At our church choir’s annual June pool party, we’d been chatting, poolside, about the real names of movie stars like Cary Grant, John Wayne and Marilyn Monroe. An English professor, the star of our bass section, seized the moment to reveal his knowledge of the real names of authors better known by their pen names: George Eliot, Saki, Lewis Carroll, O.Henry, George Orwell.

The imp on my left shoulder prompted me to ask him if he knew Walt Whitman’s real name. Caught off guard, his eyes jerked left and right as he ran a quick search through his gray cells and came up short. “No,” he said, “I don’t think so.”

“Well,” I said, a little ashamed of myself for baiting the good man, “his real name was ….

Walter!”

Ha!

One day, just over a half century ago, I pulled a fat, thick book from a shelf in my high school’s library. It was titled “Leaves of Grass.” “Blades of Grass” would have made sense. But leaves? Grass doesn’t come in leaves. So what was this book?

I might have wondered how anyone could write such a long book about various strains of grass. Fifteen years old, I knew nothing about the book, had never heard of its famous title.

Even when I opened it, I didn’t at first realize that it was a book of poetry. I grew up hearing a lot of poems read aloud to me by my grandfather and by my mother, poems like “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” “The House With Nobody In It,” “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere,” and “The Village Blacksmith.”

The writing in Leaves of Grass was nothing like those poems. Most of the sentences were very long and none of them, so far as I could see, ended the way I thought lines of poetry were supposed end: with a word that rhymes with the end of the line that comes right before it.

In the table of contents I spotted a section oddly entitled “Song of Myself.” Was this a song book? I flipped through. Nope. There was no music notation anywhere in it.

I sat down and started reading “Song of Myself.” I remember my growing amazement. “Who IS this man, this Walt Whitman?” I wondered. “How could one person ever BE all these things? Is he really talking about his actual self? or is he talking about the self of someone he’s made up? Or is he just bragging that he’s done all these things when he really hasn’t done any of them?"

I vaguely wondered if “myself” meant something different to this Walt Whitman than the word meant to me. Reading “Song of Myself” was baffling but intriguing. It made me wonder about all sorts of things. The main thing I felt was amazement.

I am no longer much-ly amazed by most of the things that amazed me much-ly when I was fifteen. But I am still amazed by Walt Whitman. Much-ly!

I love his long, long poems …

Uncle Walt (as a friend calls him, and I like that moniker) gave us a good many long poems but he gave us many wonderful short poems, too, marvels of truth and simplicity.

Here comes one.

Winter has just drawn to its close, and Uncle Walt, out for a walk, sees a dandelion “emerging,” the first he’s seen that year. Could there be a humbler topic for a poem? See, just see, what he finds to say.

The First Dandelion

Simple and fresh and fair, from winter's close emerging,
As if no artifice of fashion, business, politics had ever been,
Forth from its sunny nook of shelter'd grass,
Innocent, golden, calm as the dawn,
The spring's first dandelion shows its trustful face.

The poem opens its trustful face, asks only that we return its gaze. It is immediately and entirely comprehensible. It does not ask us to search for hidden meanings. The poem, like the dandelion, is right there in front of you, "simple and fresh and fair." The poem and the dandelion are quietly going about their business; they mean precisely themselves, nothing more,

For Uncle Walt, that’s miracle enough.

Could a piece of music be so clean? Using only musical sounds, could a composer emulate that poem, that dandelion?

I tried many a time over the next fifty years, as when I wrote “Morning," the opening movement of my Trio #10 for clarinet, cello and piano, “Winds of May.” (The other movements are entitled “Dark Forest,” “Wildflowers” and “Sunset.”)

To hear Trio da Camera (clarinetist Laurel Bennett, cellist Teresa Villani and pianist Carol Alexander) performing “Morning," the opening movement of Trio #10, “Winds of May,” click on the link above.

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

Rick Sowash
Cincinnati, OH
May 7, 2017

🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶

Every week, right on schedule, without fail, I am blessed with two 75-minute windows of time through which, together with people I love, I get to peep at and ponder things rich, rare, lovely and profound.

Both begin at 11 a.m. and end at 12:15 p.m.

One is the Sunday worship service at Mt. Auburn Presbyterian Church.

The other is the Wednesday class I teach, “Music Theory & History,” at a school with an improbable name: “Leaves of Learning.”

(You know the phrase, “leaves of absence.” Our students are on “leaves of learning,” i.e., they’ve taken leave of their homes to come learn at our school. At least that’s my take on the name of our school.)

Five bright, serious, thoughtful, sometimes funny students — Grace, Chad, Aaron, Gavin and Chris, aged 15 to 17 — venture with me into realms of speculation, as we ponder together one of the Great Questions:

How does music MEAN?

That is, or ought to be, the central question in the study of “Music Theory.”

“Ugh. I had to take Music Theory. I HATED it!”

Saddened, frustrated, enraged … those are my feelings when I hear fine musicians say that.

How can this be? Here it is, like a great feast spread before us, the most absorbing of topics, central to the art of every musician and the experience of every music-lover … and they HATE it?

Why? Because it is often so badly taught. Because the instructors lose sight of the subject matter, namely that music is a metaphor for our experience of the world, of life.

In our “Music Theory & History” course we examine the precise means composers have employed to fashion metaphors. We consider the shapes, harmonies, rhythms and structures they devised to convey the meanings they found in their experience of the world, of life.

The class alternates between lecture, listening and discussion. I lead, direct, emote. My reaction to music is physical. As we listen together I indulge in a curious 'interpretive dance' I find myself wanting to do, whenever I listen intently to music. I keep still in a concert hall so as not to distract my fellow listeners, but in the classroom I allow myself to MOVE, weaving the air, yearning for the infinite, executing a slow spin now and then and a little footwork. No one laughs because my sincerity is evident. The students accept it from the start; it is apparent to them that “this is what Mr. Sowash is going to do when he listens to music with us.”

Come, visit my class, right now. (Sorry, but you won’t get to see the ‘interpretive dance’ component). Together, let’s consider one aspect of one movement of one work from my own fertile pen. It’s from my Trio #10 for clarinet, cello and piano, subtitled “Winds of May”; it's the second movement, “Wildflowers.”

Let’s consider which instruments are playing when … and why.

If you were seated in a concert hall, observing a clarinetist, a cellist and a pianist coming on stage, then poised, seated, ready to play, you might expect all three musicians to play continuously throughout the performance. That could happen. It’s one possibility. If all three play continuously, that alone will MEAN a certain something: a metaphor of continuity, unity, cooperation.

Are those the qualities I want to evoke in this particular movement? No.

This movement is entitled “Wildflowers.” Are wildflowers continuous, unified, cooperative? Is that how we experience them? Walking in a spring woods, coming upon wildflowers, do we experience them all together, all at once? No.

Wildflowers press themselves upon our consciousness in varying patterns, often one or two at a time. As we saunter along, we leave their colors behind us, only to find those same colors re-appearing in front of us a little later, sometimes separately, sometimes in a cluster or ’stand’ of the same species; still other times we glimpse several varieties at once, in close proximity.

How can this simple phenomenon be conveyed in music? How did one particular composer, (the undersigned), answer that question to his own satisfaction and, hopefully, yours?

The quest for answers to questions like that one is what renders Music Theory so exciting, so fascinating.

Let me guide you through this short movement with a simple, easy-to-follow chronological ‘map.’ If you want to listen as you follow me, click on the link above.

http://www.sowash.com/recordings/mp3/may_wildflowers.mp3

It begins with a lilting, descending figure in the piano.

At :07 the piano exits and the cello enters, rising, the clarinet answering immediately, falling. They form a duet, two wildflowers standing side by side, a bluebell and a trillium, spontaneously arising from the green forest floor.

At :47, having said what they have to say, the cello and the clarinet cease playing, they go silent for now. We move on, leaving those flowers behind.

From :48 the piano wends a winding path through a stand of a single variety, perhaps "a host of golden daffodils." The piano is the only ‘color' we hear. The other instruments are at rest. At 2:32 the piano goes silent. We’ve moved on again.

At 2:37, so shyly, so tentatively, so unsure of itself, the cello creeps into our vision again, or rather, this being music, our hearing, playing a rising figure, as when it first raised its voice.

At 2:44 the clarinet joins the cello with a falling figure. It makes a satisfying symmetry because -- remember? — we heard this same music at the opening of the movement. The tune has returned to us. Or have we returned to it? Wildflowers are stationery. They do not move among us. It is we who have been moving among them.

Together the cello and the clarinet make it clear, make it simple, make it sing.

At 3:50 they play the falling figure you heard when the piano began the movement, as if they are inviting the piano to join them. Sure enough, she does, at 3:53.

In the whole of this little movement, the ending phrase marks the first and only time when all three instruments play together, contributing to the final chord. They make a lovely threesome, the bluebell, the trillium and the daffodil, a trio of wildflowers waiting for us, together, at the end of our little walk in the woods.

Voilà! A metaphor!

Now, THAT is Music Theory! And, since I wrote this music fifteen years ago, I guess it qualifies as Music History, too!

So much to discover and enjoy, merely by considering which instruments were playing when and why. We could undertake similar explorations considering the shapes of the melodies, the choice of the harmonies, rhythms and dynamics, the handling of the instruments’ various registers, the era, the style, the nationalist musical traditions that are evoked, all of which could contribute a great deal more to our understanding of the metaphor rendered by this one short piece of modest music. We might go on to compare it to other pieces, written earlier or later, perceiving influences and intuiting prophecies.

Now listen again, this time without a map and an overly talkative guide.

“Here will we sit and let the sounds of music creep in our ears."

To hear Trio da Camera (clarinetist Laurel Bennett, cellist Teresa Villani and pianist Carol Alexander) performing “Wildflowers," the third movement of Trio #10, “Winds of May,” click on the link above.

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

🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶

“If you can do it, there’s nothing to it.”

Take my son, for instance. Chapman walks into a New Orleans bar with his trombone case under his arm. In short order the band waves him up onto the stage. He doesn’t have to ask the name of the song they’re playing or what key they’re in. He jumps in and anyone would think he’d been playing with that band for years.

If I try to tell him how amazing this is, he shrugs. Nothing to it.

I’m a piano player but not a pianist. My mother was a classical pianist with a far better technique than I ever acquired. As a boy, I rarely practiced in the usual sense though I spent hours messing about, making up stuff. I can slap a piano around OK but I was never much interested in playing music. I wanted to write it. I’m not a musician; I’m a composer.

I did figure out, early on, the most important trick to playing a piano: when you hit a wrong note, hit it again right away so that it seems you hit it intentionally. Then just slide from the wrong note to a neighboring note, which will almost always be the right note, and keep on playing as if nothing happened. “If you can do it, there’s nothing to it."

What about creative work? If you want to create, put yourself in the way of an idea. Here’s an analogy (I dislike it; can you think of a better one?): if you want to get hit by a train, you have to stand on the track. You can’t just wander around the countryside complaining that other people get hit by trains, but never you. No. You must find a track and position yourself between the rails.

When I was writing my Trio #10 for clarinet, cello and piano, subtitled ‘Winds of May,” I had completed three bright movements entitled “Morning,” “Wildflowers” and “Sunset.” Now I needed a dark movement. I put myself on the track, so to speak, by asking myself what darkness one might expect in a trio entitled “Winds of May.”

I thought of a deep, dark forest of huge, mossy, old-growth trees, their dense leaf-canopies obscuring the sunlight. “Deep Forest” would be the name of the dark movement.

Clearly, the cello, unaccompanied, must introduce the tune because the cello is the most tree-like of those three instruments. I knew that the tune should be in the Dorian mode because that mode has a surprising feature: though the third degree of the mode is a gloomy minor, the sixth degree is a sunny major, like a shaft of sunlight piercing the canopy of leaves, briefly blessing the wildflowers flourishing far below. (“Deep Forest” is the second movement, followed by “Wildflowers” which I shared last week.)

I sat at the piano, fooling around down low, sounding the notes the piano shares with the cello’s lowest register, staying within the Dorian mode. I soon found a tune. (If you can do it, there’s nothing to it.)

Sometimes, if the tune is a good one, it is enough simply to let the tune be played. No Beethovenian development is needed. After the cello introduces the tune, the clarinet and the piano play it again, in a different key, imitating a choir of voices. Then the cello returns with the tune in the original key and the movement ends.

It’s a brief peek into a Deep Forest. Composers, storytellers and speakers know: it’s always better to leave people wanting more than to go on too long.

To hear Trio da Camera (clarinetist Laurel Bennett, cellist Teresa Villani and pianist Carol Alexander) performing “Deep Forest," from the Trio #10, “Winds of May,” the briefest, breeziest and easiest-to-play of my fifteen trios for clarinet, cello and piano, click on the link above.

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

🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶

Listen to “Sunset” while slowly reading this gorgeous poem. Copy and paste the next line into your browser:

http://www.sowash.com/recordings/mp3/may_sunset.mp3

The Apple-Barrel of Johnny Appleseed
by Vachel Lindsay

On the mountain peak, called ‘Going-To-The-Sun,’
I saw gray Johnny Appleseed at prayer
Just as the sunset made the old earth fair.
Then darkness came; in an instant, like great smoke,
The sun fell down as though its great hoops broke
And dark rich apples, poured from the dim flame
Where the sun set, came rolling toward the peak,
A storm of fruit, a mighty cider-reek,
The perfume of the orchards of the world.
From apple-shadows: red and russet domes
That turned to clouds of glory and strange homes
Above the mountain tops for cloud-born souls: —
Reproofs for men who build the world like moles,
Models for men, if they would build the world
As Johnny Appleseed would have it done –
Praying, and reading the books of Swedenborg
On the mountain top called ‘Going-To-The-Sun.’

To hear, again, Trio da Camera (clarinetist Laurel Bennett, cellist Teresa Villani and pianist Carol Alexander) performing “Sunset," the final movement of Trio #10, “Winds of May,” click on the link above.

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

🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶

Do musicians experience sunsets differently from the rest of us?

I know one who does.

The reason I know her is because of my policy of giving away my music -- free PDFs of my scores & parts, mp3s, boxes of my CDs -- to anyone who is interested. A flutist, she was curious to discover the music I’ve written for her instrument.

“Cast your bread upon the waters and it shall return to you.” True. I send out my music and the gesture is returned. My incoming ‘snail mail’ often includes delightful, handwritten thank you notes. Some comes with checks or cash tucked inside the folded note, though I never ask for payment, quite the opposite. Some have sent chocolates, peanut brittle (which I adore, especially with a tart Honey Crisp apple). Some send me the fruits of their own creativity: recordings, videos, poems, books, drawings, photographs, even paintings.

Every now and then someone sends me an inspiring vignette.

Here’s one such, a remarkable account, emailed to me by the above-mentioned flutist, detailing the unique means by which she derives maximum pleasure from sunsets ...

“When you sent me your “Variations Plain and Simple” [for solo flute] you couldn't have known about my personal daily ritual for my soul, but since you shared your music, I'll share how I am using it.

It is an instance of finding and using hidden resources during this year of restrictions.

Fortunately, my house faces west so I can see the sunset. Lately, I have been checking the time for the sunsets and putting it on my calendar.

I set up my music stand in front of a west-facing window. When the sunset begins, I start practicing on my flute. I play a phrase from the Andersen études three times and then stop and observe how the sunset has changed, then go back and practice the phrase again.

The sunset changes slowly, so it is a little boring to just sit and watch it change, but a difficult practice spot allows just the right amount of time to pass between viewings of the sunset.

It turns out that your theme-and-variations coincides very well with the progress of a sunset. The sunset changes in 16-measure units of time. While I check out the change, I decide whether I want to repeat the variation I just played to do it better or if I want to just go on.

When there are no clouds, the direct sun is too bright for the eyes and there are no colors progressing and changing. So a couple of weeks ago, I moved my music stand to a window that faces east. I watched the effects of the sunset upon the mountain. While there was still leaf color on the slopes, I watched the sunset glow turn the foliage from orange to red as I practiced. The snow on the mountain top turned pink. Gradually the whole mountain turned purple, then gray. It was a great flute-sunset time.

Yesterday, I was playing for the mountains on the east and when they turned gray I thought I was done. I carried my stand and flute back to the bedroom that faces west and, to my surprise, there was still a brilliant orange on the horizon! I thought, "I know what this calls for!" and played a couple of flashy variations from Marin Marais' "Les Folies d'Espagne."

Another option is to practice by the front door. I have some cut glass in the side lights of my front door. When the sun is bright and low, the light splits and casts rainbows on the hallway walls. I can practice and watch the rainbow light move and change just an arm’s length away.

I started to realize that, especially when the sunset was really nice, it made me feel sad at the end because I was left with stark, dark, leafless trees against a gray twilight sky where, a few minutes earlier, there had been a riot of glorious colors.

Solution? Have a candle ready. When the sunset is waning and I put down my flute, I light the candle and take it with me to the kitchen to start making dinner. It helps me get past the sadness.

Not every evening has a brilliant sunset, but I decided I wasn't going to miss any good ones by lack of looking.

Thanks, Rick, for sending me music to enrich that experience.”

Isn’t that wonderful? I replied, thanking her in turn for sending me this splendid account. I included the link to the final movement of my Trio #10 for clarinet, cello and piano, titled “Sunset.” It evokes the melancholy she mentions as well as the gorgeous display of colors a setting sun sometimes shoots out.

The sun is setting on 2020. Look for dawn in 2021.

To hear Trio da Camera (clarinetist Laurel Bennett, cellist Teresa Villani and pianist Carol Alexander) performing “Sunset," the final movement of my Trio #10, “Winds of May,” click on the link above.

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