2006; violin, piano; 11′ Written for and recorded by David Kim, CD and score published by Paul Jones Music in the collection The Lord is My Shepherd.
1. Sinner, Don’t Let This Harvest Pass
Sinner, don’t let this harvest pass,
Sinner, don’t let this harvest pass,
Sinner, don’t let this harvest pass,
And die and go to Hell at last.
2. My Shepherd Will Supply My Need
My shepherd will supply my need;
Jehovah is his name:
In pastures fresh he makes me feed
Beside the living stream.
He brings my wandering spirit back
When I forsake his ways;
And leads me, for his mercy’s sake,
In paths of truth and grace.
3. The Old Ship of Zion
What ship is this that will take us all home?
O glory hallelujah!
And safely land us on Canaan’s bright shore?
O glory hallelujah!
’Tis the old ship of Zion, hallelu, hallelu;
’Tis the old ship of Zion, hallelujah!
The sheet music for American Spirituals, Book Two, for cello and piano, is now available through Paul Jones Music. I wrote this for Anne Martindale Williams, principal cellist of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, and Paul Jones, who accompanies her on her latest solo CD, Sacred Music for Cello, which has been available for a few months now.
Sharing in this project are many other composers and arrangers of works written for church or concert performance. Particularly, cellists who play in church services should be interested in the entire volume of new hymn arrangements, spirituals, and well-known works by Bach, Mendelssohn, and Fauré. Anne edited the cello solos and added fingerings. She was also delightful as could be while we worked on the pieces.
I’ve enjoyed working with Paul on this and on the earlier American Spirituals, Book One for violin and piano. Those were written for David Kim, Concertmaster of the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the CD and sheet music for that are also available.
Walked into WRTI on Saturday to tape a few more Now is the Time shows, and Mark Pinto was there holding down the fort, cataloging CDs during the Rigoletto broadcast and preparing for his post-opera airtime. “Hey, I’ve programmed your cello spirituals on New Releases,” he said.
“Fantastic, thanks!” I answer, “when will they be on?”
“Four o’clock.”
“Oh…today, you mean?!”
So that was it. On the air, for everybody.
I took a break from my taping at 4:00 and potted up the air monitor in the studio to have a listen. (The CD, with audio samples, is here—American Spirituals, Book Two are tracks 11–13.) Anne and Paul sounded good as ever. Here’s where we made that octave change, oh, right, here’s that added rubato, and now here comes that whole bar we added. Funny how you live with and worry over a piece for months, and then—at some point—it’s just music, not yours anymore. Yours, yes, but not yours because there’s nothing you can do about it. Not anymore. Happened twice to me this weekend, as I just finished my string quartet, and since I was well ahead of any deadline I had to force myself to give it up to the players. I’d still be messing with it otherwise. It’s a piece of music, just let it go, it’s not yours anymore.
Now it’s for everybody.
Update: CD and sheet music published by Paul Jones Music in the collection Sacred Music for Cello.
Definitely one, and maybe two CDs will be released this weekend. Vespers, we’re still waiting to hear for certain, but a box o’CDs may show up at the Piffaro concertsFebruary 13–15. I plan to be at Friday’s concert at St. Mark’s in Center City Philadelphia.
The CD of hymns with cellist Anne Martindale Williams and pianist Paul S. Jones just came out. I’m not sure of the CD title, but my American Spirituals, Book Two is on this recording. To launch this, Anne and Paul are performing four concerts, tonight through Sunday, and will play, along with Beethoven, Bach, and Prokofiev, some selections from the CD, including two of the three spirituals. I plan to be at tonight’s concert in Paoli; for all the concert details go to the calendar.
And my mom’s 80th is this weekend…parties all around!
Update: CD and sheet music published by Paul Jones Music in the collection Sacred Music for Cello.
Last month Anne Martindale Williams, Paul Jones, and I got together to rehearse the American Spirituals, Book Two for the upcoming CD. They rehearsed, that is. I hovered and said those things composers say at those times when musicians rehearse and composers hover. It’s the last chance, after all, to have a say in your piece, because you are witnessing the moment when it ceases being your piece. In earlier days such moments were bittersweet. Now I can’t get to them quickly enough. “Go! Fly away!” is all I can think now.
And with musicians such as Anne and Paul, its leave-taking is safe. They played beautifully, we adjusted a small thing or three, and they recorded a day or so later. American Spirituals, Book One is for violin and piano; this book (three different ones) is for cello and piano. The CD will be released and sheet music published within a couple of months, I believe.
[Update: CD and sheet music published by Paul Jones Music in the collection Sacred Music for Cello.]
Here’s the beginning of the third spiritual, “Little David, Play on Your Harp,” just from a MIDI file, and the first page of the music:
Some spirituals have been called black, some white, and while there are distinguishing characteristics, the spiritual as a genre rises above race to an American unity. The characteristics are, in fact, so intermingled that it is often difficult to determine which group is doing the characterizing.
Most of the music first saw the light of day among the folk of the British Isles, before it sailed to the New World and established new varieties. It was eventually displaced from the cities by more traditional European hymnody, cultured and tonal. The now American-incubated songs were simpler, the texts quaint and outspokenly pious. The melodies were modal and square, the harmonies sharp-elbowed, and the singing was often riotously embellished. These tunes were more suited for the revival than the liturgy, and rather than sung in grand sanctuaries, they were more comfortably shouted and wailed from the frontiers of both geography and community.
Spirituals would not be tamed—could not be tamed and remain spirituals, in fact—and so they survived outside of the cities with blacks and whites who lived on the edge or in the gut of the States. They sang these back and forth to each other for a century or two, then invented new ones and sang them back and forth. They since have been sharing these treasures, all grown into as many variants as there are counties, with us.
The music has survived commercial denaturing and homogenizing, and, it is fervently to be hoped, arranging for such hi-falutin’ instruments as the violoncello and the pianoforte. So, American Spirituals, Book Two. Written for Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra Principal cellist Anne Martindale Williams and pianist Paul Jones (Music Director of Philadelphia’s Tenth Presbyterian Church and the engine behind these projects), this follows the first book of American Spirituals written for David Kim, concertmaster of the Philadelphia Orchestra (go here for excerpts of David’s recording, tracks 16, 17, 18).
Thomas Oliverswas converted from roustabout to evangelist by George Whitefield, and he composed, among other hymns, Helmsley. He admitted, though, that he first heard someone whistling something like it on the street. He then sculpted it into this, normally known as the music to “Lo, He Comes With Clouds Descending.” Being an American and a Lutheran and an innocent concerning English church music, I never knew the tune at all until my late 20s, when I “discovered” it in one of George Pullen Jackson’s incomparable chronicles of spirituals. Philadephians used this tune for “Jesus, Master” when baptizing in the Schuylkill River. They knocked the notes around a bit from what Olivers had assembled off the street, and here it’s changed a bit more.
Jesus, Master, O discover
Pleasure in us, now we stand
On this bank of Schuylkill river
To obey thy great command.
Pleasure in us,
Pleasure in us,
Pleasure in us,
Who obey thy great command.
“My Lord, what a mournin’!” is closer to the truth of the matter when the stars begin to fall than the sweet “My Lord, what a mornin’,” but both blacks and whites squeeze emotional essence from the sudden realization of salvation’s power. Salvation, however, is always coupled with judgment, and that’s when the stars fall. This arrangement both conflates and alters black and white versions.
My Lord, what a mournin’!
My Lord, what a mournin’!
My Lord, what a mournin’,
When the stars begin to fall!
I think I hear my brother say:
Call the nations, great and small,
I look on God’s right hand
When the stars begin to fall.
I arranged “Little David, Play on Your Harp” a while back and have coveted an opportunity to revisit it. Some versions of this tune are so wildly unlike each other as to be hardly recognizable as siblings. With this one, I confess that I’m not sure where some words might land, as the music started to take on a mind of its own, and I was reluctant to stand in its way. Here are two out of innumerable possible verses:
Little David, play on your harp, halleluia.
Little David, play on your harp, hallelu.
David was a shepherd boy,
He killed Goliath and shouted for joy.
Little David, play on your harp, halleluia.
Little David, play on your harp, hallelu.
Joshua was the son of Nun,
He never would quit till his work was done.
CD and sheet music published by Paul Jones Music in the collection Sacred Music for Cello.
