A Musician Must First Be an Exegete

Yaoundé, Cameroon  ·  September 15–26, 2025
Psalms Workshop

The musicians who came to the Yaoundé workshop had composed before. What they hadn’t done was compose from inside a psalm — not a general sense of its message, but a detailed understanding of its structure, its emotional arc, the specific function of each section.

Working through Scriptura’s materials changed that. The familiarization and internalization steps — listening to the psalm repeatedly, mapping its movement, understanding what the psalmist was doing in each part — gave the musicians a foundation they hadn’t had before. One of them put it directly: a musician must first be an exegete.

It sounds counterintuitive. Music feels like it should come from inspiration, not analysis. But what the workshop demonstrated is that analysis and inspiration aren’t opponents — they’re collaborators. For the longer and more complex Psalm 2, the musicians said it would have been very difficult to compose a faithful song without the materials. The Bakoko and Mengaka teams produced songs that participants described not as scripture-based compositions, but as scripture translations — the psalm itself, in a new and living form.