One of you kindly wrote to me to say, "Your pieces of music and your emails are like little inspirational biscuits (as funny as that may sound) for me."

Inspirational biscuits! That makes me smile. I love the ordinariness of 'biscuits.' Not rainbows or mountaintops or sunsets or galaxies. Just biscuits. But, mind you, not ordinary biscuits, after all. Not your everyday biscuits. No, sir! Inspirational biscuits. I love it!

Mid-August is upon us. James Agee said it succinctly: "High summer holds the earth."

Odell Shepard, a forgotten writer whom I admire for the musicality of his prose and the nobility of his thoughts, said it loquaciously:
"Slowly, leaf by leaf, the landscape is turning golden and ruddy, like an apple, beneath these August suns.
I can almost see the landscape change before me while I gaze. Certainly it is richer and more various in tone than when I stood here yesterday. If I am to watch the splendor of the year mount slowly through all its delicate gradations, I must be vigilant from hour to hour.
Early summer’s monotony of green has given place to the tints of maturity; brown and purple, dim orange and umber are faintly discernible along the lower slopes, and there are rare touches of scarlet from the dogwood and sumac in the thicket. The cedars far and near begin to glow with their peculiar, nameless hue. Among the solid ranks of the ferns at my feet there is here and there a frond that seems to be made of beaten gold.
Winter is a long stern conflict, spring is a brief ecstasy like first love, and autumn is sheer amazement, but late summer brings us peace."

Ah! Now that is writing I can admire. I could set those words to music. Maybe I should. They already sing.

I tried to express August in "The Blossom," the second movement of Daweswood, my concertino for violin, clarinet, cello and piano. I wrote this music in the late summer of 1980 when I was 30 years old and an artist-in-residence at the lovely, thousand-acre Dawes Arboretum in central Ohio. "Daweswood" was what the Dawes family called the property when it was their private estate, before they left it as the gift to the public.

I walked all over the Dawes Arboretum during my time there, trying hard to see, deeply, the green and growing things all around me and to devise music that would be worthy of them.

The three movements are titled after the three phases in the life of a plant: The Bud, the Blossom and the Berry. "The Bud" is springtime-y and "The Berry" is autumnal, but "The Blossom" is for right now, this August moment, the languid music of fulsome late summer.

To hear the Mirecourt Trio (Ken Goldsmith, violin; Terry King, cello, John Jensen, piano) and clarinetist Craig Olzenak play their gorgeous rendition of "The Blossom," click on the link above.

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

Rick Sowash
Cincinnati, OH
August 17, 2014