A teacher said to me, “I saw on your website that you have CDs. So, are you a singer?"

Her school was hosting me, for one day, as a Visiting Author.

An author?

Well, yes. I’ve written several books about Ohio for older elementary school children. Books about Ohio’s heroes, animals, geography, folk lore. Schools sometimes invite me to be a Visiting Author.

I’m a One Day Wonder!

I present assemblies, I host a “Lunch with the Author” for the school’s best student-writers, I spend happy half-hours with each of the older grade-levels, trying my best to inspire the kids by revealing “the secret tricks that writers know” so that they can have the fun I have, the fun of "putting pictures into other people’s brains."

Music focuses kids' attention. I punctuate my instruction with improvisations on the piano or funny little tootles on my soprano recorder.

Composing, my true calling, is not part of my Author’s Visits. Not even the teachers know that I have put far more creative energy into composing music than writing books … unless they read about it on my website, as this teacher had done.

“Well, I can sing, yes,” I told the teacher. "I sing tenor in my church's choir. But I am not a soloist and I don’t sing on the CDs you saw on my website."

“So then, if you’re not singing, are you playing the piano on those CDs?”

“No. I get musician friends to play the music on my CDs. They play better than I do.”

“But what songs do they play?”

“Well, it’s my music but they’re not songs; they’re instrumental pieces. It’s chamber music.”

"So it's mostly cover songs, then?”

Unintentionally, I gave her a look. She wasn’t getting it.

“No. I wrote the music. The tunes are original. I chose the harmonies; I decided which instruments would play what.”

“But if you’re not performing on these CDs then why is your name on the covers?”

“Because I’m the composer. You know, like Beethoven? I wrote the music.”

She still didn’t get it. She nodded, then changed the subject.

She wasn’t stupid. There are many intelligent, educated Americans who don’t grasp what it means to be a composer. Author? Painter? Yes. Composer? Not so much.

Why is this? We are a nation of music lovers but most of the music we love did not come to us from American classical composers. It came from performers, improvisers, singer/songwriters.

Being both an author and a composer has allowed me to experience, first hand, how much Americans’ attitudes and assumptions differ regarding those two artistic professions.

I’ve experienced the discrepancy many times. The passenger next to me on the airplane asks that classic American question, “What do you do?”

If I say, “I’m an author,” he lights up and asks about my books.

But if I say, “I’m a classical composer,” he’s at a loss. Pause. Sometimes a stranger will come back with, “Oh, then where do you teach?” When I tell him that I don’t teach music, that I have never taught music, I just write it … bewilderment sets in.

Europeans know about composers. In France, I’ve seen parks, streets, schools and even apartment buildings named for classical composers. Before the Euro, Debussy was featured on the French two-franc note. Do you think we’ll ever see Aaron Copland’s homely mug smiling up at us from a two-dollar bill? Me neither.) In French public spaces there are statues of Berlioz, Chopin, Gounod, et al.

So far as I know, in all of America there are only two statues of composers and, strictly speaking, neither of those two musical geniuses were composers; they were song-writers. There’s the statue of George M. Cohan on Times Square and a statue of Stephen Foster here in Cincinnati’s Alms Park.

In all of America, there is exactly one George Gershwin Elementary School. Where? You’d guess NYC? Nope. Chicago. Go figure.

There Is a Samuel Barber Road in Jackson, Georgia.

I’m not complaining, mind you. Just sayin’.

In any case, if you’d like to hear Teresa Villani playing the 2nd movement of my Little Suite for solo cello, click on the link above.

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

Rick Sowash
Cincinnati, OH
August 14, 2016

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“Musicologically speaking wise,” as Peter Schickele funnily says (funny, ‘grammatically speaking wise’), our vocabulary of musical terms is severely limited, a handful of clumsy analogies, most of them easily misunderstood.

Consider “high” notes vs. “low” notes … I mean, notes aren’t really high or low. We borrow the notion from the heights of things in our everyday world. Some things are high, like the top of our refrigerator, which my petite wife has never seen. (Good thing; it’s very dusty up there, a disgrace, really; I mean to do something about it, once of these days.)

Other things are low, like shoes (the only item of our clothing that we can view while being worn, without using a mirror, which is why — as Sherlock knew so well -- shoes tell us so much about the person wearing them; we look down at our shoes and say to ourselves, “See? That’s the sort of person I am!").

But a C-sharp is not any “higher” than a C. Basses do not sing “lower” than sopranos.

Music isn’t “fast" or “slow" either. Other than 'chronologically speaking wise' or in a figurative, musical/architectural sense, a piece of music is not going anywhere; it's not moving from point A to point B. Music itself moves not quickly, not slowly, not at all. Music is moveless.

Yes, we say music is “moving,” we are “moved” by it, 'emotionally speaking wise.' Another figure of speech. Faugh.

With the notable exceptions of marching bands, rock-n-rollers and string bass players, musicians almost always perform while seated. They move only when they take a breath, finger the valves, whack a tom-tom or yank a bow across a string.

Physical motion is not relevant to music, when you think of it, anymore than the temperature of a painting is relevant. A painting undoubtedly HAS a certain temperature just as seated musicians are undeniably hurtling through space along with the audience and all the rest of us as the earth spins on its axis. But so what?

Music can be loud, yes. But “soft” is a term we've borrowed from our sense of touch A pillow is soft. Why then do we say music is soft vs. loud instead of saying that music is soft vs. hard?

To be sure, in a different sense, there is such a thing as “hard” music, like the Haydn piano sonata I had to master in music school. That was hard, 'technically speaking wise.'

Curiously, the French express the idea of quiet music with an image borrowed from the sense of taste. They use “douce,” meaning “sweet.” Their word for “loud” is “forte,” which means “strong,” and can be applied to flavors as well as biceps.

'Practically speaking wise,' even the fundamental terms of music are fraught with potential misunderstandings.

For most people a “key" is an object that is used to unlock a door or start a car.

A “note" is a small piece of paper with writing on it.

A “bow" shoots arrows.

A “snare" catches rabbits.

Knives are “sharp.” Floors are “flat.”

A “staff" is what a wizard, if wise, is seldom without.

The English horn is neither … neither English nor a horn.

What is the frog? Part of a violin? Or a tailless amphibian with a short squat body, moist smooth skin, and very long hind legs for leaping?

With relief, we turn to the phrase, “music stand.” Here, for once, are two words from the world of music that mean, 'verbally speaking wise' almost nothing other than what they indicate,

I say “almost” because the phrase dimly echoes a question polite Midwesterners (such as the undersigned) would ask more frequently if our regional culture hadn’t rendered us so reluctant to risk seeming to be less than friendly. Namely, “How can you stand that music?”

Let’s see if you can stand the music I hope to share today.

To hear Teresa Villani playing the first movement of my Little Suite in G for solo cello, click on the link above.

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

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My painter friend Richard Schemm swears this story is true.

Richard and a friend were out for a walk in Chicago on a windy winter evening when they came upon a ragged, grizzled man seated on the sidewalk, wrapped in a dirty blanket and holding a cardboard sign: “Homeless Please Help.”

Richard reached for his wallet but his friend cautioned him. “Don’t give him anything; he’ll most likely spend it on cigarettes or booze.”

Richard hesitated. That was a likely outcome.

Then a blast of wind gusted across his face. Richard pulled a ten dollar bill from his wallet and handed it to the man.

“Thank you, sir,” the man said. “This money will come back to you! It will! You’ll see!”

“Slim chance of that,” Richard thought. Aloud, he said, "Glad to help.”

A year later Richard was back in Chicago, walking in the same neighborhood, alone this time. Approaching the street corner where he had encountered the ragged man, he remembered the incident. This time, no man, no sign.

Richard looked down at the square of sidewalk where the man had been seated.

And there on the sidewalk was … a ten dollar bill.

I’m not quite sure what this story means. Make of it what you will. A good story doesn’t need an explanation; it is its own excuse for being. I thought you might like to read it.

I am not quite sure what music means. Make of it what you will. Good music doesn’t need an explanation; it is its own excuse for being. You might like to hear it.

To hear Teresa Villani playing the final movement from my Little Suite for Cello, click on the link above.

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

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For as long as I can remember, I’ve loved to ‘make up stuff.’

As a boy I devoted all my leisure to doing just that. It was how I played … with blocks, toy soldiers, marbles, costumes, anything. Really, anything. There being no toys at my Grandma Sowash’s house, when I stayed there overnight I borrowed her lipstick tubes, boxes of buttons and wooden bobbins, assigned each one a personality and a name and then passed happy hours watching and listening as they ‘talked' to one another, assembled into formations and undertook battles, quests and adventures.

Eventually I transferred that spirit of play from toys and buttons to musical notes and words. I 'made up stuff’ sitting at the piano and I ‘made up stuff’ with a pencil, writing stories on pads of bright yellow paper with thin green lines, chronicling the deeds of Rouston S. Clark and General Floucus and other characters I invented.

In my teens, my elders pressed me to choose, once and for all, what I “wanted to be when I grew up.” They said that I must choose between the only two disparate career paths I could envision. I wanted to be a composer and I wanted to be a writer. But which?

Robert Frost was no help at all, standing there in his yellow wood, confronted with two diverging roads, saying he was “sorry I could not travel both."

Someone could have spared me a good deal of adolescent angst by informing me that a person CAN "travel both” by becoming more than just one thing. In defense of those grownups, who loved me and cared about me very much, the notion that a person could be more than one thing was not as commonly accepted fifty years ago as it is today.

One of the reasons why Teddy Roosevelt was chief among my boyhood heroes was because he was so many things. President, author, naturalist, cowboy, soldier, hunter, explorer. My kind of guy!

In college, still unable to choose between the two paths, I tackled a double major: Music Composition AND Comparative Literature. It required a fifth year of undergraduate courses. So be it, said I.

After college, I returned to Richland County, Ohio, the home of my family for six generations, and set about writing BOTH music and literature.

By my mid-twenties the composing was going well and you are kindly allowing me to share the music I wrote during the four decades that followed. Thanks. Your interest in my music means so much to me.

The writing did not go nearly as well. I had not found ‘my’ genre.

I tried most of the more familiar literary genres. In my twenties, I wrote a couple dozen poems and two novels: taken together, they comprise 'a richness of embarrassments.' I lacked the knack for fiction or poetry. I tried re-writing one of my novels as a play, without success. I tried writing lyrics. Oscar Hammerstein made it seem so easy. It is not.

In my late thirties I began writing non-fiction for 4th- and 5th-graders, books about Ohio history, folklore and animals. I made a fair amount of money from those books, publishing them myself, marketing them to Ohio schools, but their artistic value is negligible.

I wrote my best book in my late fifties, my boyhood memoir, “The Boy Who Would Be Famous.” It’s delightful and I am proud of it. If you want to read it, you can download it for free by copying the link below and pasting it into your browser:
http://www.sowash.com/recordings/mp3/boy_who_would.pdf

My best efforts as a writer are these weekly emails you kindly permit me to share. It’s a literary genre which I seem to have invented: a weekly blab anchored by a piece of music which I have composed, with links to an mp3 recording and a PDF of the score. My daughter coined a term for this combination of verbiage, recordings and sheet music: an “mpFree,” an essay more or less about and accompanied by a piece of my own music.

At long last I have found my genre! All these years, I never knew I was an essayist! I’m like Molière’s character who is delighted to learn that all his life he’s been speaking in prose! But then, I never knew that I was a teacher either, until the last couple of years, the same period during which I’ve written and shared these ‘mpFrees.’ Self-discovery, this late in life. Who knew?

Writing these ‘mpFrees' and teaching various subjects that interest me are activities that still feel, even after four years, very new and exciting to me … and richly rewarding!

Why am I sharing these thoughts about writing? Because, in truth, I have almost nothing to say about the music I want to share with you today.

It’s a good piece but it speaks for itself.

To hear Teresa Villani playing the third movement from my Little Suite for Cello, click on the link above.

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

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Many of you I know quite well. Friends of old, neighbors, folks I see at church, fellow Cincinnatians.

About many of the rest of you I know little. ‘Seein’ as how’ you kindly permit me to send you these weekly emails, I can assume that you must like my writings and my music.

If you’re in the latter category and if you’re inclined, I’d love to know a bit more about you. Tell me sometime, please: Who are you and what matters to you?

No hurry. If you’re disinclined, that’s OK too. You’re still my friend.

Meanwhile our annual ‘Horror Season’ is almost over, thank goodness. I am fond of Halloween but I abhor and avoid horror. Perhaps I should be ashamed of myself but I have never read a book by Stephen King. Friends have told me he’s a good writer. Then again, I wonder if Mr. King has ever heard any of my music. Come to think of it, he lives in Maine and Maine Public Radio broadcasts my music now and then … so maybe he has!

I’m sorry, Mr. King, but I can’t stand ‘scary.’ It gives me nightmares.

I do enjoy ‘spooky’ in small amounts. And I have always loved costumes.

At Leaves of Learning, the school where I taught for six years before COVID, the students celebrate Halloween by donning extravagant costumes, often of their own making. Even “the big kids” do this. The school, serving pre-K through 12, has only one rule regarding costumes and makeup: nothing gruesome. Fine with me!

Most of the faculty didn’t costume themselves for Halloween but Mr. Sowash wasn’t going to miss an opportunity like that. I dressed like Gandalf -- a big gray pointed wizard’s hat with a wide round brim, a staff in my hand, a knee-length teal blue cloak (it had belonged to my late mother-in-law) and green, pointy-toed elf shoes. It was ‘a hoot and a roar,’ as the Irish say. I stood in the hall in front of the door to my classroom, clasped my staff with both hands and shouted,

“YOU! SHALL! NOT! PASS!”

The kids got it. In case you didn’t, that was Gandalf’s defiant cry just before he and the Balrog, a demon of the deep, toppled into the abyss. (Spoiler: Gandalf returns in Book Two, transformed.)

I have written neither horror stories nor avant garde compositions, which pretty much amount to the same thing. I remember a friend’s term for off-putting modern music: “Ear terrorism.”

I have, however, composed a few works that are gently spooky and thus, according to my cautious tastes, suitable for sharing with you on this Halloween day.

One of them is the third movement from my Little Suite for Solo Cello. It’s in G minor, the merriest of the minor keys. It begins with the cello plucking the strings, playing a mock-stately tune that makes me want to dance. It’s very soft. You may want to turn up your volume. The more serious middle section, a chorale, is played with the bow. Like Gandalf, the pizzicato tune returns and has the last word -- a surprising G MAJOR chord!

To hear Teresa Villani playing the third movement from my Little Suite for Cello, click on the link above.

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

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“Art is significance rendered with feeling through form.”
-- Will & Ariel Durant

Significance, feeling and form. How can mere musical tones be made to offer such grand things?

We sense significance in music when the composer and performer have ‘something to say’ that is sufficiently substantive to reward careful listening. The prospect of a musical performance is a contract, a promise. “Listen carefully,” the composer and performer assure us, “and you will be rewarded.”

Of what does this promised reward consist?

A pleasing alignment of contrasting elements, a reconciliation of opposites. When we sense that music is reconciling opposites, we are ennobled.

From birth we are confronted with opposites. Mother and father, night and day. Awake / asleep, hungry / fed. As we mature, we devise patterns to help us cope with more complex opposites: up and down, left and right. Later still: young and old, past and future. Later yet: boy and girl, right and wrong, good and evil, joy and sorrow.
hot cold
female male
question answer
life and death
land sea
rich poor
day and night
Try as we might, we cannot dissolve opposites into a larger unity. It’s not like mixing corn starch and milk. We can only try to arrange contrasting elements into a pattern that displays some logic, that makes some sense to our eyes, our ears, our state of mind.
For Western societies, the reconciliation of opposites is our most profound and troubling theological problem. If God is good, why all this evil? Here’s a handy word: theodicy, meaning “the defense of God's goodness and omnipotence in view of the existence of evil.”
Those who embrace the Abrahamic faiths, however loosely, must accept, simultaneously, these two contradicting ideas: the goodness of God and the existence of Evil. For many people, including a few whom I deeply love, this is impossible. For them, Evil obviates the power, the love, the very possibility of God.
They ask, "How can we thank God when good things happen but exculpate God when bad things happen?"

Theologians posit various responses, various theodicies. Many believers -- I, for one -- merely shrug and say, "We just do, that's all."

A knotty conundrum to say the least, it strains all of us, believers and non-believers alike. It affects everything, perhaps especially the way our artists shape their work and the way we respond to their works.
When we encounter a work of art that reconciles opposites into a coherent and pleasing pattern, be it a painting, a play or a musical composition we are both relieved and uplifted. It seems to me that this reconciliation is the highest aspiration of Western art. The art that achieves is our best art.

Think of how the Mona Lisa's smile is reconciled with the dreary landscape that looms behind her.

Or how skillfully and satisfyingly Cezanne's landscapes employs greens to reconcile the blue of Mont Sainte-Victoire and the sky behind it with the opposing salmon-orange colors of the little Provençal farmhouses? and the way his still lifes position humble jugs, crocks and glasses so that they are depicted simultaneously from differing points of view? those twisting tables, those tilting teapots? They seem to twist and untwist, tilt and un-tilt before our wondering eyes.

The most salient characteristics of Shakespeare's characters are their ambiguities -- those wise fools, those flawed heroes, those villains who, maddeningly, mouth such good advice. Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello -- murderers, to be sure; yet we find in them much to admire.

See? Opposites reconciled … or at least intriguingly juxtaposed.

The best romantic comedies work the same way. We know that “these two” are going to get together because … opposites attract. Think of Beatrice and Benedick in “Much Ado About Nothing” or Tracy and Hepburn in “Adam’s Rib.” It’s only a question of how the reconciliation is going to be achieved. We know it’s coming. The fun lies in watching them discover what we’ve known all along.

Consider our greatest music; the works of Bach and Beethoven are replete with opposites presented, then reconciled: loud-soft, fast-slow, major-minor, rising and falling motifs, conjunct and disjunct melodic phrases, the opposing tonic and dominant keys of the fugue, the contrasting character of the first and second themes in the sonata-allegro form.

When we encounter such works of art, something deep in our hearts says, “Here at least, here at last, something is happening that almost never happens in Life: opposites are reconciled! And we rejoice!

(Contrariwise, an artwork lacking opposites bores us. We quickly tire of a flawless hero, an unmitigated villain, a merely foolish fool, a painter who cannot take us beyond a narrow spectrum of form and color, a repetitive song with a never-varying beat, a cramped melodic range and the same old tiresome chords -- boring! We have no patience with such stuff. We say, “Lemme outa here!”)

In my own small way, I’ve attempted conceive music that would effect a reconciliation of opposites. The opening of my suite for unaccompanied cello is one such.

The first two measures are in G major and reminiscent of Bach’s cello suites. But at the beginning of the third measure, the key abruptly changes as a C sharp minor 7 chord is heard, the diametrical opposite on the Circle of Fifths, G and C sharp being a tritone apart.

Thus, opposites are immediately established. Now comes the interaction of the two. Is it effective? Does it work? Is a reconciliation achieved over the course of the rest of the movement? Does it work as a metaphor?

Are the opposites merely placed in slapdash proximity to one another? Or are they aligned in a way that is pleasing, satisfying, ennobling?

I did my best. Now you be the judge.

To hear Teresa Villani playing the first movement of my Little Suite in G for solo cello, click on the link above.

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

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This week I put the final touches on the first major musical composition I’ve written in ten years, my Trio #2 for flute, cello and piano, “Sylvan America.”

Ten years ago I concluded that, musically, I had said all I had to say. With some relief, I quietly set down my ‘composing pen.’ Since then, I have written three books and almost 500 Sunday morning emails to friends like you but only a little music — a few short pieces for solo clarinet, solo cello, and a couple of hymns and anthems for my church choir.

What got me back to composing? “How Music Means.”

That is the name of a course I teach at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the Univ. of Cincinnati, a philosophical, historical, personal exploration of how and why music moves us. Teaching that course is immensely satisfying. The enrollees are intelligent and enthusiastic. In preparing my lecture-demonstrations for the course, I draw on fifty years of attempting to write music that would “mean” something to listeners.

After one of the enrollees pressed me to expand my lecture notes into a book and, coincidentally, a close friend also said as much, last February I began writing such my eighth book, “How Music Means.” It is nearly finished and will be issued in the spring.

You must read it! When it is available I will announce it with an email to all of my “friends and fans.’

Teaching the course and writing the book got me thinking again about the basics of music: intervals, chords, melodic contours, large scale forms. That’s what got me composing again.

For example, in writing about how the interval of the minor sixth “means” (it metaphorizes the dramatic, sometimes the melodramatic) I realized that I had very rarely used a minor sixth in my own tunes. I wondered: what if I DID employ a minor sixth? I started humming and whistling minor sixths to myself and found some attractive little ideas. They began to grow.

I wrote a “sketch in C major” for solo cello, keeping it simple. My computer’s synthesized cello sound is pleasing. I enter a few notes, listen to the computer’s “playback,” then enter a few more notes. It is like having a cellist alongside me, playing the notes as soon as I write them. Every day, all summer long, I sat in the pavilion in our garden by the hour, slowly composing “sketches.” I’m still at it, albeit indoors now.

I call these pieces as “sketches” for a good reason. That’s what they are. Though finished and complete, they are sketches -- not paintings. Any of these sketches could be expanded into larger works, longer movements, rescored for multiple instruments.

All told, I wrote sixteen “sketches” for solo cello. Then I started writing for TWO cellos, a glorious sound. And I just finished my twentieth “sketch” for cello duet.

These sketches are cast in many different moods, meters, tempi and durations. Some of them push tonality further than I have done in earlier years. Most have a strong emphasis on counterpoint an canons. About ten of them are fugues.

Then the Sylvan Trio (flute, cello & piano) contacted me about upcoming broadcasts and performances featuring music I had written for them ten years ago. I thought of expanding some of my cello duos into a new piece for them and asked them for ideas. They requested a “sylvan” trio focusing on the woodlands and the natural beauty of different regions of America. An exciting idea! “Sylvan America!”

I reviewed my sketches for cello duo and found four that seemed especially promising. I rewrote, rescored and expanded those four ’sketches’ … all of which had been written in the past four months.

This way of composing has served me well from my earliest efforts. I perfect a short piece; months or years later, I expand it into a chamber work, orchestral or choral work. A solo vocal piece becomes chamber music. It works the other way too. I made the hymn-like tune in the fourth movement of this new trio into an actual hymn with lyrics adapted from Wm. Blake. We sang it in my church two weeks ago.

Inspired by Nature and friendship, this new trio is joyful, optimistic, life-affirming, fun-loving and, I hope, inspiring. Obviously, it has not yet been recorded. I sent the score and parts to the Sylvan trio only a few days ago. Thus, I can’t share this music with you; that time will come.

Meanwhile, I’ve written all this music for solo cello and cello duet, also too new to have been recorded as yet. Sorry, you’ll have to wait!

This morning, please listen to the final movement of my “Little Suite” for solo cello, a piece I wrote back in 2008. The music is Bach-ish yet American-sounding. Is that even possible? Does it work? See what you think.

To hear Teresa Villani playing the final movement from my Little Suite for Cello, click on the link above.

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