Tomorrow being my 67th birthday, I’m thinking about gifts.

I’m not much interested in receiving gifts; I have all the stuff I want and our apartment offers scant storage space.

I’m thinking about the gifts I want to give, to y’all and sundry.

Nowadays I give away my music to the greatest extent possible. I send free PDFs of the sheet music for my scores to any musician who contacts me, curious to discover my work. I give them permission to print the scores and parts and play the music for free, anytime, anywhere.

I give away CDs of my music, too. If you want them, reply with your physical address and I’ll mail you a box full. CDs of my music, sitting on the shelf here in our tiny apartment, bless no one. I’d much rather you shelve them at your place (after listening to them a time or two, of course!).

For decades I tried to squeeze a little cash out of my music by selling sheet music of my works and CDs of my music, coaxing commissions, pushing for radio broadcasts and concert performances to beef up my quarterly ASCAP royalty checks. One year, my best, I grossed $13,000 solely from my music. That was amazing. All the other years what I earned from my art didn’t amount to half that much or even a quarter of that much..

No matter. I found many other interesting ways to earn enough to keep the wolf from the door.

Lately, for the first time in my life, I’ve been teaching; French, Music Theory and The Art of Storytelling, three days a week, to young people who are 10 to 18 years old, at “Leaves of Learning," a local resource center that offers enrichment courses for kids who are otherwise home-schooled.

When I reached my sixties, the impulse to convert my tunes into 'Happy Cabbage’ ($$$) came to seem a less than worthy expenditure of energy. The thought occurred to me: “I never paid a nickel for any of my ideas. They all came to me for free. Why am I trying to sell them? The thing to do is to pass them along, free of charge.”

Sages agree: the universe is to you exactly what you are to it. Give away good stuff and good stuff will come your way in turn.

To quote an old book, “Cast your bread upon the waters and after many days it shall return to you.” (Ah, but who wants soggy bread, you ask with a smug smirk? Don’t be a mugwump! It’s a metaphor!)

Melody Knight, a voice major at Texas Christian University, found my work on-line, printed the PDF of the score for one of my songs and sang it in a recent recital, bless her heart. Afterward, she uploaded her performance onto YouTube and now any computer-owner anywhere in the world can see and hear her rendition, for free.

Amazing. What times we live in when such things are possible! For free!

The song she sang is my setting of "Velvet Shoes,” a lovely winter poem by Elinor Wylie.

If you want to follow the words as you listen, here they are:

Let us walk in the white snow
In a soundless space;
With footsteps quiet and slow,
At a tranquil pace,
Under veils of white lace.

I shall go shod in silk,
And you in wool,
White as white cow's milk,
More beautiful
Than the breast of a gull.

We shall walk all through the still town
In a windless peace;
We shall step upon white down,
Upon silver fleece,
Upon softer than these.

We shall walk in velvet shoes:
Where’er we go
Silence will fall like dews
On white silence below.
We shall walk in the snow.

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

Rick Sowash
Cincinnati, OH
January 15, 2017