Product Description
Crossing Jordan grew out of my daughter Kianas surprise request that I arrange a spiritual for voice, piano and cello for her senior recital. She received a degree in commercial music the year before COVID shut everything down, at a time before climate change made blizzards an anomaly here in Central PA. As a result, snow days still existed. I spent one of them doing the first draft of Deep River, her favorite.
Later, I decided that if singers engage a cellist for a concert, they might like to program more than one piece for them, so I chose two more water-themed spirituals to complete the set. His Name So Sweet is a more meditative version of the song than Ive generally heard. I wanted the piano, cello, and briefly the voice to imitate the fountain in the text. The mood is ecstasy, resulting from the fundamental change that baptism is meant to create. Deep River also includes Michael Row The Boat Ashore and The Water Is Wide. The latter isnt a spiritual, however, taken together the message is that the river is deep, the water is wide, but with (the Archangel?) Michaels help, Jordan can be crossed. Wade in the Water is one of the most well-known spirituals. I focus on the idea of escaping enslavement: the opening is quiet, furtive, maybe even nervous. The Moses in the text can be understood to be Harriet Tubman, who might urge escapees to wade in the water so pursuing dogs couldnt follow their scent. In my mind, the ending symbolizes that the party has vanished, never to be enslaved again.
The first instrumental version of Deep River was for trumpet and piano, performed by my sister, Alicia Thompson, and her son, Justin Griffin, during a church service in Atlanta shortly after I arranged it. After hearing a recording, I took borrowed her idea of adding a repeat (which she did to allow enough time for the ushers to take up collection). The clarinet, cello and piano version was premiered by the Isosceles Trio (Doris Hall-Gulati (clarinet), Sara Male (cello), and me (piano)). When Naima Burrs, violinist and conductor of the Petersburg Symphony, asked if I had any pieces for trio, I created a version for violin, piano and cello. Please note that the YouTube version for clarinet is slightly different than the one with violin, to accommodate the differences in range.
This product was created by a member of ArrangeMe, Hal Leonard's global self-publishing community of independent composers, arrangers, and songwriters. ArrangeMe allows for the publication of unique arrangements of both popular titles and original compositions from a wide variety of voices and backgrounds.