One of y'all kindly wrote to say that as much as she enjoys the music in these weekly emails she often enjoys the verbiage even more, “particularly the funny stuff.”

I was gratified. Devising these dispatches, I don’t dilly-dally. I don't pussyfoot around. I open a tin of smoked oysters, put my cards on the table and talk turkey.

I’m serious about them! — especially the funny ones. You see, "the funny stuff,” as my fan put it, is difficult to pull off.

When the great British actor David Garrick was on his deathbed, someone asked him, “Is dying hard, Mr. Garrick?” His immortal reply: “Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.”

Hard, even dangerous. A crash helmet is advisable. A hard hat, a football helmet or that curious, padded headgear favored by boxers.

Partly, the risk lies in the possibility of making a durned fool of yourself, as when something you think is funny strikes someone else as being just plain dumb, dumb as a box of rocks.

When I was a county commissioner, the county’s budget included funds that were encumbered and other funds that were unencumbered. I suggested that we should have some funds that were cucumbered so that we’d have money to spend if we ever found ourselves in a pickle. The other commissioners just looked at me.

That moment may well have marked the beginning of the end of my political career. It was, in any case, the start of what has proven to be, so far, a significant detour on my road to the White House.

You’ve been there. You tell a joke and it falls flat, garners groans, elicits eye rolls.

To wit:

They was this old, old lady, a hunnerd years old she was, an’ it was her birthday an’ the reporters come round to make a fuss an’ all, and to congradyulade her on her longevity an’ good health.

“Was you ever ill?” they assed her.

“Ah don’t jus’ hear so good,” she says.

“WAS YOU EVER ILL?” they assed her agin, more louder.

“Ah’m terrible sorry, but I don’t jus’ hear so good.”

So then they assed her, “Well, was you ever BEDRIDDEN?”

“Oh,” she says, "hunnerds uh times -- an’ twice in a buggy!”

Your auditors might slap their knees and declare it the funniest thing to come along since Mark Twain teamed up with Samuel Clemens.

Or they might just look at you.

Should a joke like that one fall within the earshot of a person beset with delicate sensibilities, it could induce what modern-day nerve specialists term ‘a conniption fit.'

Another thing you risk is an exponential increase to your already sizable store of regrets.

When I was a twenty-something classical music radio broadcaster i sometimes said things on-the-air that, today, when I remember them, give me the Willies.

“In the next hour, music by Dvorak and Smetana. Czech it out.”

Jeesh. Did I really say that? Squirm, shudder, cringe. Yes, I did.

Oh well. We were all young and foolish, once upon a time, and thought we were a whole lot more clever than we actually were.

Let’s hear some funny music. Czech out the Trio da Camera (clarinetist Laurel Bennett, cellist Teresa Villani and pianist Carol Alexander) playing the third movement of my Trio #5 for those three instruments, a parody of a Haydn minuet, subtitled, tongue-in-cheek, “In the Classical Style.” click on the link above.

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

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What books shall we read in the coming year? Can we advise one another, you and me?

When I ask a librarian for advice, they sensibly ask in turn, “What books do you like?"

The books I like are well written; the content needn’t always be deep.

A case in point: here is P.G. Wodehouse, virtuoso-ing mirth out of the seemingly mirthless word, “someone” ...

"It made such a difference to someone, he explained, if someone had someone someone could sort of lean on at times like this. Maudie said she quite understood.”

“...someone someone…” Ha! At first, I thought it was a typo; I had to read it twice.

I want to feel that I am addressed by someone someone can care about. Writing so well, P.G. compels me to care about his characters, however "visibly fizzy” they may be.
The subject matter needn't be hoot-worthy. P.G. often wrote about golf. Golf is not unmeaningless to me but he writes so well that I am happy to be his caddy, traipsing in his tracks as he swings his inventive prose, every sentence a hole-in-one. The man is both funny and eloquent.

I want writing that offers some wit and some wisdom. I want to feel that pains have been taken in the expression of said wit and wisdom. I want writing that makes me feel that I have worth, that I am respected, that a contract has been entered into, between the writer and myself, to the effect that if I give the writing my careful attention, my effort will be rewarded.

I want to feel that the writer cares about me, just as I care about you, gentle reader of my Sunday-morning e-pistles, giving you my best, musically and lingually.

What books, then, shall we read this year, you and I? Let's swap suggestions.

Here are some books I love:

"Three Men in a Boat, to Say Nothing of the Dog" by Jerome K. Jerome — a comic account of a week-long boating journey on the Thames, undertaken by Jerome, his friends George and Harris and his dog, Montmorency.

“The Harvest of a Quiet Eye” by Odell Shepard — a chronicle, with many digressions, of the author’s two-week walking journey through rural Connecticut in September of 1926.

“Dr. Dogbody’s Leg” by James Norman Hall — ten highly improbable, hilarious accounts, each completely different from the rest, of how Dr. Fedal Dogbody, a naval surgeon during the Napoleonic Wars, came to lose his leg.

“The Wind in the Willows” by Kenneth Grahame — the adventures of Toad and the loving interventions of his steadfast friends: Water Rat, Mole and Badger.

The best of Willa Cather — “My Antonia,” “O Pioneers,” “Death Comes for the Archbishop,” “The Professor’s House,” and, best of all, her novella entitled “Neighbor Rossicky.”

“The Lord of the Rings” by J.R.R. Tolkien — Frodo, Sam, Gandalf, et al. I’ve read it seven times, the funnest being when I read the whole saga aloud to my seven-year-old son. It took us seven months.

The Sherlock Holmes novels and stories by Arthur Conan Doyle. No description or explanation is needed.

“The Code of the Woosters,” “Uncle Fred in the Springtime,” and many more by P.G. Wodehouse.

“War and Peace” and “Anna Karenina” by Leo Tolstoy — I’ve read ‘em both, three times. If anyone should ask me, “After Shakespeare, who?” I would answer: Tolstoy, the second greatest writer of all time. His knowledge of and empathy for people is second only to Shakespeare's. If God wrote novels, they would be “War and Peace” and “Anna Karenina."

None of these titles are contemporary.

Go figure. Here I am, a contemporary composer, yet I steer clear of contemporary music, art and books. I almost never feel happy in their presence. New books, particularly novels, are almost always tainted by ugliness and vulgarity; they entangle the reader in situations that are morbid and degrading; they read like badly written film scripts; the characters have names but little personality; they converse but their voices are indistinguishable; they do not come to life and I cannot care about them.

I want to be uplifted and inspired by what I read. At least some of the time, I want to laugh.

Any suggestions?

I may be a contemporary composer, but my music looks backward. Never moreso than in my Trio #5 for clarinet, cello and piano. Deliberately, I wrote it "in the classical style” (that’s the subtitle) perfected long since by Franz Schubert & Company.

Very old-fashioned!

To hear the first movement played by Trio da Camera (clarinetist Laurel Bennett, cellist Teresa Villani and pianist Carol Alexander), click on the link above.

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

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Each of us dwells in a box which we mistake for Reality, The Real World. We know how things work inside that box; we know the ‘givens,’ the established facts and situations, the things that are assumed to be true.

Still, when Hamlet tells his friend, "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” we sense that he could say as much to each of us and he would be right. We are taken aback, chilled.

Every now and then circumstances prompt us to reach our hands up as far as they will go, curl our fingers over the edge of our little box and hoist ourselves up to where we can peek out and perceive a bit of the Great Beyond, things not dreamt of in our philosophy.

For example, here’s a ‘given,’ an established fact that anyone with common sense knows to be true: "Music is the universal language.”

I must have been in my early teens when I first heard that truism. I bought it. It made sense. Humans may speak in various tongues but music communicates universally.

Music-making is universal, certainly. Every culture makes music. But a universal language? No. Nowadays, when that assertion is made I remember an experience which, for me, turned that ‘given’ on its head.

During one of my visits to Taiwan, as leader of a cultural exchange delegation, my Taiwanese hosts kindly asked to know my ‘special interests.’ I mentioned music and chamber music in particular. My interpreter asked me to define “chamber music” and then translated what I had said for my hosts. One of them lit up. I could see by his face that he had an idea, an inspiration. (Facial expressions may well be a universal language.)

He explained that he knew of an extraordinary opportunity for me to hear the most heartfelt, impassioned and intimate chamber music, that very evening. He would inquire, handle the details, set everything up for me to attend a unique and memorable performance.

After supper, my interpreter and I were taxied through the city. I assumed we were heading for a recital hall but looking through the windows I saw that we were leaving the city; the areas through which we passed were residential. At length we stopped in front of a modest home. We entered and were warmly greeted by an older woman, white-haired, smiling, clad in colorful, elaborate, traditional Chinese garb.

She directed us to a living room where there were many chairs surrounding a table on which was displayed, amidst fruits and flowers, a black-and-white photograph of an elderly Chinese man holding a curious musical instrument. It was explained to me that the man in the photo was the late husband of our hostess and that he had been a great musician. This evening's concert, in what had been his home, was being given in his honor and memory by the musician friends with whom he had performed for many years.

As the room filled with friends and family, my interpreter explained to me, the only Westerner in attendance, that a Chinese Emperor who lived in the 7th century had cherished this particular variety of chamber music, had been a musician himself, and that this performing group was dedicated to keeping alive this ancient musical tradition. “This should be interesting,” I thought, “seein' as how music is the universal language, after all.”

The musicians took their places at the front of the room, five elderly gentleman, carrying strange-looking instruments — a three-stringed offspring of a viol da gamba mated with a banjo, shirttail relatives of the oboe and clarinet, plus various others to whose shapes and sounds I had never been introduced. The audience applauded as the aged instrumentalists seated themselves, joined by a younger female, carrying wooden percussion instruments. She remained standing. My interpreter explained: she was to be the vocalist.

The audience fell silent. The musicians drew a breath, all together, then performed.

Their high seriousness, heartfelt passion and fervent devotion to their art were powerfully conveyed by the expressions on their faces. I had seen such expressions before, on the faces of impassioned American and European musicians, playing string quartets or piano trios. No doubt about it, the musicians were deeply engaged in what they were doing, the audience spellbound.

The music itself? Excruciating. Hideous. It was shrill, a racket. It made no sense whatever. Quarter tones abounded. I judged the meter to be 7 / 4 because the vocalist, I noticed, would smack her wooden percussion instrument as hard as she could every seventh beat, so that the accent was always, maddeningly, on the pick-up, never on the downbeat. The scraping bows, the piercing reeds, the caterwauling Chinese lyrics, screeched and howled, albeit with obvious deep feeling, made the experience, for me, positively grueling.

Mind you, I’m no novice. Have I not in my day heard some awful music?

“Have I not in my time heard lions roar?
Have I not heard the sea, puffed up with winds,
Rage like an angry boar chafed with sweat?
Have I not heard great ordnance in the field
And heaven’s artillery thunder in the skies?"

I have been present when our own culture's contemporary avant garde composers held sway, inflicting many a “bleep-gazorp” on a bewildered and uncomprehending audience with their “modern music,” which a friend terms: “terrorism for the ears.”

That long, long evening of traditional Chinese chamber music was, compared with our wildest Western avant garde music, far, far more difficult to bear. However wild our avant garde music may be, it still exists within the limits of our own musical culture and is generally played on instruments we recognize.

As soon as that concert of 7th-century Chinese chamber music began, all I could think was, “Let me out of here!” But I was a 'special guest' and could not leave. I thought the evening would never end.

There was nothing universal about the music. It was utterly incomprehensible to me, a person with what I had imagined to be rather highly developed musical sensibilities … but nevertheless a Westerner.

It made me realize that music only seems universal to the culture it serves; it is, in fact, very particular to a given time and place, quite the opposite of universal.

Of course I applauded and afterwards congratulated the musicians and thanked the hostess. What a relief it was, at length, to be back in the taxi, heading back to my hotel. Though I was still in Taiwan, a culture very alien to my own, I felt that I had returned to Earth from a distant planet where I had understood nothing about what had been going on around me. My interpreter was silent, inscrutable. She must have known that the music had been agonizing for me, painfully far beyond my ability to comprehend.

Within the narrow world of Western classical music, yes, there is a certain universality. I tapped into the core of it, evoking the Viennese tradition that gave us Beethoven and Schubert, when I wrote my Trio #5 for clarinet, cello and piano, subtitled “in the classical style.”

Here it is, then, music communicating in a language that inheritors of Western Civilization, dwelling in the little boxes we mistake for Reality, have pronounced “universal."

To hear the final movement of my Trio #5 “in the classical style" played by Trio da Camera (clarinetist Laurel Bennett, cellist Teresa Villani and pianist Carol Alexander), click on the link above.

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

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The inauguration elicited feelings of pride and relief.

Personally, I’m relieved that it was Biden, not me. With Atlanta’s mayor as my running mate, ours would have been the “Sowash-Bottoms” ticket.

Our slogan? “Make a Clean Start!”

We could have sold a ton of red ball caps with “MACS” emblazoned on them. We could have called our major donors “Big MACS.”

Still, I’m glad I didn’t throw my hat in the ring. The White House is no place for a composer and I love my home and garden.

Some say thinkers can’t be do-ers, that philosophers are incapable of worldly success.

They forget Thales, an ancient Greek philosopher who, upon hearing it said that philosophers were nonuseful, resolved to prove ‘em wrong.

A close observer of the passing seasons, Thales’ meteorogical skills tipped him off, while it was yet winter, that the following autumn would bring a bumper crop of olives. Bumming coins from his friends, he made deposits guaranteeing him the exclusive use of all the olive presses in Athens, getting them at a very low price as there were no other bidders. Who needs olive presses in the bleak mid-winter, when frosty wind makes moan?

Come harvest-time, all the presses were needed at once. Thales let them out at any rate he pleased, repaid his friends and made a quantity of money. Thus, he demonstrated that philosophers could enrich themselves if they so chose. It’s just that that philosophy seemed a worthier investment of time and energy.

Composers? Same thing. If some contemporary composers write music in a modern style, it’s not because they are incapable of writing traditional classical music. They could, if they so chose.

Thales-like, I set out to demonstrate this by writing my Trio #5 for clarinet, cello and piano, subtitled “in the classical style.”

The first movement makes obsequious use of the traditional sonata allegro form that shaped the opening movements of countless works during music’s classical era.

You know the drill: Exposition, Development, Recapitulation.

The music is solidly, stolidly in the key of G minor. It opens with an aggressive ‘first theme’ (there is no introduction) built on a three-note motif with a masculine character: jerky and aggressive.

The ‘second theme’ enters right on cue at :37. It is in the key of B flat major and has a feminine character: flowing and lyrical. Very traditional.

(Masculine? Feminine? Sexist terms! Don’t blame me. I didn’t invent the sonata allegro form. I merely made use of it.)

The cello presents the second theme; then the clarinet enters with a flourish and takes it up in turn. I even utilize the famous “Alberti bass” in the piano accompaniment, the musical filigree frequently favored by Mozart. So much for the Exposition.

The Development begins at 1:40. Playing strictly by the rules, the two themes -- masculine and feminine -- now intermingle. Fragments from both themes are tossed “here, there and thither” (as Oliver Hardy said). It’s not clear what key we are in as the music tentatively finds its way forward. The Development section ends with a big build up on the dominant seventh, a D7 chord, pointing the way back to good old G minor, the key in which the movement began and must end.

At 2:50 comes the Recapitulation, right on schedule. We hear again our old friend, the first theme, played just as it was at the beginning of the movement.

It’s followed, of course, by -- what else? -- the second theme, complete with Alberti bass, at 3:30 — only THIS time the second theme is ALSO in G minor. It has to be; that’s the rules of the game when using the sonata allegro form.

The first theme returns one last time with just a little more development, while remaining firmly in G minor. There is no coda. Introductions and codas are optional. I chose not to use either. Keep it simple, that’s my motto. The movement simply ends.

Though cast in a minor key, this music seems humorous to me because the composer (me) is earnest to a fault. How precisely he obeys the rules! No risk-taker, he! Conformist, he is smugly satisfied, bless his tiny soul. You want to pat him on the head.

He reminds me of young Stivings, Jerome K. Jerome’s schoolmate, whom he recalled in “Three Men in a Boat”:

“He was the most extraordinary lad I ever came across. I believe he really liked studying. He used to get into awful rows for sitting up in bed and reading Greek; and as for French irregular verbs there was simply no keeping him away from them.
“He was full of weird and unnatural notions about being a credit to his parents and an honor to the school; and he yearned to win prizes, and grow up and be a clever man, and had all those sorts of weak-minded ideas. I never knew such a strange creature, yet harmless, mind you, as the babe unborn.”

To enjoy the first movement being played with relish by Trio da Camera (clarinetist Laurel Bennett, cellist Teresa Villani and pianist Carol Alexander), click on the link above.

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