Clark County composer’s spiritual gets world premiere

Judy Rose sat in her truck, weeping. She had places to go and things to do, but she couldn’t move. She certainly couldn’t drive.

It was July 2016 and Rose had just dropped off her spouse, a hospital chaplain whose mission is tending to people in crisis. But Rose, an African-American woman, couldn’t shrug off the day’s horrible headlines. A Florida mental health therapist named Charles Kinsey — a black man — had been wounded by police while assisting a man with autism who had wandered from his group home and was playing with a toy truck when Kinsey found him. When police arrived, Kinsey lay on the ground, put his hands in the air and begged them not to shoot. After he was shot, Kinsey was left handcuffed and bleeding, without medical attention, for 20 minutes.

Rose was paralyzed with sorrow and fear. Life as a woman of color in very white Clark County has not been easy, she said.

“I began to wonder how my ancestors tolerated such race hatred,” she wrote later, and she thought of Harriet Tubman, the Underground Railroad, and the “brilliant signal songs that set many slaves literally and spiritually free. As I was thinking about where I could go run and hide to escape the troubles of the world, a melody and lyrics came to me:

“I’ve found me a river, to run and hide,

When the troubles of life overtake me, when fear is nigh.

When the troubles of life overtake me, I’ve learned to pray

I ask my guiding spirit to make safe the way.”

Rose jotted the words down on a blue sticky note and shelved them, she said. They gave her the strength to get through another day teaching music at Portland Public Schools. For years, she taught high school, she said, but a few years ago she was moved to a middle school. Rose loves her students, she said with a smile — and when you teach middle school, you’d better.

There’s another positive byproduct of her move to middle school, she added: fewer concerts to prepare for than in high school. That leaves Rose more time to pursue her passion for composition.

Two new Rose pieces get world premieres this month. The first is that spiritual song, “I’ve Found Me a River,” which she pulled back off the shelf and completed after the presidential election of 2016. “I call it a new spiritual,” she said. “I’ve been writing a lot of modern spirituals about being a person of color at this amazing time in history.”

Now, Rose is getting ready to experience the thrill of hearing the 140-voice Portland Symphonic Choir share with the world a song that grew out of a private moment of crisis in her car. “I’m so excited to hear it,” she said. “I get that feeling of being so happy you want to cry — and that’s a good thing.”

The other new piece is “A Jubilant Day,” and it’ll be performed later this month by the Grant High School A cappella Choir. It was inspired by a school field trip to see the Alvin Ailey Dance Troupe perform “Revelations,” a signature work that relates African-American faith and struggles through spiritual music and dance.

“Our mindset (is) that there has to be some joy in the world,” Rose wrote about that piece. “If there is to be that joy, we must create it.”

Old story, new words

Rose’s biography is unique. A native of West Virginia, her earliest childhood was spent in poverty. She was given up for adoption and went at age 5 to live with a single white mother in California. “It was so forward of her. It was an admirable thing to do,” Rose said.

“I thought, this is a nicer existence. I didn’t think, ‘Oh, I have more privilege now,’ because I didn’t have the words. Now there’s verbiage for that,” she said.

Eventually, Rose’s adoptive mother married, and the blended family of six wound up in Eugene, Ore., where Rose enjoyed the attention and encouragement of some great music teachers, she said — including her mother. She also enjoyed her first exposure to live performance: “The Nutcracker.”

“I wasn’t interested in the ballet and the costumes,” she said. “I watched the conductor. The spirit of the music was so rich and deep in him. I thought, ‘Who is this guy?’ ”

Classical was the core of her musical education, she said, but she also absorbed the soulful sounds of artists like Al Green, Marvin Gaye and the Jackson 5. “This is cool,” she decided. “It’s all cool.”

Less cool was her multiracial family’s move to La Grande, Ore., she said, where her love of sports got squashed. She was into everything from baseball to volleyball and thought she had a decent chance at making the girls’ basketball team, she said, but didn’t; later she heard that the coach had vowed never to let a black girl play on his team.

“That changed my life,” Rose said. “It was straight-up racism, but I still didn’t know what to call it.” The joy of sports was over, but there were music teachers who kept supporting her. They channeled her energy into leadership roles and let her try her hand at conducting.

“I am welcome somewhere,” she said she recalls feeling. “That was huge. If I didn’t have that, I don’t know what I would have done.”

It was in college at Portland State University that Rose started composing. “All I wanted to do was write,” she said. She earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in music education; she’s been a music director, accompanist and singer. She also plays the Native American Flute.

Rose’s spouse is poet and artist Gwendolyn Morgan, the director of spiritual care at Legacy Salmon Creek Medical Center, who was recently profiled in this newspaper as she became Clark County’s Poet Laureate.

Mighty river

Rose isn’t a member of the Portland Symphonic Choir, but her friend John Eisemann is one of its conductors. During a recent rehearsal in a church basement in Portland, he instructed his choir to warm up for Rose’s river song with “a big resonant ummm. It’s the mmmight of the Coluuumbia,” he intoned.

Then he invited the composer to help him guide the group. They whooped with excitement as a grinning Rose climbed onstage, and Eisemann announced: “Love is in the house.”