Instrumental Duet,Piano Cello,Instrumental Duet,Piano,Violin - Level 5 - Digital Download SKU: A0.1272508 By Maria Thompson Corley. By Anonymous. Arranged by Maria Thompson Corley. 21st Century,Classical,Religious,Sacred,Spiritual. 35 pages. Maria Thompson Corley #864733. Published by Maria Thompson Corley (A0.1272508). āCrossing Jordanā grew out of my daughter Kianaās 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 āDeep River,ā 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. āHis Name So Sweetā is a more meditative version of the song than Iāve 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. āDeep Riverā also includes āMichael Row The Boat Ashoreā and āThe Water Is Wide.ā The latter isnāt a spiritual, however, taken together the message is that the river is deep, the water is wide, but with (the Archangel?) Michaelās help, Jordan can be crossed. āWade in the Waterā 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 couldnāt follow their scent. In my mind, the ending symbolizes that the party has vanished, never to be enslaved again.The first instrumental version of āDeep Riverā 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.
