Today’s song from Sing Praise is ‘Come now, O Prince of Peace’ by Geonyong Lee (a Korean classical composer) and Marion Pope. I read somewhere that Korean music uses the same Pentatonic scale as Scottish folk music, which is why it sounds more familiar than other Asian styles.
The song is from the Advent section of the book. The appeal to ‘come now’ (very much part of Advent) is addressed to the Lord variously as ‘Prince of Peace’, ‘Lord Jesus’, ‘God of love’, ‘God our Saviour’ and ‘Hope of unity’. What we ask him to do when he comes is to ‘Make us one body’, ‘reconcile your people’ and ‘reconcile all nations’. Only the last of these is strictly an Advent hope. Looking at the words as a whole with their reference to ‘one body’ and ‘your people’, it seems to be more suited to Christian Unity week or any other ecumenical gathering, or indeed with its gentle melody would be suitable for a music group to sing during Communion.
I didn’t like this song much. On the words, I found it hard to see why the particular four titles for Jesus (Prince of Peace, God of love, God our Saviour, Hope of unity) had been chosen, and the fact that the third is out of rhythm so has to go on the second line of the verse displacing the “make us one body” and forcing a change to “set us free” simply struck me as a piece of clumsy untidiness. I couldn’t see why “reconcile your people” changed to “reconcile all nations” half way through the piece. In short, I didn’t discern the inner rationale which is supposed to motivate a coherent set of song-lyrics.
On the music, I suppose it is possible that the open fifth chords on the cadences (i.e. chords without the thirds in them) were intentional for a deliberate effect, but again it looked like clumsiness to me. There are two lots of parallel fifths between bass and tenor and one between soprano and alto; the alto’s descent to the tenor G in bar 3 doubles the major third in the chord (which isn’t audible on the piano but sounds poor with an actual choir), and the overlapping of tenor and alto parts also seems to be a mark of poor writing. The rising of the alto’s C to a D in the suspended chords before the cadences (D at the half-way point and G at the end) is also poor.
I guess all this is supposedly “explained” by the fact that the hymn is supposed to be Korean? But I think it’s just poor in quality.
When one practises a piece of music one can get used to its idiosyncrasies, but I find it hard to play with conviction what I consider to be mistakes, and it took me a long time to persuade my fingers to do what the music said they should do – in fact they probably didn’t! The whole thing felt very unsatisfactory to me, and I was left wondering how on earth this hymn was ever felt suitable for inclusion in the book?