Since Cincinnati's Muslim community became a Sanctuary Congregation for undocumented immigrants facing deportation two weeks ago, they've received numerous bomb threats and their Imam has received almost SIXTY death threats. Now they feel they must step back from the Sanctuary movement to try to safeguard their congregation and their Imam.

Bomb threats? death threats? in Cincinnati? ... our quiet, lovable, richly blessed, mid-American city? Yes. I live in the heart of the city; the mosque is just a mile away. The people making those threats are my neighbors, my fellow Cincinnatians.

A dark beast — energized by fear and hatred of The Other — has been awakened and exploited. The irony is obvious: our land is peopled almost entirely by immigrants and by the descendants of immigrants, all of whom were The Other, once upon a time.

The challenge this presents our country is a subject that is too big for me.

I’m only qualified to comment on one tiny, trivial aspect of the subject: the challenge our immigrant heritage poses for an American composer.

To write authentic music, American composers must know who they are, where they are and where they come from. They must figure out how to express and extend these realities, musically, in the America of their own time.

My father's ancestors were French. Johannes Sauvage arrived in Boston in 1737. (The origin of “Sowash” is the French family name “Sauvage.”) During the American Revolution, his grandsons served in the Continental Army. Our family had long since ceased speaking French by the time I came along. I learned the language in college, improving my skills in subsequent visits to France. I have found much to admire in French culture and I love to think of "la belle France" as the land of my ancestors. For two-and-a-half years now, I’ve been joyfully teaching French to young people. Some of my music sounds a little French-y.

My mother's parents were Austro-Hungarians, from what is called Serbia today, though they considered themselves Germans, not Serbs. They arrived in Crestline, Ohio around 1900. My great-grandmother, Sophia Hoff, quickly learned that if she wore her beautiful headscarf in public she would be treated very badly. Her son, my grandfather, John Hoff, was relentlessly beaten up at school until he learned enough English and mustered the courage to stand up for himself. I heard these stories, growing up, along with contrasting stories of how the kindness and compassion of some neighbors and teachers helped the family. I heard a lot of German as a boy, picking up the rhythm and music of the language along with a few words and phrases. When Jo and I visited Austria the language came back to me pretty quickly. Sure enough, some of my works have an Eastern European sound.

Yet I am neither French nor German-Serbian. I am American and my music has an American sound, identifying me accordingly.

I wrote my clarinet quintet in response to some of the European musical structures. Think of the four movements as four glasses, made in Europe, each with a different shape, each filled with American wine.

The last movement of the quintet is my take on Brahms’ Hungarian Dances, my attempt to extend that very Austro-Hungarian genre into a contemporary American context.

The resulting music sounds … how shall I term it? … Austro-Hungarian-American? The temperature is gradually turned up and once the music gets cooking, it's a full-scale kerfuffle. American goulash!

How fortunate I am, that such wonderful musicians have recorded this music! Namely, clarinetist Michele Gingras, violinists Kris Frankenfeld and Elizabeth Stevens, violist Dorotea Vismara Hoffman and cellist Ellen Shertzer, click on the link above.

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

Rick Sowash
Cincinnati, OH
February 5, 2017

🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶

Prose is easier to analyze, understand and appreciate than music. Few of us write music, but we all speak prose. It is familiar territory.

Analyzing music takes us into the dark, abstruse and dreaded jungle identified on maps of the intellect as Music Theory. “Here be dragons!”

I gifted my friend Chris Miller, who bestrides music and literature, with a copy of Odell Shepard’s fine little book on trout fishing, “Thy Rod and Thy Creel.”

Chris is an avid fisherman and, you’ll recall, the choir director at our church. He is an ardent champion of my music and one of my best friends. He loves poetry and ends every choir rehearsal by reading a poem he’s recently discovered. Word music.

The making of ‘word music’ being analogous to composing, a writer learns from a literary chef d’œuvre in the same way that a composer learns from a masterpiece by an admired musical Master.

For instance ...

Observe O.S. working his magic as he compares a brook first to a giant violin string and then to a chorus of “numberless” singers, imagery a conductor-fisherman such as Chris would, I knew, particularly relish.

Here is the passage:

“… the brook … is the string of a mighty violin, stretched between the mountain and the sea. And it has a great gamut, from the broad rumbling bass of the main current rounding a granite boulder to the tiny trebles of little ripples sparkling pizzicato in the shallows.
Where the stream flows wide over gravel beds, there are numberless singers blending their tones like so many leaves in a tree, but where it narrows and bores between rocky walls the voices crowd together in one vague shout."

When I come on prose like this, I study it. How does it achieves its effects? I want to master this art, too.

The genius of this kind of prose is that the rhythms, consonances and alliterations of the words and phrases complement, extend and amplify the meanings of those same words. Words are more than their definitions. Words are SOUNDS. Skillfully combined, they hum a kind of ‘word music’ in our inner ear as we read them.

Let’s put this phrase under the magnifying glass:

“...from the broad rumbling bass of the main current rounding a granite boulder …”

The very SOUNDS of the words convey the breadth, the rumble, the rounding of the boulder. As a choral conductor you will appreciate that all of those words boast broad, singable vowels. The word “boulder” is itself a boulder among words. The sound of it is boulder-like. The sound of the word, spoken or sung, has the heavy, dark, hugeness of a boulder. What’s more, it echoes its homonymnic cousin, the word “bolder.”

Then, with a touch of wizardry, the music of the words alters. Look what comes next, in contrast to the broad, rumbling we just heard:

"… to the tiny trebles of little ripples sparkling pizzicato in the shallows…”

The tempo picks up. There is a touch of alliteration -- “to the tiny trebles” and “sparking pizzicato” -- not found in the earlier, broader part of the sentence. There’s a slant rhyme between ’trebles’ and ‘ripples’ and a symmetry to the rhythm of the phrase: “tiny trebles of little ripples”.

The little phrase “sparkling pizzicato” is so rhythmical that you can almost hear it sung by a choir. You can visualize the score: six sixteenth-notes: "spark - ling - pizz - i - ca - to.”

Setting phrases like these to music, a composer only needs to get out of the way and let it sing.

I once met one of Shepard’s students at Trinity College, by then an elderly gentleman. He shared with me Shepard’s dictum about writing: “Make it clear, make it simple, make it sing.”

Elsewhere Shepard wrote, “Prose can hardly say more than it sings.”

An accomplished keyboardist who could play Bach fugues on the organ and Beethoven sonatas on the piano and possessing a fine baritone voice, made for singing, he brought a musician’s sensibilities to the writing of prose.

There is more to think about in this passage. Shepard was a latter-day Transcendentalist, in a class with Emerson and Thoreau, albeit a generation-and-a-half later than they. He believed that Nature reveals verities left and right, in simple things, near to hand, available to all. Stones, ferns, trees, clouds, “a spear of summer grass” … or a stream:

He writes: “... the stream teaches or recalls to mind deeper truths … [the] river is the metaphor of time to us, and we are children of Time. It rushes toward the sea of oblivion, as we do. It would linger if it could in this pool, under such a bending elm, but a stronger need and wish draws it down, forever down, toward its swaying and softly breathing rest.”

Once again, in the final five words, he is harmonizing his meanings with the alliterations and rhythms of the words he chooses.

Imagine that last phrase sung by a choir: “swaying and softly breathing rest.” The music would be in 3/4 time, sung slowly, three quarter notes for “sway-ing and” … then a half note and quarter note for both of the next two measures: “soft-ly breath-ing” ... and then a single quarter note with a staccato mark for “rest,” conveying that the river and the tune have simultaneously come to be, in fact, “at rest.”

His thought achieves closure by this device; the journey is over. The stream and, by extension, we humans, come to the end of our respective journeys from mountain to sea, attaining at last a state of “swaying and softly breathing rest.” The prose evokes a vast, calm ocean, “swaying and softly breathing,” giving voice to the waves rolling gently and endlessly to shore.

Shepard is a minor master of American prose. His unique voice sings to readers who, when they read, are also listening.

He invites readers to perform his prose as they read, as a composer invites musicians.

Another friend wrote this to me:

“I have been reading, in lucid enchantment, Odell Shepard’s The Cabin Down the Glen. I find I cannot read anything he wrote straight through. I have to pause to savor an insight, an image, or a turn of phrase. The man was a poet, a musician, and a master stylist, and like the truly great ones, he manages to hide the effort that went into it.”

Let’s turn at last to actual music, the third movement of my clarinet quintet. Its Bach-like arabesques burgeon forth from a descending four-note fragment of the Blues scale. The clarinet bubbles along like the stream Shepard describes, against the backdrop of a string quartet playing pizzicatto, evoking the sound of a strummed guitar.

I’ve long intended to rescore this movement for clarinet and piano. If any clarinetists among you would like to have the piece in such a reduction, let me know and I’ll comply.

Just wait ‘til you hear the marvelous Michele Gingras playing this music. She makes it seem as effortless to play as Shepard’s prose seems to have streamed, effortlessly, from his pen to the page and on to our hearts. click on the link above.

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

🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶

Composing is an act of ego. I admit it and get on with it.

When I finish a new piece I format the title page with my name at the top, like Monet daubing the letters “M-o-n-e-t” in the lower right corner of a pale blue-green painting of water lilies.

Composers must be self-confident. We’re up against the best: Bach, Beethoven, Sibelius. How dare I ask anyone to listen to my scores when they could listen instead to a Bach fugue, a Beethoven string quartet or a symphony by Sibelius?

I just do, that’s all. Let the chips fall.

I laugh at myself. Who do I think I am? Rick Sowash was really a mad man who thought he was Rick Sowash!

And what is with my funny name?

P.G. Wodehouse invented a delightful character who chooses to go by the name of Psmith. Not Smith, his actual name.

Why “Psmith”? We are not told, but we gather that by spelling his name with a silent “P” he believes he renders himself more interesting.

“Sowash” is already interesting or at least strange. However, anything can be improved.

I could try Psmith’s approach. Psowash? Wrick Psowash?

Or how about Xawaash?

When I read in the NY Times about a Somalian spice called Xawaash I thought ... hmmm.

I could go by Rik Xawaash. It’s kind of cool. A Martian’s name in a Twilight Zone episode.

What music would you expect to hear in a clarinet quintet composed by Rik Xawaash? Mysterious harmonies, exotic melodies, alien meters.

Exactly what is waiting for you to hear in the finale of my clarinet quintet, a send up of Brahms’ “Hungarian Dances.”

The music sounds … how shall I term it? … Austro-Hungarian-American? The temperature is gradually turned up and once the music gets cooking, it's a kerfuffle -- a Sowashian goulash!

Which brings me back to “Sowash.” I’ll stick with it.

How fortunate I am, to have this music recorded by wonderful musicians: clarinetist Michele Gingras, violinists Kris Frankenfeld and Elizabeth Stevens, violist Dorotea Vismara Hoffman and cellist Ellen Shertzer. To hear them play, click on the link above.

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

🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶

Musicians are like theatrical directors and actors who, while sticking to the script, invent non-verbal bits: sight gags, pratfalls, double takes, gesticulations, pantomime. “Stage business” can drastically alter the meaning of a line, even without changing a word of the original script.

A moment in “Hamlet” comes to mind...

Ophelia knows that her father and the king are hiding behind an arras so as to eavesdrop on her meeting with ‘the melancholy Dane’ who asks her a simple question, “Where is your father?” Why does he ask this? Has he spotted the concealed eavesdroppers? If so, then he is testing her to see where her loyalty lies.

To this simple question she makes a simple answer: “He is at home, my lord.”

That’s all the script says. There are no stage directions. But how is it to be performed?

If, when she delivers the line, Ophelia, eyes averted, keeps her hands at her side, then Hamlet will know -- and we will know -- that she is lying and, thus, that she is in cahoots with her father and the king.

Conversely, if, as she answers Hamlet’s question, she glances and gestures toward the arras behind which the eavesdroppers are hiding, then Hamlet will know -- and we will know -- that she is his ally, that she is more loyal to Hamlet than to her prattling, wily, underhanded father and the unscrupulous, fratricidal king he serves.

Shakespeare wrote the words; the actor and directors must decide how to perform them. Thus it is with composers and musicians; the composer writes the notes but the musicians must decide how the score is to be performed.

If I put a fermata above a note -- a symbol indicating that the note is to be held for a bit before proceeding on to the next note -- there is no indication of how long the note is to be held. Two seconds? Five seconds? Ten seconds? The musicians must decide.

If I write “ritard” above the stave, it means “slow down.” But how much? Twice as slow as what came before? Three times as slow?

“Allegro” means fast, but how fast? If it’s not fast enough, the music may drag and feel dull. If it’s played too fast the music will be frantic, even zany. What might have been noble and stirring, if played too fast, may be merely clownish.

Sometimes musicians ask me, “How should this be played?” Unless it’s really “off,” I don’t know what to tell them. They are the musicians; deciding is what they signed on for. And, honestly, for most musicians making such decisions is part of the fun and satisfaction they find in performing. They bring their creativity to bear.

Good musicians often surprise me by improving the way my music comes across. I trust them!

Clarinetist Michele Gingras is a “take charge” musician. Like a director taking charge of the production of a Shakespeare play, she imposed her will upon the other musicians who recorded, with her, my “Quintet for Clarinet & Strings.” Even while playing her instrument, she all but conducted the performance. The resulting recording is splendid. Had the details been left up to me, it would not be half so good.

To hear the first movement of my “Clarinet Quintet” performed by clarinetist Michele Gingras, violinists Kris Frankenfeld and Elizabeth Stevens, violist Dorotea Vismara Hoffman and cellist Ellen Shertzer, click on the link above.

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

🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶

VACCINES and ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS are in the news every day. I want to go on record: like millions of Americans, I owe my very existence to vaccines and illegal immigrants.

It’s a sad story but it has a happy ending.

In the 1890’s, my great grandparents, Michael and Sophia Hoff, lived in Bertchgerek, a town in the country we now call Serbia. They had three sons, all of whom died of diphtheria in the same week, devastating the couple. Soon after, Sophia discovered she was pregnant. By the time she bore her son, John, the diphtheria vaccine had become available and the infant was inoculated.

Michael and Sophia, in hopes of moving past their grief, decided to immigrate to America and start anew. But Michael was an officer in the Austro-Hungarian army. He could not legally leave the service. He had to desert. This required much planning.

One day in 1900, carrying no luggage, dressed as if they were simply going for a stroll, the couple and their son, now six years old, left their home. They had sewn cash into the linings of their clothes. They boarded a ship in Trieste.

They made it to America, entering, I believe, under a false name. Had they been apprehended, Michael would have been deported back to Austria Hungary and shot as a deserter. But they got through customs at Ellis Island and bought train tickets to take them as far west as the money they could spare would take them. They figured the further west they could go, the safer they would be. Their money carried them all the way to Crestline, Ohio, a railroad hub halfway between Columbus and Cleveland.

Luckily for them, there was a small German-speaking community there. With help, Michael found work as a farm hand and Sophia as a janitor at the town’s small public library.

They suffered discrimination. Sophia quickly learned that if she wore her beautiful headscarf in public she would be treated very badly. Her son, my grandfather, John Hoff, was relentlessly beaten up at school until he learned enough English and mustered the courage to stand up for himself. He sneaked an ax to school and was caught swinging it at the bullies. Imagine if such a thing happened today. The ax swinging students would be expelled. But the principal was a good man and he perceived the larger narrative. He made my grandfather promise that he would never bring an ax to school again and let him remain there as a student. For that gesture, my grandfather remembered that principal all his life, telling me the story many times.

My grandfather married another German-speaking immigrant, Katherine, and my mother grew up speaking German at home, a language she learned before picking up English which she would speak at school.

In my boyhood, I often heard German spoken in our home and I learned the rhythm and music of the language along with a few words and phrases. When Jo and I visited Austria the language came back to me pretty quickly.

The Bible enjoins the Hebrew people -- and by extension, all of us -- to remember that they were once slaves in Egypt and to welcome the immigrant, to give comfort to the outcast. Jesus takes it further. He pronounces such people as “blessed.” “Blessed are the meek,” he says, “Blessed are the poor.”

Shall we victimize the people Jesus termed “blessed”?

When the news of the day features anti-vaccine and anti-immigrant policy makers, I remember that I am descended from ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS and from a grandfather who would not have survived childhood but for a VACCINE. Our children have been told this story, crucial to our family identity.

Millions of Americans, perhaps including yourself, have similar stories. May we remember and be accordingly compassionate.

There is little that I can do to affect policies related to these issues. But at least I can tell my family’s story here, in this weekly email sent to a few fans and friends … whose chief interest, after all, is in my music, not the story of the Eastern European branch of my family.

But the story related to the music I want to share today.

Some of my works have an Eastern European sound, sometimes almost Klezmer-like.

The last movement of my Quintet for Clarinet & Strings is my take on Brahms’ Hungarian Dances, my attempt to extend that very Austro-Hungarian genre into a contemporary American context.

The resulting music sounds … ??? … Austro-Hungarian-American?

American goulash!

Wonderful Cincinnati musicians have recorded this music! Namely, clarinetist Michele Gingras, violinists Kris Frankenfeld and Elizabeth Stevens, violist Dorotea Vismara Hoffman and cellist Ellen Shertzer. To listen, 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 10, 2025