Today’s selection from Sing Praise returns us briefly to the feast of Pentecost, with a cantor-and-refrain chant on the invocation ‘Come, Holy Spirit’, or rather the Latin version ‘Vene, Sancte Spiritus’. We have sung the refrain by itself, in the 4-part harmony, in our church music group, but here Peter Nardone has added four short verses for a cantor.
The first verse is “Come make our hearts your home, give us grace, Spirit, come”, followed by “Come, come thou well of life, come thou fire of love”. Fire and Well (i.e. water) seem to be opposites, one extinguishing the other, but then the Spirit’s ways are so diverse that sometimes they do seem contradictory. But he responds to the individual’s need: at one point in my spiritual life I may need the deep refreshing water, ant other times to be fired up. At another I may just need to feel the love or peace of God, as the last two verses put it: “Come, fill our hearts with heavenly love, come, strengthen from above … Come, keep us all from danger free, come, peace that dwells in thee”.
The two-line verses are seemingly intended to rhyme, except verse 2 doesn’t at all (life/love) and rhyming home/come (verse 1) also misses the mark.
I felt the same disappointment in the verses as Stephen reports with this hymn: if one wants perfect rhymes (love / above in v3) one should stick to them, if one wants near-rhymes (home / come in v1) one should stick to them, if one wants assonances (life / love in v2) one should stick to them, and if one wants ancient language (“thou” in v2, “thee” in v4) one should stick to that (and write “thy home” instead of “your home” in v1). Did Peter Nardone really “add” the verses – are they not part of the original? If he did this would perhaps explain why they seem out of keeping with the Ostinato.
I was also confused about the key signature. I realise this is a technicality, but if the piece is in F major then the key signature should be one flat B-flat, and all the E-flats in the piece should be marked as the accidentals which they are. We are quite used to this kind of convention: for example, no-one would dream of writing a piece in C-minor with just two flats (E-flat and A-flat) in the key signature simply on the grounds that almost all the B-flats get naturalized in the melody and harmony! This kind of musical illiteracy should never appear in a published hymn book!