When I was a Boy Scout, I figured out that there are two good reasons to volunteer to do the cooking on a campout. First, you can fix the food the way YOU like it to be cooked. Second, you don’t have to clean up; you can say, “OK, you guys, I cooked, now you wash the dishes.” They'll grumble, but they’ll do it.

I love to cook. I love everything about it. My favorite spatula, our dear old cast iron skillet, the Japanese knife my son gave me for Christmas, our colorful porcelain Provençal olive oil dispenser, our brass pepper mill, my Kelly-green apron. Searching out the recipes, buying the groceries at historic Findlay Market and at Avril’s, Cincinnati's great downtown butcher shop. I love the cooking, the serving, even the clean up (which I do nowadays, there being no Scouts handy).

Our kitchen is tiny. When our pastor, a Texan, visited our apartment and saw our kitchen, she put her hands on her hips, shook her head and said, “Wall! This here’s what we call a one-ass kitchen.” She had it right.

A kitchen is best judged by the quality of the food that comes out of it. Jo is tired of hearing me say that. She yearns for “a nice kitchen” like the one we had in our first home as newlyweds, back in Bellville, Ohio.

It was a sweet place. We still refer to it as The Little Yellow House. The rooms were small, but the kitchen was big enough to accommodate two or more persons without unduly frequent bumpings of bums, hips and elbows.

We loved that house. We could hardly believe it was ours. It seemed to us that it must belong to someone else: serious, grownup people; not a couple of goofy kids like us. When we painted a room, we said, “Whoever REALLY owns this house might be shocked by the new colors we’ve chosen.”

In those days, we were taken with the watercolors of the Swedish painter Carl Larsen. He depicted the rooms of his home, showing his family doing ordinary things -- watering house plants, reaching for a utensil, setting the table. Charmed, we bought prints of his paintings, framed them, hung them on the walls of our home.

"Our home!” For us, in those days, it was a thrill to use that phrase.

I decided to try something like what Carl Larsen had done, to use our home as a subject matter, not for paintings but for a piece of music.

In 1978 I wrote a suite in seven movements, one for each room of the house, each movement expressing the character of that room.

The first movement, entitled “The Kitchen,” is bubbling and merry.

I scored the work for flute, oboe, clarinet and bassoon and invited friends to our home to play and listen to the premiere. “Chamber” music, indeed!

Not long ago, a saxophonist friend, Bill Perconti, re-scored the work for saxophone quartet. To hear Bill and his Alloy Saxophone Quartet playing "The Kitchen" from Our Home, click on the link above.

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

Rick Sowash
Cincinnati, OH
September 4, 2016

🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶

Today, a two-minute piece that will leave you smiling.

Back when Jo and I bought and occupied our first home, at 81 Fitting Avenue in Bellville, Ohio, we were very taken with the Swedish painter Carl Larsen.

His clean, simple watercolors depict the rooms of his home, his wife and children doing ordinary things — watering flowers, setting the dinner table. The sweetness and sincerity of these paintings captured our fancy.

I suggest you google “Carl Larsen home paintings” and look at the images. Delightful.

We bought prints of his paintings, had them framed and hung them in most of the seven little rooms of ’our little yellow house,’ as we’ve always called it.

Larsen inspired me to try something similar as a composer: to use the rooms of our home as a subject matter for music. That’s how the suite “Our Home” came to be.

The music for The Kitchen is bubbling and merry, The Composing Room is a careful canon, The Attic is quiet and thoughtful, The Dining Room quotes Shaker hymns, The Bedroom is a lullabye and/or a romantic love song and The Living Room is lively, a place of bustling jollity.

The suite is friendly, fetching and naive (not unlike ourselves back then, in 1978 and, I hope, even still today). We invited musician to premiere the work for a tiny audience of friends, playing the piece in the very rooms the music depicted.

“Chamber” music, indeed!

I scored the suite for flute, oboe, clarinet and bassoon; later, a clarinetist transcribed the suite for clarinet quartet; a few years ago Bill Perconti transcribed it for saxophone quartet and recorded it.

You’re invited to listen to Bill and his friends in the Alloy Saxophone Quartet playing the final movement, "The Living Room,” from the suite Our Home by clicking on the link above.

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

Rick Sowash
Cincinnati, OH
March 5, 2017

🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶

“For this article, I’d like to get a photo of you in your studio,” said the free-lance writer, telephoning me to set up an interview.

I laughed. “Studio? I have no studio. I don’t even have a piano.”

I told him: "I’ve made up tunes in all sorts of circumstances, by humming and whistling while driving my car, while soaking in the tub, while on duty as a guard at the art museum. If I come up with something interesting, I pencil a few notes on a scrap of paper so that I can recover it after I’ve forgotten it. I throw the scraps in a drawer. It’s a little mine of musical fragments. Sometimes I open it and ‘pan for gold.’ If I find something that seems to want to be developed, I set up my computer and electronic keyboard on our dining room table and that’s where I do the notation work. I have no studio."

Once upon a time, though, I did have something like a studio. Many years ago, back in the ’70’s, in our tiny first home, there was a half-finished section of attic with just enough room for the miniature harpsichord I had back then, along with a table, a chair and a shelf of reference books.

We called it “The Composing Room” because that room was where I retreated to do the work of composing, notating music by hand. Composers had no computers in those days, no “Finale" music notation programs; all my early scores were hand-written in the neat calligraphy I had learned in college.

I remember my composition professor telling us, “No computer will ever be able to do music notation; it’s far too complicated.”

Twenty years after he told us that I bought “Finale” and undertook the vast task of transcribing all my hand-written scores into computer notation, generating scores that are far more professional in appearance than any I had written by hand.

In 1978 I wrote a suite for flute, oboe, clarinet and bassoon entitled, “Our Home,” depicting each of the rooms in our tiny first house. For the movement entitled “The Composing Room,” I fashioned a composer-ly display of rounds.

You know what a round is? Think “Row, row, row your boat.” One singer begins the tune, a second begins the same tune but a bit later, a third a bit after that, etc.

Rounds are easy to learn and fun to perform but tricky to write because they have to be fashioned so as to ensure that when all the parts are simultaneously singing different sections of the same tune they still sound good together.

The invention of the round was a major leap in musical consciousness, as important to the development of music as the Renaissance discovery of perspective was to the development of art.

No one knows who made up the first round. Before rounds, people sang, of course, but only in unison, we suppose. Then one day ….

I picture a scene such as Breugel might have painted, pot-bellied peasant louts in a tavern, rowdily singing. One of them is so drunk that he starts singing the same tune as everyone else, only two bars too late. And what do you know? It works! It sounds good! Voilà!

Where did this happen? Maybe in England. The English round "Sumer Is Icumen In” (Summer is a-comin’ in) may be the earliest, dating from the mid-13th century.

A hundred years later comes an Italian vocal form, a round for two voices with a text describing the hunt. The name for this form was “caccia” — Italian for “hunt.” It makes sense because one voice is, in effect, chasing the other voice, the way a hunter chases his prey, hard upon its heels.

Two hundred years later comes the English “catch," a 17th-century type of round, which may derive its name from “caccia.” Again, one voice is pursuing, trying to ‘catch’ the other.

“Will you troll the catch you taught me?” asks Caliban in Shakespeare’s “The Tempest.”

Stephano replies, “At thy request, monster … Come, let us sing."

Rounds, rounds and more rounds. Seven hundred “Sumers” after “Sumer Is Icumen In," we’ve not tired of them.

Not long ago, a saxophonist friend, Bill Perconti, re-scored “Our Home" for saxophone quartet. To hear Bill and his Alloy Saxophone Quartet playing "The Composing Room" from Our Home, click on the link above.

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

Rick Sowash
Cincinnati, OH
June 4, 2017

🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶

Laughter is in short supply these days. I try to do my part.

What I want to share today is just silly.

But first, a disclaimer:

The events described herein are, in fact, really very likely, being founded, to a certain extent, on an all but true episode, which actually happened, after a fashion, in a modified degree.

Blessed nowadays with a plenitude of leisure, I thought I’d take up a musical instrument.

I have long been able to slap around a piano and tootle a recorder and I can strum and pick the basic Peter-Paul-&-Mary chords on a guitar. And though I cannot play the trumpet, I know how a trumpet is played.

I learned the fingerings of the trumpet when I was in junior high school but I could never get a good sound out of the instrument because of a crevice in my cranium. At least that is my diagnosis of the problem.

I have not consulted a physician about my suspected cranial crevice. There has been no official diagnosis; no x-rays to prove its existence. It has never proven problematical, except insofar as it impeded my ability to play the trumpet. I can only attest that, when I, an earnest seventh grader, blew hard into the trumpet mouthpiece, tiny streams of air shot from the inner corners of my eyeballs. Seriously! It was an unpleasant sensation and prevented me from hitting the higher notes.

I insist: there’s a sneaky leak somewhere in the grottos, caverns and cavities of the labyrinth that separates my esophagus from my parietal bone. I doubt if modern medicine, for all its advances, could caulk this leak, certainly not non-invasively.

Thus, I never excelled at the trumpet. I was relegated to the Third Trumpet section in the Lexington Jr. High School band. Third trumpet parts rarely ascend beyond G-above-middle-C.

The tuba is a cousin of the trumpet, or more like a portly uncle. It asks the same fingering and does not require the intense air pressure necessary to the sounding of the trumpet. So I thought, “It’s never too late; I’ll take up the tuba.”

We still have the old tuba we bought for our son when he was in the seventh grade. He eventually soared far beyond the tuba, becoming a master trombonist, the veteran half a dozen tours of Europe and Brazil, dozens of US tours and a featured artist at thousands of gigs. He isn’t playing much these days because weddings and corporate events are postponed and few bars are hiring bands. Fortunately, he is also a trained and highly skilled Mechatronic Technician so he does not depend upon the trombone for income.

Lugging the old tuba up from the basement, I found it heavier than I had remembered. The weight of the tuba is of no import once it is properly propped on the knees of a seated tuba-ist. I positioned myself on the bench in our foyer and commenced the enterprise.

No man is an island. My wife’s was a rapid response. She did not offer what could be termed ‘active encouragement.’ She gave voice to her conviction that our life would be more serene if I did not attempt to master the tuba inside the house. I must needs continue the attempt ‘à l’extérieur.’

Every cloud has a silver lining, they say. Her suggestion prompted an idea which I believe to be uniquely my own. I find no mention of it on the internet.

I cobbled together a system of nylon ropes and pulleys, stretching the web betwixt the two large pines from which my beloved hammock is slung. With a hearty “Heave, ho!”, I hoisted the tuba. It’s out there now, aloft, gently a-sway in the morning breeze. I could take you back into the pines and show you.

I don’t worry about rain. Remember, it’s just an old tuba, tarnished, dented and cheap. (I may take it down during the winter months, I haven’t decided yet. It would be fun to play “Frosty, the Snowman” out there in January.)

The project took a bit of doing, but I was excited about it; the rewards would be great.

It’s very simple, really. Once recumbent in the hammock, I give the rope a gentle tug and down comes the tuba. The trick is to do it slowly. The first time I employed the device I didn’t realize the importance of lowering it slowly and it fell hard onto my stomach. Oomph. Or I should say, “Oom pah?”

Reclining, with the bulk of the weight borne by the ropes,I embrace the tuba fervidly and press my lips to her sun-warmed mouthpiece.

I started out with the immortal ditties that all beginning instrumentalists master: “Twinkle,” “Hot Cross Buns” and “The Erie Canal.” At first the melodies were not identifiable. The initial sounds I made did not suggest music; the sounds were more along the lines of random tooting.

The neighbors, enjoying a late afternoon beer on their patio, mistakenly assumed the tooting sounds to be coming from the outhouse, which is a little further back in the pine grove, though still near the hammock. Hearing these noises, they feared I was unwell and, as they told me later, became quite alarmed. When I paused between songs, they didn’t know whether to shout “Encore!” or call 911.

However, as my skills quickly improved, their alarm softened into appreciation. They hadn’t realized that “Climb Every Mountain” could be emitted by such means from an outhouse, as they mistakenly assumed. And so expressively! Such feeling!

Humbly, I shrugged off their praise. It’s no big deal, I assured them. It only asks a little breath control.

And now for some music -- sweet, silly and less than 30 seconds long.

Let’s hear Bill Perconti and his Alloy Saxophone Quartet playing his transcription of the fourth movement from my suite, “Our Home.” click on the link above.

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

🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶

How does music mean?

(I am not asking WHAT music means. I am asking, HOW.)

How does music do that thing that music does?

That is the question we seek to answer in the course that I teach at the University of Cincinnati’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute. I will teach it again in the upcoming Spring term. We’ll meet at 9:30 on Tuesday mornings for eight weeks beginning April 22. If you live in or near Cincinnati, enroll!! You’ll love it.

Of course I know that most of you, the recipients of these weekly emails, live far away from “the Queen City” and thus cannot enroll.

Instead, you can read the book I wrote, titled “How Music Means.” Purchase a new copy at amazon.com for $25. Or purchase a used copy at https://www.abebooks.com/ for as little as $16.

In the course and in the book -- which grew out of the course -- the central idea is that music MEANS by presenting contrasting elements and then reconciling them.. This process serves as a metaphor for the reconciling of opposites in the larger, non-musical aspects of our lives.

A contemporary example: imagine two people with opposing ideological views. Perhaps yourself and a neighbor. Now imagine the two embracing. Opposites reconciled! That is what music “metaphorizes” and that, I believe, is why it gets to us the way it does.!

Now imagine a piece of music that begins “here”, then presents harmonies that go “somewhere else” and then returns “here”, i.e., back to where we began. A simple A - B - A form. It’s a little musical journey that moves from one place to another place and then returns.

Ah! How good it is when opposites are reconciled! If only Life could be like that. That’s a wistful thought and explains, I think, why some music moves us to tears. “If only …” Sigh.

What would Leonard Bernstein think of this idea? As I was writing the book, “How Music Means,” I searched through the many videos that are available on line which feature Bernstein lecturing or being interviewed.

He never uses the phrase “reconciliation of opposites.” However,in the very first of his celebrated Young People’s Concerts is titled ‘What Music Means’ he comes close. This is what he says:

“... if I play a note on the piano, just one note and I hold it for a long time —
[PLAY]
— that has no meaning at all, has it? But let's say I play the note and then move to another note,
[PLAY]
— right away there's a meaning -- a meaning we can't name, a sort of stretch, or a pulling, or a pushing, something like that -- but it's there. The meaning is in the way those two notes move, and it makes something happen inside of you. If I move from that first note to another note,
[PLAY]
— the meaning changes - something else happens inside of you -- the stretch is bigger, somehow, and stronger.”

True, he never uses the phrase I favor -- “reconciliation of opposites” -- but he brushes right up against it, instinctively, when he specifies “a pulling or a pushing.” Ah hah! Pulling vs. pushing. Opposites!

And when he says that the experience of hearing those contrasting elements of music, those two different notes, "makes something happen inside of you,” he brushes right up against what I’m saying: that music presents a metaphor.

Making such an assertion is risky. I risk the possibility that you might dismiss me as a pompous pontificator. Do I mean to say that I am smarter than Leonard Bernstein? What do I know, after all, about the deep psychology of how the brain perceives aural stimuli? I am a composer, not a scientist nor a physician.

My notion that music moves us because it metaphorizes the reconciliation of opposites is not verifiable. I concede that it is mere speculation.

True or false, verifiable or otherwise, the notion is a very effective ’tool’ for me as a composer when conceiving new music, developing new musical ideas.

I wonder what Bernstein would have said about my Big Notion? I suspect he would have been cautious. He might have gone so far as to say, “You may be onto something.”

I wonder what YOU think. I’ve barely skimmed the subject in this email. Take my course or read my book, “How Music Means,” and then tell me your thoughts.

Or not. Just a suggestion.

Meanwhile, you can listen to an example -- a very short journey from “here” to “somewhere else” and then back to where we started. A - B - A.

It’s a very short piece but you will discover when you reach 1:31 that you are “in” quite a different “place” than where you were at the beginning. By the end, you will have “returned.” You will feel very satisfied, I predict. That is music, doing its job, doing that thing that music alone can do.

From the suite “Our Home,” in which each movement depicts one of the rooms in the little house where we lived in the 1970’s, you can hear Williams Perconti’s Alloy Saxophone Quartet playing his transcription for saxophone quartet of the the movement titled “The Attic-Library. All you have to do is click on the link above.

There's also a link to a PDF of the score.

🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶

A friend wrote:

I read about A.I. and was intrigued enough to ask it how Ernest Hemingway would tell us to make scrambled eggs. Get a load of what it came up with.

- - - - -

Scrambling Eggs — Hemingway Style

Crack the eggs. Two, maybe three. Depends how hungry you are. Crack them clean. No shells. Shells are for cowards.

Beat them with a fork. Not too much. Just enough so the yolks break and run. Like blood in a bullring.

Pan on the stove. Medium heat. Butter — a knob the size of a shot of whiskey. Let it melt. Don’t let it burn. Burnt butter ruins mornings.

Pour the eggs in. Let them sit a moment. Then stir. Slowly. With purpose. Like rowing a boat through fog. Don't rush. Rushing breaks things.

Salt. A pinch. Maybe pepper. Maybe not. Depends on how the night went.

Take them off before they’re done. They’ll finish in the pan. Eggs, like men, are best when not overdone.

Eat hot. With bread, if there’s bread. With silence, if there’s no bread.

- - - - -

There’s no denying it. That parody is brilliant and hilarious, especially the last line. I love it.

But … does it ever raise questions!

Could Hemingway be said to have written it? Obviously not since it was created long after he died. But if not Hemingway, then who? Oh, I know the answer: it was generated by A.I. in the style of Hemingway. Masterfully.

If the goal was laughter and the goal was achieved -- which it certainly was -- then what does it matter who or what wrote it? Funny is funny, however it is generated.

A new joke makes the rounds and no one can identify who made it up. Who cares? How is that any different than A.I. inventing a joke? Isn’t A.I., in fact, just another of the many unknown authors whom we designate as “anon.”?

The Hemingway parody raises questions for me as a composer.

Suppose that all of my recorded works were available on line, as I hope they eventually will be. (I work toward that goal every day. A week from today I am going to share with yoy a splendid recording of a new work of mine, recently recorded by a trio of superb Cincinnati musicians.)

Suppose that, once all of my works are available on line, I, Rick Sowash, asked A.I. to generate a three-minute piece for oboe and piano, written in the style of Rick Sowash.

Would I be honest in saying that the resulting piece of music was mine? I devised the style, didn’t I? Whether the style is extended into another piece by A.I. or by myself, either way it’s a new piece of music “by” Rick Sowash, because it is written in his style, right?

But what if I asked A.I. to write a hundred three-minute pieces for oboe and piano in the style of Rick Sowash? Could I then claim to be the composer of a hundred such pieces? Like you, I want to shout, “No!” But if not me, then who? Anon.?

I sense your growing unease. Stick with me. Let’s see where this takes us. Consider this:

Suppose A.I. generated a new piece in the style of Rick Sowash and then I touched it up a little? Or a lot? How much touching up do I have to do before you’ll let me claim the piece as my own creation? Do I have to alter 50% of the measures? 66%? What about those other hundred pieces in the style of R.S.? What if each of them was touched up by the undersigned? Would they all then be mine?

To be more practical, what if I chose the single piece out of the hundred which I deemed to be the best one? Would it then be mine because I was the one who brought this judgment to bear on it, who pronounced it the best?

Why do such a thing? Then again, why not? If a new piece of music “improves Reality” (as Schubert said music does), then wouldn’t a hundred new pieces improve Reality just that much more, no matter how they were generated?

Just as “funny is funny,” so too, “music is music” and if it’s good, should we care whether it was created by a human composer or by A.I.?

I strive to be honest. You will be relieved to know that I would not claim to have written a work generated by A.I. in the style of Rick Sowash.

I sure would like to see and hear it though!

Then there is the matter of getting the work recorded. Suppose I asked A.I. to create an mp3 of one of my works for solo cello in such a way that it would sound as if it was being played by Yo Yo Ma. Just a few days ago the New York Times ran an article about someone doing something very close to this, only with an A.I. generated piece of music in a classical style.

If A.I. can record my music à la Yo Yo, why should I recruit a cellist friend? Because he is my friend, sure, and because friendship is important. But then again, if he could escape an evening passed recording my music he could instead spend that evening at home, playing with his children.

Recording my music is a very difficult and frustrating process. Good musicians are extremely busy and the mere act of scheduling a group of them for a rehearsal and then a recording session is maddening. How much easier if I could just ask A.I. to record the music for me and in the manner of the finest musicians.

Would that be cheating? What if I was ‘up front’ about it? Does acknowledging the role of A.I. make it OK?

These interesting questions have been pressing upon me.

In any case … A.I. and the complex implications of A.I. have absolutely nothing to do with the simple music I hope you’ll let me share with you today: a movement from a suite titled “Our Home” which I wrote in 1978. Each movement depicts a room in the home in which we lived back then. I originally scored the suite for woodwind quartet but a fan named Bill Perconti rescored it for saxophone quartet and recorded with friends who call themselves, collectively, the Alloy Saxophone Quartet.

The movement depicting “Shaker Dining Room” simply quotes two very beautiful, very simple Shaker hymns, “Verdant Fields” and “Whence Comes This Bright Celestial Light” -- a long way from the world of A.I. To hear it performed, click on the link above. There's also a link to a PDF of the score.

I'd love to know what you think about this music; feel free to reply if you're inclined. But please don't feel that you are expected to reply. I'm just glad to share my 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
August 24, 2025