"Wade in the Water" from Crossing Jordan, arranged for clarinet, piano and cello
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SKU: A0.1284511
Composed by Spiritual. Arranged by Maria Thompson Corley. 21st Century,Chamber,Sacred,Spiritual,Traditional. 9 pages. Maria Thompson Corley #875686. Published by Maria Thompson Corley (A0.1284511).“Crossing Jordan” grew out of my daughter Kiana’s 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 I’ve 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 isn’t a spiritual, however, taken together the message is that the river is deep, the water is wide, but with (the Archangel?) Michael’s 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 couldn’t 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)).
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