What shall I compose next?

You’ve been a fan and a friend for some time, graciously allowing me to send you these Sunday morning emails for some time now. So I am asking you, what next?

In the past 18 months I’ve written about 80 new pieces, most involving cello … solo cello, cello duo, cello + piano. I love the cello, can you tell?

I finished a new piano trio about a month ago and a new cello-piano piece titled “Solemn the Night May Be” about eight days ago. Yesterday I put the final touches on a new suite of six short movements for violin-cello duo titled “Agreeable Suite.”

Left to my own devices, I’d continue writing mostly cello-piano pieces. But I have already written 25 pieces for that combination and most have not yet been performed or recorded because it’s just more than my cellist friends can manage to keep pace with. Shall I write yet more when my poor cellist friends are already swamped? “awash with Sowash”?

What about the clarinet, the flute, the oboe, or some combination of those and / or stringed instruments? Or shall I write more choral music?

Or what?

Definitely not orchestral. Don’t tell me to write a symphony. There are already plenty of great symphonies and getting an orchestra to play a new work is almost impossible. Stick with chamber music, that’s the ticket.

So how about it? What do you advise? Seriously, I’d love to know.

Meanwhile ..

“The Mystic” is the title of a cello-piano piece I wrote a few months ago.

What is a mystic?

A mystic is person who believes in the spiritual apprehension of truths that are beyond the intellect, truths that cannot be perceived with the five senses.”

Put another way, I’d call a mystic anyone with an appetite for religious experience who has discovered what actions will feed that appetite.

That’s just me. There are as many ways of being a mystic as there are mystics.

But I asked myself a question: What would a piece of music titled “The Mystic” sound like?

I wanted to write a piece in which the music itself awakens in listeners a sense of the spiritual, of mystery, awe and fascination. I think you’ll hear something like that, right off.

There is a moment of ecstasy in the middle of this piece, a moment of “breakthrough” … when the mystic transcends the intellect … soars … and then, inevitably, lapses, returning back to everyday reality … but still inspired, still listening.

Surely you have felt something like that, so difficult to describe.

Curiously, it is much easier to evoke this experience with melodies and harmonies than with words.

In the final section of the piece, the probing tune that began the piece is heard in the deep bass notes of the piano and then imitated or “followed” in canon by the cello a measure later. The cello is the mystic at that point, allowing itself to be quite literally guided by the deep piano notes, as if receiving and accepting guidance from a Power outside and beyond herself.

When our Cincinnati classical music station, WGUC, made room in their playlist for a superb recording of this new work, they kindly asked me to give a short interview just prior to the broadcast.

You can access the interview followed by an inspired performance of “The Mystic” by cellist Michael Ronstadt and pianist Beth Troendly. If you want to skip the interview, the music begins at 3:15. Copy and paste this link into your browser:
https://beta.prx.org/stories/478427

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