Mardi Gras! This coming Tuesday! My church, Mt. Auburn Presbyterian, will put on its annual Shrove Tuesday Pancake Supper and a certain composer you know is the chef de cuisine! A team of flapjack flippers will serve up home-made cornmeal-buttermilk pancakes alongside the best sausage to be had in Cincinnati, a city famous for its sausage. What's more, a Dixieland band will have us stompin' and struttin', throughout the evening. We're expecting about 200 to attend. It's a blast and I wish you and all my other friends and fans could be there.

One of the tunes the band will play, along with traditional New Orleans standards, will be a tune of mine, entitled "Beignets and Gelato." It's an homage to the Crescent City where we've enjoyed three week-long visits over the last four years. We do love it so! We long to return. Such a fun-loving, lovable city!

I want you to hear my only foray into Dixieland -- in its original orchestral setting.

In 2011, the Heartland Symphony Orchestra (a spirited community orchestra serving Brainerd and Little Falls, Minnesota) commissioned me to write an orchestral suite in honor of the orchestra's 35th anniversary. I wrote a half-hour piece called North Country Suite which they premiered in April of 2012.

Since the Mississippi originates in northern Minnesota I decided to portray that great, vast, storied river in the suite's third movement, entitled "Father of Waters" -- that's what the word "Mississippi" once meant in a Native American language.

The movement begins almost inaudibly; you won't hear much in the first few seconds.

Then come tentative, trickling fragments of tunes, an evocation of the bubbling of springs and the coalescing of little streams and creeks, already with a few jazzy "Blue" notes. These come together in a broad, rolling theme with a distinctively American, Western feel and then, just when the movement seems to end (about three and a half minutes through), comes a surprise: the music goes Dixieland! ... because, of course, the Mississippi culminates in "N'awlins!"

The Dixieland music is familiar-sounding because I deliberately wrote it in a very familiar style -- but the tune is original, I assure you -- that's my tune, "Beignets and Gelato."

I even included a banjo part, hoping the orchestra could locate a banjo player. Sure enough, at the premiere, the concert mistress' banjo-playing father was featured, his first performance before a crowd, and looking very trim and handsome, in his tuxedo!

Josh Aerie conducts the Heartland Symphony Orchestra's in the live, premiere performance of the "Father of Waters" movement from my North Country Suite.

Rick Sowash
Cincinnati, OH
March 2, 2014

🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶

American place-names! Now there’s a subject. A careful examination of the map of Ohio — my life-long stomping ground — reveals crossroads, hamlets and villages with peculiar names. Glandorf, Peebles, Burgoon, Overpeck, Deunquat, Pancoastburg, Tipp City, Mingo Junction, Mogadore, Fitchville, Chuckery.

Some cue laughter: Coolville, Reminderville, Outville, Celeryville, Getaway, Nellie, Big Bottom, Round Bottom, Fly, Flushing and -- best of all! -- Knockemstiff.

Knowing that such names are spread across the Buckeye State, the thoughtful Ohioan daresn't disdain the perplexing place-names found in other states. We must keep a straight face when our consciousness is penetrated by the likes of Gnawbone, IN, Wahoo, NE, Dimebox, TX, Rabbit Hash, KY or Podunk, CT.

Some are downright oxymoronic. Remembering Brilliant, OH, we Buckeyes must needs soft-pedal our natural astonishment when we come upon Liberal, Kansas.

There are stories behind these monikers. In 1872, a good-hearted fellow by the name of S. S. Rogers built the first house in what would become Liberal, KS. Rogers became famous in the region for dispensing water to weary travelers. The commodity was precious but the generous Mr. Rogers liberally ladled the stuff of life to the longing lips of thirsty pioneers. Expressing their thanks, grateful recipients would say, “That’s mighty liberal of you, Mr. Rogers.”

Ninety-Five years before public television, Liberality was the salient feature in this particular Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood.

Think of it! There was a time when the word “liberal” had positive connotations. Then, along came Eugene V. Debs, William Jennings Bryan, Dorothy Day, T.R., F.D.R., William O. Douglas, M.L. King, George McGovern, Bernie Sanders, et al. For better or worse, they changed the connotation of the word. Today, very few public figures dare to embrace the adjective. Many a Conservative has gotten elected chiefly by pointing at an opponent and yelling, “Liberal! Liberal! Liberal!" Especially in places like Kansas. A recent book title rightly raised the question, “What’s the Matter with Kansas?"

For me, genuine astonishment lingers in connection with Liberal, but not because of the improbability of coming upon such a place-name in a state determinedly red as Kansas. Twenty-five years ago, having landed a gig in Liberal, I flew into Wichita, rented a car and undertook the five-hour, west-bound drive on a highway as unwaveringly straight as a Kansas politician.

Parts of Ohio may seem flat. Tain’t so. You don’t know flatness until you drive across Kansas. The flatness of Kansas puts the lie to all other flatnesses. Kansas is as flat as the Earth is round. Flat, but not without color. The sky is a depthless blue, the endless corn is Kelly green, broken only when white grain elevators become visible, a distant fleck at first, fully five miles away, seeming to grow as approached, finally towering ten stories high.

Suddenly I noticed a strange, dark smudge, just above the horizon, far, far ahead. Like the grain elevators, it seemed to rise, slowly, as I drew nearer but it also spread, slowly, to the south and north of my ‘Westward, ho!' highway.

Inexplicably, it rippled in gentle waves, rising and falling like a long, limpid, silken scarf, unimaginably vast, undulating unnaturally in a weirdly lugubrious wind. I could form no theory to explain what I was seeing. Was it some bizarre phenomenon of the weather? A meteorological secret, unique to south-central Kansas? Could clouds execute such a vast, slow-motion dance-step? Was I watching the birth-throes of a tornado?

No. It was birds. Millions upon millions of birds, migrating. The largest throng of birds I have ever seen or will ever see, winding across the sky in silent majesty. Silent from a distance, that is. At length, when I was underneath them, their cries were maddeningly raucous. The extraordinary sound, which I will never hear again, climaxed as I passed through, then faded as I passed beyond the shifting shadows cast by a quarter billion birds.

Silent once more, the undulation came into sight in my rear view mirror, falling further and further behind until becoming, again, only a strange, dark smudge ... receding, fading, shriveling, diminishing at last to the merest wisp on the horizon. Perhaps an hour after I had first sighted it, the spectacle fell from my sight.

It was astonishing. An immense wonder, unfolding with neither prompt nor direction from human beings, simply happening, once again, as it has for thousands and thousands of years, out there in the middle of the continent, a gigantic, living, non-human event taking place, all on its own, high above the prairie.

The only thing I ever saw that could compare with it was the Northern Lights. Like that migrating column of birds, it is something I’ve seen only once. When I was about seven years old, my parents awakened me one midnight and carried their little, sleepy boy, wrapped in a blanket, outside, to see the Northern Lights. Like the migration, it was another immense, unfolding wonder, happening entirely on its own, utterly indifferent to us, the little Sowash family, and thus, awe-inspiring. Faces upturned, mouths open, hushed, we cast our eyes skyward, feeling tenderly toward one another, vulnerable and small.

At such moments, the distinctions that seem so important in common hours -- the nuanced distinctions we make between Liberal and Conservative, say -- surrender all significance.

In 2011, the Heartland Symphony Orchestra, a spirited community orchestra serving Brainerd and Little Falls, Minnesota — two more good, old, American-sounding place-names — commissioned me to write an orchestral suite in honor of the orchestra's 35th anniversary. I wrote a five-movement piece called North Country Suite which they premiered in April of 2012.

The second movement, entitled “Northern Lights,” strives to express the bewildered reverence we feel at those rare moments when we confront the essential truth that only Nature can teach us: that our brief, tiny lives are acted out upon an unutterably tremendous, unthinkably ancient, imponderably mysterious and almost inconceivably beautiful stage that is not of our making.

To hear Josh Aerie conducting the Heartland Symphony Orchestra's premiere performance of "Northern Lights" from North Country Suite, click on the link above.

To see a PDF of the score, click on the link above.

Rick Sowash
Cincinnati, OH
March 20, 2016

🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶

Before I set to work, I conferred closely with Josh Aerie. He apprised me that the orchestra was blessed with a particularly strong trumpeter, oboist, a great French horn section and an exuberant virtuoso timpanist. Wanting the suite to begin with a bang, I wrote a first movement that prominently features those instruments.

I opened with a vigorous, almost swashbuckling theme in 7/4, a meter that renders the music a little breathless, a bit off balance, like an enthusiastic amateur snow-shoer. The music is in G minor, a key that is at once dark and joyful.

Then things settle down, making way for a contrast. A hymn-like tune is sounded, varied and developed. The valiant opening tune returns and, voilà, the two musics are combined, the opposites reconciled.

My model for this movement was Sibelius’ Finlandia. Sibelius being a Finn, that piece, too, has a Northern spirit, with an aggressively rhythmical figure balanced by an ardent Nordic hymn, the two contrasting musics reconciled.

Sibelius is the 20th-century composer I most admire. After years of careful listening, I remain astounded by his symphonies and tone poems. His was a great soul and he managed to express it musically. And in a remarkable diary entry that gives us an intimate glimpse into the spirituality of a Master. He wrote:

"In the evening, working on the symphony … which strangely enchants me. As if God had thrown down pieces of a mosaic from the floor of heaven and asked me to work out the pattern. Perhaps a good definition of composing.”

These words thrill me almost as much as his music.

To hear “Spirit of the North” performed by the Heartland Symphony Orchestra in their premiere performance of North Country Suite, conducted by Josh Aerie, click on the link above.

To see a PDF of the score, click on the link above.

Rick Sowash
Cincinnati, OH
Oct. 9, 2016

🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶

One advantage of growing up in Ohio is that you learn about the Moundbuilders, the ancient peoples who built Ohio's "Indian mounds," as we used to call them. Ohio history is taught in the fourth grader; Ohio children are aware that there were people here long ago. They know American history didn't start in 1776 or 1620 or even 1492.

May I recommend a book that opened my eyes to the astonishing breadth and depth of this subject?

1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann. Fascinating!

At the time I read it I was writing an orchestral piece, my five-movement North Country Suite, commissioned by Minnesota's Heartland Symphony. It prompted me to make the fourth movement an elegy for the ancient forest that once covered all the land from what is now Minnesota to Maine. It was the greatest hardwood forest that ever was, an unimaginably vast, living giant, all gone except for a few nail trimmings, spared only on hillsides the settlers deemed too steep for farming. I wanted to evoke that forest and the ancient, vanished cultures that flourished in its shade.

How to express such a thing? A query like that one sparks my creativity.

The Moundbuilders, like people everywhere, sang songs and fashioned musical instruments. We don't know what their music sounded like; there was no help for me from that source. I might have studied Native American music of more recent times but that music has no connection with my experience and scant connections with the music of peoples so long forgotten.

I wanted to steer clear of the most obvious cliches: the repeated low brass "Heap Big Injun" chords and the menacing tom-toms I heard in the film scores of "Cowboy and Indian" movies I saw in my 1950's boyhood. (I loved them at the time!) I seized on one cliche from those films: parallel fifths. You'll hear them at the beginning and the end of this movement. I hope I used them in a fresh way.

I tried to fashion music that, for me at least, draws forth mental images of a vast, ancient, solemn forest, implicitly honoring the forgotten peoples who made it their home for thousands of years.

You can hear the movement entitled "Boreal Forest" from my North Country Suite as recorded before an audience of northern Minnesotans (please excuse an occasional cough) in its premiere performance under the baton of Josh Aerie, by clicking on the link above.

You can see a score of the movement by clicking on the link above.

Rick Sowash
Cincinnati, OH
June 8, 2014

🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶

Many years ago, when we were young and foolish, Jo and I passed a happy week in Green Lake, Wisconsin, as guests of the Green Lake Festival of Music. I sat in on rehearsals of my music, introduced the pieces in concert and took a bow after they were played. We were hosted by the Boismenues, a lovely couple who had a grand, old, tree-shaded lakefront home. They had a dock … and a canoe!

We canoed every day. Wonderful! I’m an old hand with canoes, a master of the craft since my Boy Scouting days. Paddle in hand, I’m confident. Heck, I taught canoeing at Scout camp.

The idyllic week passed. It was morning, the day of our departure. We were to catch the 12:10 train at nearby Ripon. The Boismenues breakfasted us amply and by mid-morning we were packed, teeth brushed, tummies full, nothing much to do. We traded a glance: “One more canoe outing!"

As we shoved away from the dock, the waves seemed a little higher than they had before, spouting pretty little sprays of foam. We set out, gently nudged along by the pleasant breeze behind us.

We quickly reached in the middle of the lake. Beautiful! Then we judged it was about time to head back to the Boismenues, who were to drive us to Ripon.

I executed the Reverse Sweep, a classic canoe stroke, and found that I had made a 360-degree turn instead of the 180 I had intended. Yikes! I tried again, more cautiously. As soon as the prow was pointed toward the Boismenue’s dock, the wind, which had picked more than a little, pushed us off course.

I tried every maneuver in the Canoeing merit badge pamphlet but I could not keep that canoe pointed in the direction we wanted to go. The wind stiffened; the sky went gray; it became downright cold. We paddled as hard as we could, grim and silent, to no avail. We were losing ground. Or rather water. We were no longer in the middle of the lake. We were being blown to the opposite side.

The wind made me think of Tall Tales. People walking sideways so as to keep from flyin’. Ducks winging backwards to keep from gettin’ sand in their eyes. The county line blown ten miles east -- the county engineer had to go out and gather it up again on cable spools, bring it back and tamp it down good, so’s it wouldn’t be blown away again.

It felt like a Tall Tale but it wasn’t funny. We were going to miss our train!.

Just when all hope seemed lost (isn’t that always the way?), an angel appeared unto us.

We did not at first realize that he was an angel because he was cleverly disguised as a pot-bellied, sunburned geezer ensconced on the poop deck of a little motor boat, one hand on the tiller, the other clasping a can of beer.

He was, however, an angel sure enough. He had grasped our desperate situation. He threw us a rope and towed us back to the Boismenues, bless him. We shouted our thanks, jumped into the waiting Boismenue’s car and caught our train with hardly a minute to spare.

I remembered that little adventure when I wrote the last movement of my North Country Suite for the Heartland Symphony in north central Minnesota. Folks up there know a thing or two about canoeing "into the wind” on Minnesota’s fabled “ten thousand lakes.”

As you listen, imagine paddling with all your might through waves and wind, our frightened exhilaration and our lucky arrival at the Boismenue’s dock, and in the nick of time, too! (albeit towed, somewhat ignominiously, behind a motorboat).

To hear the Heartland Symphony Orchestra under Josh Aerie performing "Into the Wind,” the final movement from my North Country Suite, click on the link above.

To see a PDF of the score, click on the link above.

🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶

Sixty five years ago, when I was a boy, I was fascinated by the Eskimos, those amazing people who lived in igloos, went about in kayaks and, in their spare time, harpooned whales.

In the temperate and much less interesting neck of the woods where I lived, we did not use the word “Eskimo” in a perjorative way. Today, the word is considered derogatory because it was assigned by non-Inuit people and was said to mean 'eater of raw meat.' President Obama signed legislation that replaced the term with "Alaska Native" in federal laws.

I don’t wish to offend, but since the re-evaluation of the label was still in the future at the time my story unfolds, please allow me to use the word here.

In the mid-1950’s, the Eskimos who populated my world were made of soft gray molding clay. I passed many happy hours fashioning them myself. I wrapped each little Eskimo’s ball-of-clay right hand around a sewing needle so that they would look like they were holding a spear. I rolled a lump of clay into a sausage shape with pointy ends to make a kayak, poking a hole in the middle in which an Eskimo could sit. I rolled the clay into a sphere and sliced it in half to make two igloos.

I tried to make polar bears and walruses but, try as I might, the creatures I made looked too human, which was creepy. Too much clay was required to make a whale so I stuffed a t-shirt inside a gray woolen stocking to serve as my Moby.

"Moby Sock!” All it took was a little imagination!

I loved Eskimos but I hated TV dinners. I had to eat TV dinners when my parents went out for the evening, leaving me behind, baby-sat by my cousin Barbie, whom they instructed to heat a TV dinner in the oven and serve it to me for supper. Turkey and dressing with peas in an aluminum tray. Yuck.

I resented my parents’ excursions mainly because, though I liked Barbie, it was insulting to be left in the care of a baby sitter. I gave vent to my resentment by railing against the TV dinners.

Then one afternoon my father explained to me that he and my mother would be dining out that evening but that, this time, my cousin Barbie was going to prepare a very special TV dinner for me: whale meat and tundra.

“Tundra?” I asked. “What’s tundra?”

“It’s what Eskimos eat, alongside whale meat and peas,” my father explained.

Cool! I was fascinated and, for once, very eager to eat a TV dinner. When Barbie placed the flimsy aluminum tray of hot food in front of me, I examined the contents, carefully and appreciatively.

True, it looked exactly the same as the other TV dinners I had eaten. The meat had the same pale gray-beige color as sliced turkey and the tundra looked just like the bland dressing to which I was accustomed. As for the peas, well, peas are peas. No difference there.

The whale meat tasted just like turkey. Who knew? My friend Larry Palmer claimed to have eaten fried rattlesnake. He said it tasted like chicken. So I wasn’t surprised to find that whale meat tasted like turkey. It made sense. And the tundra tasted just like dressing! No matter. It was Eskimo food! I loved it!

From then on, when I learned my parents were going out, I eagerly anticipated another ‘Whale Meat & Tundra with Peas’ TV dinner. I took it to be a standard item in the Swanson’s line.

Then came 7th grade and Mr. Beale’s Geography class. We were studying the Arctic. Mr. Beale described ‘the tundra.’ He said it was a vast, flat, treeless region where the soil is permanently frozen.

I raised my hand.

“You know,” I ventured, “you can eat that tundra. The Eskimos serve it alongside whale meat and peas. It’s not bad.”

Mr. Beale was taken aback. He scrutinized my face, trying to determine my motive in making this unexpected announcement. He saw that I was in earnest.

“Oh, is that right?” he said, tenuously.

“Yes, sir,” I replied. “I’ve had it lots of times.”

“So I suppose you’ve eaten whale meat, too, then?”

“Oh, yes. It tastes a lot like turkey. It’s one of Swanson’s TV dinners.”

Some of my classmates permitted themselves a cautious chuckle. Mr. Beale, frozen by my assertion, blinked his eyes several times, then smirked.

“This is,” he said in a doubtful tone, “something of which I have not heard. Be that as it may …” And he continued the lesson.

I was indignant. When I got home I demanded that my mother make haste to the nearest Kroger’s and purchase said TV dinner so that I could take it to class in triumph and deliver my chuckling classmates and the skeptical Mr. Beale their comeuppance.

She had to explain. They had only meant to make it a little more fun for me to eat the turkey and dressing TV dinners when they were out. She said she was sorry they hadn’t gotten round to telling me the truth of the matter.

This information induced several emotions in me. Not least was my disappointment that I would never again eat turkey and dressing under the false impression that it was whale meat and tundra. It had been a culinary adventure. I had relished it.

Oh, well. It was one of the costs of growing up.

With the Antipodal regions fresh in our minds, let’s listen to “Spirit of the North,” the first movement of my North Country Suite, commissioned by the Heartland Symphony Orchestra of Brainerd, MN.

The tunes have a Nordic character but what I like best is the timpani part and how the timpanist makes the most of the opportunities I gave her. She really takes charge and means business, like one of my clay Eskimos in a clay kayak, armed with a sewing needle, on the hunt for "Moby Sock."

To hear their premiere performance, under the direction of Maestro Josh Aerie, click on the link above.

To see a PDF of the score, click on the link above.

🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶

Today, I would like for you to hear my only foray into Dixieland.

In 2011, the Heartland Symphony Orchestra (a spirited community orchestra serving Brainerd and Little Falls, Minnesota) commissioned me to write an orchestral suite in honor of the orchestra's 35th anniversary. The result was my five-movement North Country Suite.

Seein’ as how the Mississippi originates in northern Minnesota, I decided to portray that storied river in the suite's third movement, titled "Father of Waters," one of the great river’s manifold monikers.

Taking a cue from Smetana’s “The Moldau,” the movement begins with tentative, trickling fragments of tunes, an evocation of the bubbling of springs and the coalescing of little streams. This being an American river, listen, too, for a scattering of telltale "Blue" jazz notes foretelling the river’s eventual destination in “N’awlins.”

The fragments come together at 1:20 in a broad, rolling pentatonic theme with a distinctively American feel, like the main title theme from a Hollywood western.

The tune swells, depicting the widening of the river as it flows south.

The movement seems to end at 3:30, but then comes a surprise: the music goes Dixieland! After the tub lays down the bass, the trumpet takes the lead, an homage to Louis Armstrong, New Orleans’ greatest musician.

The Dixieland music is familiar-sounding because it is written in a very familiar style -- but the tune is original, I assure you. In fact, it’s a Dixieland variation on my piece “Gelato per Dio,” which I shared a few weeks back.

I even included a banjo part, hoping the orchestra could locate a banjo player. Sure enough, at the premiere, the concert mistress' banjo-playing father was featured, his first performance before a crowd, looking trim and handsome in his tuxedo. He makes his entrance at 4:09.

At the end of this movement, you’ll hear the audience move beyond mere smiles to active applause (ignoring the ‘rule’ that discourages clapping between movements).

To hear Josh Aerie conducting the Heartland Symphony Orchestra's premiere performance of the "Father of Waters" movement from my North Country Suite, click on the link above.

You can see a PDF of the score by clicking on the link above.

🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶

“Whether you go up the ladder or down it,
your position is shaky.
When you stand with your two feet on the ground,
you will always keep your balance.”

-- from the “Tao Te Ching” by Lao Tzu

Dear old Lao Tzu. Bless his heart! Everything he says makes equally good sense whether taken literally or figuratively.

When you read the above just now, did you think of an actual ladder? Of course you did. But did you also think of what might be termed “the ladder of success” or “the ladder of one’s career?” That, too.

Taken either way, Lao Tzu’s words are true, his wisdom holds. Scrambling for position and rank within an organization, our position is shaky indeed. Better to remove oneself from such structures and “stand on the ground” as an independent, self employed person. We may not become rich but at least we will “keep our balance.”

That sums up the story of my career. I got off “the ladder” when I was 36 and haven’t had a full time job since. I had a family to support so I lived by my wits, writing music on the side. Balance!

But what about ACTUAL ladders? Oi vey. I was on one again this morning. We live in an old, old house and the outside walls are wooden clapboards, not vinyl or aluminum, thank goodness. They look historical but they always need work. I’ve been scraping, priming and painting every morning for a week now.

We don’t usually think of composers as people who paint houses. It’s difficult to imagine Debussy on a ladder with a paint brush in his hand, painting and hard at it.

Yet I was indeed a professional house painter. And I once used a ladder in an unconventional way. The ladder didn’t extend quite far enough so … I backed up the car and set the base of the ladder in the trunk, gaining a couple of feet off the ground. Red Green would be proud of me!

Now please excuse an abrupt change of subject. Some of you, after hearing a lot of my chamber music have kindly asked if I have written any music for a full symphony orchestra. Yes, but just a few pieces. The reasons for having written only a few are both practical and artistic.

In practical terms, it is simply much easier and more affordable to recruit a few musicians to rehearse and record a piece of chamber music than it is to recruit a 60-piece orchestra to rehearse and record a symphonic work.

Also, I prefer to write chamber music because it is more intimate and true to my authentic self that orchestral music would be.

When I think of the great orchestral composers -- Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Mahler, Sibelius, to name a few -- I envision them as giants. Literal giants. 90 feet tall, at least.

By contrast, here I stand in my stocking feet: five feet, nine inches tall (and two feet wide).

Still, I have dared to compose for the orchestra a couple of times. My Concerto for Clarinet & Orchestra, my Serenade for Mary, my Rhapsody for Cello & Orchestra and my North Country Suite.

Today it is my pleasure to invite you to listen to the premiere performance of that suite. Just copy and paste this link:

https://www.pbs.org/video/legacy-documentaries-heartland-symphony-sounds-heartland/

When you go to the link above you’ll be taken to a website where a video documentary about it can be viewed. Please manually adjust so that you start at 41:30. There you’ll meet the conductor Josh Aerie, who is my friend and a major fan of my music, and some of the musicians. Then you’ll both see and hear the piece. I take a bow at the end … shucks.

There are five movements:

I. Spirit of the North
II. Northern Lights
III. Father of Waters
IV. Boreal Forest
V. Into the Wind

Remember: start at 41:30.

I'd love to know what you think about this music; reply if you're inclined. But please don't feel that you are expected to reply. I'm just glad to share my life's work in this way.

As always, feel free to forward this message to friends who might enjoy it.

Anyone can be on my little list of recipients for these mpFrees (as I call these musical emails). To sign up, people can email me at rick@sowash.com, sending just one word: "Yes." I'll know what it means.

Rick Sowash
Cincinnati, OH
June 15, 2025