Referring to Lili Boulanger's Psalm 24 (composed in 1916), Psalm 129 (1916), and Psalm 130 ("Du fond de l'abîme"; 1914-17), Christopher Palmer noted, "The composer's best work is to be found in the three psalm-settings; together they form a triptych of epic proportions." With those works, Vieille Prière Bouddhique (1917), and Pie Jesu, dictated on her deathbed to her sister, Nadia Boulanger, in 1918, deserve to be included. While their power and originality are startling—especially emanating from a frail and chronically ill young woman who died at 24—and there is no denying Boulanger's precocious genius, those final masterpieces emerged from a background of unpublished choral Psalm settings made between 1907 and 1909, that is, beginning in her 14th year, if not earlier. Using the Psalmist as the mouthpiece for a startling truculence was not new—Florent Schmitt's gargantuan Psaume 47, dating from 1904, is the fountainhead of the genre, while the figure of Salomé, whether in Strauss' opera (1905) or Schmitt's incidental music-cum-symphonic poem (1907-1910), led the way to the gamy expressive possibilities of hoary Biblical lore seen through contemporary eyes and garlanded with quasi-oriental glees. Boulanger was au courant and certainly knew those works, but a certain fastidiousness, a taste for Debussy-esque atmospherics, and—above all—a mystical vein emerging in glowing contrast to often strident trenchancy lift her music beyond the realm of hot musical properties and blockbuster crudities to a demesne of the incisively exquisite. Psalm 24, for instance, justifies its brevity—playing around three and one-half minutes—by the potent succinctness of its ideas. Drums setting off clamorous fanfares highlight declamatory choral assertions of godly authority ("The earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein...") before yielding to a brief but ecstatic tenor solo ("He will receive blessing from the Lord, and vindication from the God of his salvation") whose serene promise of benediction conveys a sense of imminent expectation. The note of martial triumphalism returns for one of the grandest passages of the Psalms—"Lift up your heads, O gates! and be lifted up, O ancient doors! that the King of glory may come in. Who is this King of glory? The Lord of hosts...." This is worked to a brief—again, succinct—conclusion rounded with a conventional cadence. The obverse faces of the divine, majesty and beneficence, are suggested by the sparest of forces, those instruments usually accompanying French worship: drums, brass, harps, and organ.

© Adrian Corleonis, All Music Guide