Philip de Melho see Chitty, Simon Casie, The Tamil Plutarch: A Summary Account of the Lives of the Poets and Poetesses of Southern India and Ceylon: From the Earliest to the Present Times with Select Specimens of Their Compositions, second revised edition (originally published 1859; modern edition published 1946) (New Delhi: J. Jetley, 1982), 8288Google Scholar.

47 See Hunt, Robert A., ‘The History of the Translation of the Bible into Bahasa Malaysia’, Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 62/1 (1989), 35Google Scholar. See also Fenn, Eric, ‘The Bible and the Missionary’, in The Cambridge History of the Bible: The West from the Reformation to the Present Day, ed. Greenslade, S. L. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), 385Google Scholar.

48 Hunt, ‘The History of the Translation of the Bible into Bahasa Malaysia’, 35–37.

49 For instance, a Malay translation of the Psalms was published at Amsterdam in 1652 (as discussed below), and the Gospels and Acts of the Apostles were printed at Oxford in 1677: Jang ampat evangelia derri Tuan Kita Jesu Christi, daan berboatan derri jang Apostoli Bersacti, bersalin dallam Bassa Malayo: That Is, the Four Gospels of Our Lord Jesus Christ, and the Acts of the Holy Apostles, Translated into the Malayan Tongue (Oxford: Printed by H. Hall, 1677) (Cambridge University Library, 1.40.49).

50 Commelin, Isaac, Begin ende voortgangh, van de Vereenighde Nederlantsche Geoctroyeerde Oost-Indische Compagnie (originally published in two volumes, Amsterdam: Jan Jansz, 1646)Google Scholar, facsimile edition, with an Introduction by C. R. Boxer, four volumes (Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1969), volume 4, part 4, 39 (April 1632). A French translation of this episode can be found in de Renneville, Constantin, Recueil des voiages qui ont servi a l'établissement et aux progrès de la Compagnie des Indes Orientales, formée dans les Provinces Unies des Païs-Bas (Amsterdam: Étienne Roger, 1726), volume 5, 3334Google Scholar. (This volume, incidentally, ends with a catalogue of sheet music and books printed by Étienne Roger, for sale in Amsterdam, London and Cologne.) For a study of broader cultural contexts surrounding this theological exchange see Cummings, William, ‘Scripting Islamization: Arabic Texts in Early Modern Makassar’, Ethnohistory 48/4 (2001), 578CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

51 Den Psalter, ofte de hondert en vijftigh Psalmen des Konincklijcken Prophete Davids, gestelt in de Nederduytsche en Maleysche tale, na de Griecxsche waerheydt … de eerste vijftig Psalmen overgeset in de Maleysche tale door E. J. van Hasel … ende de hondert laetste … door E. Justum Heurnium (Amsterdam: Door ordre van de E. E. Heeren Bewinthebberen der Oost-Indische Compagnie, 1652) (British Library, Or.71.c.16). On the translation of the word ‘psalm’ from Hebrew see Sarna, Nahum M. and others, ‘Psalms, Book of’, in Encyclopaedia Judaica, second edition, ed. Skolnik, Fred and Berenbaum, Michael (Detroit and London: Macmillan Reference USA, 2007), volume 16, 663Google Scholar.

52 Bowrey, Thomas, A Dictionary, English and Malayo, Malayo and English. To Which is Added Some Short Grammar Rules & Directions for the Better Observation of the Propriety and Elegancy of this Language. AND ALSO Several Miscellanies, Dialogues, and Letters, in English and Malayo for the Learners [sic] better understanding the Expressions of the Malayo Tongue (London: Printed by Sam. Bridge for the author, 1701)Google Scholar, no pagination.

53 The scriptures revealed to the Prophet Daud have been associated conceptually with the Biblical psalms; however, mainstream Islamic theology does not accept that the psalm texts preserved today in the Judaeo-Christian tradition are the same as the zabūr mentioned in the Qur'ān. Some medieval Muslim authors began to recompose psalms in the Davidic tradition, especially in the twelfth century, possibly in response to acts of Christian aggression; see Vishanoff, David R., ‘Islamic “Psalms of David”’, in Christian-Muslim Relations: A Bibliographical History, edited by Thomas, David and Mallett, Alex, volume 3 (1050–1200) (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2011), 724730Google Scholar. The divergent interpretations of the figure of King David / Prophet Daud within Judaeo-Christian and Islamic traditions also feed into different ontologies of music; see Poché, Christian, ‘David and the Ambiguity of the Mizmar According to Arab Sources’, World of Music 25/2 (1983), 5873Google Scholar.

54 For instance, the missionary Nathaniel Ward used the term Zabūr in his translation of the Psalms at Padang (Sumatra) in 1827, which bore the title Bahawah inilah Kitab Zabur Nabi Daud (literally, This is the Book [or Scripture] Zabūr of the Prophet David) (British Library, 14620.e.19). The missionary Benjamin Keasberry printed a Malay psalter in Jawi script at Singapore in 1847, using lithography; its title contains both the terms Zabūr and mazmur, reading Zabur iaitu Surat Segala Mazmur (literally, Zabūr: namely, the Book of all the Psalms). A copy is held in the Cambridge University Library (BSS.680.E47.1). See Proudfoot, Ian, Early Malay Printed Books: A Provisional Account of Materials Published in the Singapore-Malaysia Area up to 1920, Noting Holdings in Major Public Collections (Kuala Lumpur: Academy of Malay Studies and The Library, University of Malaya, 1993), 147Google Scholar.

55 There have been numerous legal battles in Malaysia over the right of Malay-speaking Christians to use the word ‘Allah’; for instance, in October 2013 a Malaysian court ruled that the word ‘Allah’ could not be used by a Malay-language Christian newspaper. See ‘Malaysian Court Rules Use of “Allah” Exclusive to Muslims’, ABC News <http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-10-14/god-allah-christian-muslim/5020962> (11 March 2014).

56 Marsden, William, A Dictionary of the Malayan Language, in Two Parts, Malayan and English and English and Malayan (London: Printed for the author by Cox and Baylis, 1812), 155, 323, 519Google Scholar.

57 Diehl writes that ‘when the Psalter was put into Malay rhyme by Ferreira [João Ferreira d'Almeida (1628–1691)] (dated 16 August 1675), it was done to conform as closely as possible to the Dutch meter of Petrus Dathenus which, by 1675, was already 125 years old but was approved at Dordrecht.’ Diehl, Printers and Printing, 268.

58 The British Library holds a manuscript volume which includes forty-one folios of versified psalms, hymns and canticles in Malay; it is dated to c1678, and is thought to have been produced in Maluku (shelfmark Sloane 3115); a description is given in Ricklefs, M. C. and Voorhoeve, Petrus, Indonesian Manuscripts in Great Britain: A Catalogue of Manuscripts in Indonesian Languages in British Public Collections (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 107Google Scholar. Digitized images of the entire manuscript are available on the British Library website at <www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=Sloane_MS_3115>.

59 See Werndly, George Henrik, Maleische Spraakkunst, uit de eige schriften der Maleiers opgemaakt (Amsterdam: Op kosten van de E. A. Heren Bewindhebberen der Oost-Indische Maatschappye; pr. R. en G. Wetstein, 1736), 266275Google Scholar.

60 Werndly, George Henrik, Sji'r segala Mazmūr2-Da-ūd, dan pūdji2-an jang lâjin (Amsterdam: R. dan DJ. Wetyistejn, Peara–Kompanija, 1735)Google Scholar. Extant copies are held in the Cambridge University Library (BSS.680.D31), the British Library (14620.e.27) and other institutions. This work is listed by Gallop, Annabel Teh in her article ‘Early Malay Printing: An Introduction to the British Library Collection’, Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 63/1 (1990), 87, 116Google Scholar.

61 As Gallop points out, the system of romanization developed by Werndly used the Arabic letter ain in medial position. Gallop, ‘Early Malay Printing’, 87.

62 On the origins of the Malay syair see Braginsky, Vladimir, The Heritage of Traditional Malay Literature: A Historical Survey of Genres, Writings and Literary Views (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2004), 301314Google Scholar; see also Laffan, Michael, The Makings of Indonesian Islam: Orientalism and the Narration of a Sufi Past (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 11Google Scholar.

63 Thunberg, Travels in Europe, Africa, and Asia, volume 2, 229.

64 The psalter is prefaced by a Malay New Testament (Amsterdam, 1731) and a Malay translation of the Heidelberg Catechism (Cambridge University Library, shelfmark BSS.680.D31).

65 These nineteenth-century publications are: (1) Werndly, Georg Henrik, Surat segala Mazmur-tersji‘r (Haarlem: [Jahhja ‘Ensjedej dan ‘anakh2nja], 1822)Google Scholar; (2) Werndly, George Henrik, Surat segala mazmur2 tersji‘r (Haarlem: Jahhja ‘Ensjedej dan ‘anakh2nja, 1824)Google Scholar; and (3) Werndly, George Henrik, Sjir segala Mazmûr Dâûd (Zaltbommel: Noman, 1864)Google Scholar. Interestingly, a few staves of Psalm 1 from the 1822 psalter are given as an example of void (‘white’) notation in Bent, Ian D. and others, ‘Notation’, in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, second edition, ed. Sadie, Stanley and Tyrrell, John (London: Macmillan, 2001), volume 18, 141Google Scholar. This appears to be the only mention of the Malay psalters in musicological literature to date, although no comments are made about the contexts of the psalter's production.

66 The new version was composed by C. Ch. J. Schröder, a Protestant assistant minister. See End and Aritonang, ‘1800–2005: A National Overview’, 153.

67 Karel Steenbrink, ‘Protestantism in the Moluccas, 1605–1800’, in A History of Christianity in Indonesia, 123. This comment refers to Batavia, and other areas where schools were operated by the colonial government. Barbara Watson Andaya also says that the VOC Archives contain instructions about the use of psalters in West Timor (personal communication).

68 Taylor, The Social World of Batavia, 26.

69 A report of official visits to churches and schools in various eastern islands in 1757 mentions the presence of fourteen psalm books. Dutch National Archives (Algemeen Rijksarchief), VOC 7927, f. 217. The observation that a cupboard was needed for books on West Timor was made on 22 September 1754. Dutch National Archives (Algemeen Rijksarchief), VOC 2837, f. 71. Many thanks to Barbara Watson Andaya for pointing out these references and sharing this information.

70 Diehl, Printers and Printing, 269.

71 However, sometimes local congregants sang the psalms in Dutch: in 1819 the Baptist missionary William Robinson wrote from Batavia that ‘to this day the greater part of the people sing the Dutch psalms, when I preach in Malay; for there are very few of them capable of understanding the version in Malay, the style being too high for them’. ‘From Mr. Robinson, Batavia, to Mr. Lawson. Weltevreden, June 4, 1819’, in ‘Foreign Intelligence. Calcutta’, The Baptist Magazine 13 (1821), 39. Robinson's comment highlights the fact that there were many local styles of Malay, ranging from the types of ‘high’ language used in classical literature to pasar (market) Malay, a trade language prevalent in Batavia. For a historical overview of the Malay language see Collins, Malay, World Language of the Ages; he writes that by the late eighteenth century ‘Malay in Batavia [Jakarta] had already become the dominant language of daily multiethnic interaction in the very capital of the colonial government. Sydney Parkinson, a young British draughtsman who visited Batavia for 77 days in 1770 … left a record of the kind of vehicular Malay language that had developed there with its lively mix of Malay, Javanese and Chinese elements’ (55). See also George Miller, ‘Malay Used by English Country Traders of the 18th Century’ (2008) <http://mcp.anu.edu.au/papers/rtm/country.html>.

72 Tyerman, Daniel, Bennet, George and Montgomery, James, Voyages and Travels Round the World, by the Rev. Daniel Tyerman and George Bennet, Esq.: Deputed from the London Missionary Society to Visit their Various Stations in the South Sea Islands, Australia, China, India, Madagascar, and South Africa Between the Years 1821 and 1829. Compiled from the Original Documents by James Montgomery, second edition (London: John Snow, 1840), 200Google Scholar.

73 Jukes, Joseph Beete, Narrative of the Surveying Voyage of H. M. S. Fly, Commanded by Captain F. P. Blackwood, R. N., in Torres Strait, New Guinea, and Other Islands of the Eastern Archipelago, During the Years 1842–46; Together with an Excursion into the Interior of the Eastern Part of Java (London: T. & W. Boone, 1847), volume 1, 371Google Scholar. For a biography of Jukes see Ann Mozley, ‘Jukes, Joseph Beete (1811–1869)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, <http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/jukes-joseph-beete-2284/text2939> (14 September 2013).

74 Kitab njanji2an: jang sudah detambahij dengan barang mazmur2 dan tahlil2 indjil: akan gunanja Madjlis Pesurohan ’Indjil Wolandswy: terkarang dalam bahasa Wolandawij dan tersalin kapada bahasa Malajuw ’awleh R. le Bruijn, surohan ’indjil di-pulaw Timor (Batawijah [Batavia]: Di-patara'an Karadja'an, 1828). A copy is held in the National Library of Australia (499.2 BRU). This volume is also described in Diehl, Printers and Printing, 274–275.

75 Annabel Teh Gallop, personal communication, 5 January 2012. The shelfmark for this fragment, held in the Rijksmuseum Volkenkunde, Leiden, is 24-1. Thanks to Annabel Teh Gallop for this information.

76 Diehl, Printers and Printing, 269. Psalters also reached as far as the Dutch trading post at Deshima, Japan, but were hidden, since Christian artefacts were forbidden in Japan during the period of closure to the outside world (1639–1853). The Dutch were the only Europeans permitted to trade with Japan; they operated under strict supervision at Deshima, Nagasaki Bay. Engelbert Kaempfer (1651–1716), who visited Japan, discussed how psalters, other religious books and coins were packed away on the ship when land came into sight. See Kaempfer, Engelbert and Bodart-Bailey, Beatrice M., Kaempfer's Japan: Tokugawa Culture Observed, ed., trans. and annotated by Bodart-Bailey, Beatrice M. (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1999), 39Google Scholar.

77 Diehl found in Sri Lanka a title-page of a Dutch-language psalter printed at Colombo in 1776, but the rest of the book was missing. Diehl, ‘The Dutch Press in Ceylon’, 338. She gives a full transcription of the title-page, which details the publisher as Johan Fredrik Christoph Dornheim. Although I have been unable to locate an extant copy of this 1776 publication in any library catalogue, it appears that a copy of a Dutch-language psalter printed at Colombo in 1772 is held at the Württembergische Landesbibliothek, Stuttgart): Voet, Johann Eusebius, Het boek der Psalmen, nevens de gezangen, by de hervormde kerk in gebruik: op nieuw in dichtmaat gebragt door Joannes Eusebius Voet (Colombo: Dornheim, 1772)Google Scholar (shelfmark Theol.oct.18692).

78 End and Aritonang, ‘1800–2005: A National Overview’, 141.

79 Ross, Russell R. and Savada, Andrea Matles, ‘Sri Lanka: A Country Study’, in Sri Lanka: Current Issues and Historical Background, ed. Nubin, Walter (New York: Nova Science Publishers, 2002), 165Google Scholar. However, Holt writes that ‘the legacy of the Dutch Reformed Church in Sri Lanka today is more of an architectural than a social one, in striking contrast to the staying power of the Roman Catholicism introduced by the Portuguese’. Holt, John Clifford, The Religious World of Kirti Sri: Buddhism, Art, and Politics in Late Medieval Sri Lanka (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 67CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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Figure 1Figure 1 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

Figure 2

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Figure 2Figure 2 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

Figure 4

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Figure 3Figure 3 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

Figure 6

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Figure 4Figure 4 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

Figure 8

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Figure 5Figure 5 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

Figure 10

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Figure 6Figure 6 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

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Figure 7Figure 7 George Henrik Werndly, Sji‘r segala Mazmūr2-Da-ūd, dan pūdji2-an jang lâjin (Amsterdam: R. dan DJ. Wetyistejn, Peara–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