Have you ever thirsted beyond the edge of agony? I have, once.

Could such an experience be expressed musically?

Could music capture the accompanying elements: the silence, the stillness, the heat?

Seemingly not.

Silence? By definition, music must be audible. It can be very soft, sure. There can be brief rests between notes, phrases, movements. But silent? No.

Stillness? By definition, music must progress, must seem to ‘go somewhere.’ We are quickly bored by a changeless chord.

Heat and thirst? By definition, music reaches us through our ears, unaffected by Fahrenheit or the frequency of fluid intake.

Yet these were precisely what I wanted to express in the first movement of my Trio #3 for violin, clarinet and piano, “Memories of Corsica."

The Verdehr Trio, having performed all over the length and breadth of the globe, had asked me write a piece, suggesting that I seek inspiration from exotic places I have visited.

I asked myself, what places have I visited that could be called exotic?

Then, I thought: Corsica! The scrubby landscape, the sleepy stone villages, the crumbling watchtowers scanning the azure Mediterranean, the pristine beaches, the chestnut forests, the strong wines and cheeses, the spicy salads topped with eggs fried in olive oil, larded with the bacon of wild boars.

I remembered the intense, dry heat and my desperate thirst when, foolhardy, I hiked out from Corté, the capital city, into the wild, with a half-bottle of water. I knew better, but Corsica is a strange, timeless, enchanting place; Corsican bandits were legendary; it’s a place where the banditry of one’s usual good sense is a possibility.

My water gone, I ought to have turned back. But the landscape was thrilling and mysterious, like the Sonoran deserts of Arizona; my curiosity drew me around the bend, around the next, then the next.

Suddenly I felt unwell. A dizzy, ringing head. A sandy, swollen tongue. I turned around. There was Corté, further away than I expected. I started back but my knees weakened and I had to sit down.

I felt tiny and vulnerable, a speck of humanity, very hot and very dry, my fundament plumped on one small rock amid ranges of jagged mountains, sawtoothed against a harsh and depthless sky.

Nature? Beautiful ... and indifferent. Our predicaments concern her not.

Abandon me there for a few minutes, seated on a hot slab in the sun-baked Corsican wilderness, while you listen to the Verdehr Trio performing the first movement of my Memories of Corsica, subtitled "Arid Heat.”

Be warned: the music begins VERY quietly. If your hearing, like mine, is fading, you may not hear any music for several seconds. Be patient. The violin and clarinet are melting in and out of one another, quietly intoning a middle C, back and forth between them. That’s the ceaseless heat of the sun. Then you’ll hear the pianist playing, in both hands, two octaves apart, a hollow, desolate melody, slow but rising and falling in sharp jerks. That’s the zig-zagged outline of the moveless mountains. The ideas intertwine ….

To hear the Verdehr Trio perform "Arid Heat," the first movement of my Memories of Corsica, click on the link above.

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

Be assured. I made it back to Corté where I discovered that cold water, usually dismissed as flavorless, is, when the drinker is desperate, exquisitely delicious!

Rick Sowash
Cincinnati, OH
August 21, 2016

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Thank you for allowing me to send you these weekly messages. It means a lot to me. I hope that one message each week is not too often, lest you find yourself “awash with Sowash."

I began sharing these weekly messages four years ago by sending them only to fans and friends with whom I had a face-to-face acquaintance, mostly Cincinnatians, all of whom knew how to pronounce my last name. But the pool of recipients has gradually expanded, resulting in these messages now reaching folks who are at a loss to know how to pronounce my strange last name.

Two weeks ago, I mused on the spelling of my curious sur-name and several of you wrote to kindly ask me how it should be pronounced.

When I phone in an order for Chinese carry-out —or Greek, Thai, Indian, Mexican — the name has been variously understood as “Squash,” “Sasquatch,” “OshKosh” even “Sushi."

We Sowashes prefer the pronunciation, "SO-wash.” Accent on the FIRST syllable, please.

Wrongly accenting the second syllable — "so-WASH" — makes it sound like a response to someone complaining about having gotten their hands dirty: “So? WASH!”

Or the slurred inquiry of a half-looped friend: “So … WASH new wish YOU?"

The name was originally, “Sauvage,” a not uncommon French family name, the name of my French ancestors. Johannes Sauvage arrived in Boston in 1737 and all Sowashes, what few there are of us, descend from Great-great-grandpa Johannes.

Why would a Frenchman have the Germanic first-name “Johannes?” Because the family, being Huguenots, fled the persecution of Louis XIV, curse his bones, hightailing it to Holland where, over the next 90 years, they apparently picked up the habit of naming their children with Dutch first-names, such as Johannes.

(I curse the bones of Louis XIV for turning a blind eye to the persecution perpetrated on the French Huguenots by their Catholic compeers and for revoking the Treaty of Nantes which had ended the Wars of Religion, promoting religious tolerance in France. If Louis had been a liberal, I would be living in France. I’d be French! Not just Franco-American. As it is, I take pride in being an American descendent of Huguenots, a distinction I share with Paul Revere and Davy Crockett.)

There were Sauvages in the Continental Army, qualifying me to be a Son of the American Revolution if I were attracted to that form of patriotic expression, which I am not.

Around 1840, my ancestors arrived in western Pennsylvania and began spelling the name “s-o-w-a-s-h,” probably to accommodate their German-speaking neighbors. In German, you get a “V” sound by writing a “W” -- as in “Wagner.” To a German ear, “Sauvage” would be spelled “Sowasch.” Drop the “c” and you arrive at "Sowash."

"SO-wash" is thus an Americanization of “Sauvage."

We like our names to be correctly pronounced. Some radio broadcasters, seeing my name in print on the cover of a CD, deduce that it is to be divided down the middle, like this: Sow + Ash.

I don’t like it when someone pronounces my name as Sow + Ash because I don’t like having “sow,” a female pig, in my last name. Nor do I like “ash.”

What is Sow + Ash? the incinerated remains of a female pig? burnt bacon? scorched ham? sausage cinders? cremated kielbasa?

Come to think of it, didn’t the pioneers use sow ash in the making of soap?

Contrariwise, SO + wash connotes wholesome domestic activities — sewing and washing -- and that’s just fine with me.

In fact, that very phrase shows up in one of Walt Whitman’s most famous and affecting poems, “I Hear America Singing."

"I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear ….
The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at
work, or of the girl sewing or washing…”

I noticed that when I set the poem to music.

It made me shake my head. The things a composer gets into…

By the way, a great many American towns boast a street monikered with my family name. What? A street sharing its name with that of an obscure Midwestern composer active before and after the turn of the last century? Well, sort of ...

A multitude of American municipalities have a Washington Street, almost always in the oldest part of town. Some of these Washington Streets run north-south. So a town will have a “North Washington Street” and a “South Washington Street.” You see what’s coming? Since “South Washington Street” has a little too many letters to squeeze onto a street sign, it’s often abbreviated to … you guessed it … “So.Wash. St.”

Ha!

To hear “Ardent Souls," the third movement of my Trio #3 for violin, clarinet and piano, subtitled “Memories of Corsica,” performed by the Verdehr Trio, click on the link above.

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

🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶

“We have art,” said Picasso, “so that we do not perish from the truth.”

Art inures us to Truth either by offering an escape from it or by taking us so deeply into it that we can view the outer world from a fresh perspective, vicariously, from inside the Truth, temporarily distanced from its effects.

P.G. Wodehouse expressed the thought this way:

“There are two ways of writing novels. One is mine, making a sort of musical comedy without music and ignoring real life altogether; the other is going right down deep into life, and not giving a damn.”

Wodehouse made no bones about it; he offered escape. Me too, most of the time. I went ‘down deep’ a time or two and brought back some good stuff which I’ll share someday when the world is less crisis-ridden, when our daily dose of Truth is more tolerable. The piece I want to share today offers escape.

When the world-traveling Verdehr Trio asked me to write a piece for them, they suggested that I might find inspiration in memories of exotic places I have visited.

Corsica, I thought! The jagged mountains, an “Arizona” landscape surrounded by the amazingly blue Mediterranean, the sleepy stone villages, the crumbling watchtowers where Genoan guards kept watch for pirate raids, the pristine beaches, the vast chestnut forests, the peppery wine, the strong, sheep’s milk cheese, the salads laced with the bacon of wild boars, grown fat foraging chestnuts, topped with a hot, fried, fresh egg.

My most salient memory of the place is the aroma. When hot, dry breezes fling about the scents of the herbs that grow everywhere in wild profusion -- oregano, rosemary, sage and thyme -- the scents pervade the island. Herbs don’t only grow in the Corsicans’ kitchen gardens, mind you, but literally everywhere, wild, right along the road. Sailors at sea, it is said, can sometimes catch a whiff of that extraordinary fragrance on the breeze, fully forty miles downwind! Think of it! To sense the presence of a island, not through the eyes, no! But through the nose!

I’ve wandered that strange, timeless and enchanting island twice, awestruck, for five days both times. Though I dream of returning, I’ve contented myself so far by reading its sad, noble history.

When I settled down to write music about that beautiful place I remembered the Corsicans I’d met: neither French nor Italian, proud, a little fierce, yet quick to laugh. I remembered the intense, dry heat and my desperate thirst when I foolishly set out on a hike with too little water. But most vividly, I remembered that fragrance.

You can’t smell with your ears any more than you can hear with your nose, but music can offer metaphors for many experiences, even the olfactory ones. I tried my best to write fragrant music, herbaceous music, tunes and harmonies redolent of herbs.

To hear the Verdehr Trio play "Aromatic Breezes," from my Trio #3 “Memories of Corsica” for violin, clarinet and piano (as featured on the CD entitled “Pastorale”) click on the link above.

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

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One thing about Ohio: it’s irriguous.

“It’s WHAT?”

Irriguous. Moist, well-watered.

Sherwood Anderson said it well: “The whole Middle American empire, swept by frequent and delicious rains … land of many rivers running down to the brown slow strong mother of rivers.”

Every field has a spring. Every ravine has a “crick” at the bottom of it. Every road must bridge a brook or two or three. Every interstate must span a river.

Having lived my whole life here, I take for granted the region’s irriguity.

“It’s WHAT?”

Irriguity. Irriguousness. Irriguation. Irriguosity.

When I read that the West is suffering the worst drought in 1200 years, that the Colorado River is dwindling, the Lake Meade is evaporating, I become conscious of a reality I rarely consider, that I occupy a damp and watery land and that is a great blessing.

Ohioans may “thirst for righteousness,” but if they will thirst for water then it’s no one’s fault but their own.

Have you ever thirsted beyond the edge of agony? I have, once. And it happened in a location almost as far away as it is possible to be -- geographically and culturally -- from irriguous Ohio.

I had occasion to wonder, could thirst be expressed musically?

Could music evoke the concomitant silence, the stillness, the heat?

Silence? By definition, music cannot be silent. Good, bad or indifferent, music is audible. It can be very soft, sure. There can be rests between notes, phrases, movements. But silent? No.

Stillness? By definition, music must progress. We are quickly bored by a static, changeless chord.

Heat? By definition, music reaches us through our ears. Our perception of music is unaffected by Fahrenheit or the frequency of our fluid intake.

Yet these were precisely what I wanted to express in the first movement of my Trio #3 for violin, clarinet and piano, “Memories of Corsica."

The Verdehr Trio, performers known world-wide, asked me write a piece for them, suggesting that I seek inspiration from an exotic place I have visited.

I thought of Corsica! The scrubby landscape, the sleepy stone villages, the crumbling watchtowers where the ancients scanned the azure Mediterranean, watching out for pirates. The pristine beaches, the chestnut forests, the strong wines and cheeses, the spicy salads topped with eggs fried in locally produced olive oil and a thick slab of the bacon of wild, chestnut-fed boars.

I remembered the intense, dry heat and my desperate thirst when, foolhardy, I hiked too far out from Corté, the capital city, into the wild, with only a half-bottle of water. I knew better, but Corsica is a strange, timeless, enchanting place; Corsican bandits were legendary; it’s a place where the banditry of one’s usual good sense is a real possibility.

There is something about that island that inspires a belief that it contains a secret meaning and that if it could only be found it would lead us close to understanding the meaning of our existence on this earth. Prospero would feel right at home there.

My water gone, half crazy, I ought to have turned back. But the landscape was thrilling and mysterious, like the Sonoran deserts of Arizona; my curiosity drew me around the bend, around the next, then the next.

Suddenly I felt unwell. A dizzy, ringing head. A sandy, swollen tongue. I turned around. There was Corté on the horizon, further off than I expected. I started back but my knees weakened. I sat down and didn’t want to get up.

I was tiny and vulnerable, a speck of humanity, very hot and very dry, my fundament plumped on one small rock amid ranges of jagged mountains, sawtoothed against a depthless sky.

Abandon me there for a few minutes, seated on that hot rock in the sun-baked Corsican wilderness, while you listen to the Verdehr Trio performing the first movement of my Memories of Corsica, subtitled "Arid Heat.”

Be warned: the music begins VERY quietly. If your hearing, like mine, is fading, you may not hear any music for several seconds. Be patient. The sounds of the violin and clarinet are melting in and out of one another, quietly intoning a middle C, back and forth between them, representing the ceaseless heat of the sun.

The pianist enters playing with both hands very high and very low, a canonic tune, two octaves apart, hollow, desolate, jagged, slowly rising and falling. That’s the zig-zagged outline of the moveless mountains.

The music does not flow. It is desiccated, anti-irriguous.

The ideas intertwine …. the opposites are reconciled … the movement ends as it began, with the violin and clarinet melting into one another in a paralyzed landscape wherein all things are rendered moveless by the heat.

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

Be assured, gentle Reader. I wobbled back to Corté where I discovered that cold water, which I had long thought to be flavorless, is, when the drinker is desperately thirsty, exquisitely delicious!

🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶

Winter is at hand. Let’s escape, aurally, to sunny Corsica by listening to “Ardent Souls," the final movement of my Trio #3 for violin, clarinet and piano, subtitled “Memories of Corsica.” This music attempts to portray the proud, hot-blooded people of that small island.

Corsica has an immensely long history and a strong sense of itself despite having been under the thumb of Genoa for hundreds of years before achieving, briefly, independence. France seized the island militarily in the 1700’s and it has remained French since then. There is, to this day, an impassioned separatist movement and an insistence on the continuance of the Corsican language, a curious mix of Italian and French.

When I visited there, twice, I found the people quick to anger but also fun-loving and quick to laugh. And ardently patriotic. “Ardent Souls” includes a section that sounds like a patriotic hymn, but I assure you that it is original. Listen for it at 2:53. That was the only time I ever attempted to compose, in effect, a national anthem.

The movement features no Corsican folk songs; all of the tunes are mine. What makes this music, for me at least, “Corsican,” is its character: rough and robust, rude yet likable.

I recall the thick strips of bacon that topped a salad I enjoyed at a restaurant in Corte, the island’s cultural capital. My server told me that the source of the bacon was the wild boars that range the island, eating almost nothing else but the chestnuts that carpet the forest floor. This diet gives the boars’ bacon an intensity like no other bacon I’ve tasted. I tried to put some of that into the music as well.

To hear this lively music performed by the Verdehr Trio, click on the link above.

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