Now We Have Rivers

Purchase Now We Have Rivers

Performed at the 2022 ACDA Children's & Community Youth Choir Conductors' Retreat!
Tucson Girls Chorus Bumblebee Singers    Jess Edelbrock, conductor

Now We Have Rivers was conceived as a project with two goals: to be accessible, engaging music for kindergarten and first grade singers performing in a choir for the first time, and to engage these students in the compositional process. Students from all choirs of the Tucson Girls Chorus were invited to submit original haikus about the monsoon season of their home state of Arizona. Excerpts from their poems were selected and adapted by myself and the Bumblebees’ conductor, Jess Edelbrock, to create three contrasting sections. The choir also decides how the percussionist adds to the music of the storm, putting their own unique stamp on each performance.

Streets baked like clay pots
Thunder is like distant drums
Cloud build, humid, hot

Dark skies, whipping wind
Lightning flash, crackling thunder
Slashing monsoon rains

Watching through windows
As it rains on thirsty soil,
Now we have rivers.