Hello —

“I don’t know much about classical music,” said a new friend as I placed my CDs in his hands.

l felt a bit crestfallen.

Gifted with a collection of short stories, would he have said, “I don’t know much about short stories”?

Gifted with a drawing, would he have said, “I don’t know much about drawings”?

Palms uplifted, I assured him, “You don’t have to know anything. Just listen.”

Many Americans are less than confident about their ability to grasp so-called ‘classical music.’ . The very phrase ‘classical music’ suggests that there are “insiders” and “outsiders” and that, when it comes to music like this, if you’re not an “insider,” you can "fuh-GED-about-it.”

High walls, not of my making, shut out many people from the kind of music I’ve aspired to write, the tradition I’ve tried to carry forward on my own terms, in my own time.

This was forcibly brought to my attention early on, back in 1970, when I landed a summer job ‘riding shotgun’ on a Stroh’s beer truck. One of the drivers, Ed, loved music and we talked about it a lot. Ed told me, “Your kind of music has no stories.” I asked him what he meant.

He turned on the radio and we listened for a little while. “See?” he said. “She’s a waitress in a truck stop and she’s had her heart broke. Along comes this good-lookin’ trucker and she’s tryin' to decide if she should make a pass at him. It’s a story, you got to give it that.”

It was a story, sure enough. In all the works of Bach, Beethoven and Brahms, you won’t find anything like it.

Ed wasn’t a fool. He was kindly, thoughtful, soft-spoken and hard-working. Though he would not have used the word, what he wanted from music was humanity. To be sure, the music of Beethoven and the rest offers plenty of humanity, but Ed would not have perceived it there; he needed a story.

Our conversations made me think, gave me some perspective on what I was being taught as a music composition major at the university School of Music to which I returned when the summer ended.

Don’t worry; I didn’t start writing C & W songs. But I realized that programmatic titles welcome listeners in search of a story. A piece of music entitled “Deep Forest” is more likely to engage listeners than the same piece would if it were entitled “Sonata.”

I renewed the respect I’d had as a child for the expressive power of simple triads and traditional chord progressions. I came to see why certain tunes are so well-known and well-loved: hymns, marches, the songs that were sung in those days by the great Pete Seeger (he’d have been protesting yesterday, as I was, here in Cincinnati, along with 7,000 others) and the handful of songs that “everybody knows,” like Take Me Out to the Ballgame and Somewhere Over the Rainbow.

A few years later, I found my voice as a composer, the result of all I’d learned, heard and pondered.

For the next four decades I wrote music that is … what? “Classical?”

There’s that pesky word again. Ugh.

A Vermont cellist recently emailed me, describing my music as “tuneful while unmistakably of our time (not imitation classical).”

Not imitation classical. I like that. I’ve often groped for a phrase that would summarize my life’s work. A laconic Vermonter came close!

Still, good as it is, it’s a mouthful, a string of words.

Gregg Smith, the celebrated choral director, told me that my music was “folky but not hokey.”

That’s short and funny and it even rhymes. But it still doesn't quite fly as an answer to the question, “What kind of music do you write?”

I wish a description of my work could be conveyed in a single, widely-understood word.

Sorry. The closest word we have is ... “classical."

The music I want to share with you today is pretty, triadic and simple. It’s "folky but not hokey.” It’s "not imitation classical.” All well and good. Even so, it “doesn’t have a story” or even a programmatic title. I wonder if Ed would have liked it.

To hear The Mirecourt Trio (violinist Ken Goldsmith, cellist Terry King, pianist John Jensen) performing the sixth movement of my Piano Trio #3, click on the link above.

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

Rick Sowash
Cincinnati, OH
January 22, 2017

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A friend remarked that although our city is avid for all kinds of music, there doesn't seem to be “a Cincinnati sound.”

I'd humbly suggest that, for better or worse, my music has an Ohio sound, and, yes, a Cincinnati sound.

Since my early twenties I have earnestly tried to write a music that expresses the region where I live. I have been a Regionalist composer, just as Willa Cather is a Regionalist writer and Grant Wood is a Regionalist painter.

Why do I fancy that my music sounds "Ohioan" or "Cincinnatian?"

It is immediately identifiable as American music. Stylistically, it's in the same neck of the woods as Copland, Barber, Gershwin, etc. It doesn't sound European. Politically, culturally, economically, Ohio is the bellwether state for our country. Musically, too. That’s why an Ohio music has to sound American.

The contours of my tunes are neither Alpine nor Saharan. They rise and fall gently, modestly, like the slopes of rural Ohio or the Seven Hills of Cincinnati.

My harmonies are based in hymnody. Church is the place where most Ohioans hear most of the music that might be termed ‘serious.’ Even ‘the unchurched’ hear intentionally serious music in sacred spaces when they attend weddings or funerals in a sanctuary.

Dissonance? In my music, it's a condiment, used sparingly, like the seasoning in our best local artisanal sausage or Cincinnati chili.

Like Ohio and Cincinnati, there is nothing 'avant garde' about my music. (Au contraire, Monsieur! Ma musique est derrière garde!)

The rhythms are even, four-square, jerky only occasionally, for comic effect. Fluid and supple, never obsessive, fascistic. The rhythm of life is like that in Ohio. I should know, having lived here from the git-go.

The orchestration, relative to the Fauvist colors of so much contemporary music is lavender gray.

As for the craft, the structure, the architecture of my music, it’s ‘by the book.’ I have played by the rules. If the sonata allegro form was good enough for Beethoven, it was good enough for me.

My life’s work is optimistic, courteous, considerate of the listener. It’s open and friendly, what you would expect from a good Midwestern boy, properly brought up.

My music is not that of a crotchety, reticent New Englander. Nor a granola-fed Colorado backpacker nor a sleepy Southerner nor a California dreamer nor an experimental, coastal urbanite. There are such composers and I say more power to ‘em.

The musical experimentalism that flourishes on the coasts would not express what we are about, here in the Midwest. My music is, I fancy, if nothing else, authentic, the square, honest, centrist, what-ya-hear-is-what-ya-get music of the Heartland.

Anecdote: A very pregnant lady boards a crowded subway car. A young man immediately springs to his feet, offering his seat. Settling herself, she thanks him, then posits, "You must be a daddy." His imperishable reply:

"No, Ma'am. I'm from the Midwest."

That is how my music seems to me.

To my way of thinking, for what it's worth, my music defines and exemplifies a Cincinnati sound, an Ohio sound.

That and $4.75 will get me a cup of hazelnut mocha coconutmilk macchiata at the nearest Starbucks!

To hear The Mirecourt Trio (violinist Ken Goldsmith, cellist Terry King, pianist John Jensen) performing the first movement of my Piano Trio #3 with Midwestern freshness and zest, click on the link above.

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

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After I shared, in one of these weekly e-pistles, a movement from my solo cello suite, a cellist friend wrote:

“If I were playing it, I would do it with a stricter rhythm, less rubato, making the meter more clear.”

Glad to have heard from her, I happily replied, neither blessing nor deprecating her ideas. I merely explained that, however the recording had turned out, it was, quoting the old cowboy song “Git Along Lil Dogie,” the soloist’s "misfortune and none of my own.” I had had no occasion to confer, converse and otherwise hob-nob with the soloist before the recording was graven for all eternity onto 1,000 plastic compact discs.

This lack of an occasion to confer, converse and otherwise hob-nob was just as well, as I almost never offer opinions as to how my music ought to be performed. I avoid such encounters.

One of the many reasons I have remained close friends with my church choir director, Chris Miller, despite his having conducted numerous performances of my music, is that when he rehearses one of anthems with our choir, I never tell him how to do his job.

If asked, I will gladly explain what the lyrics mean to me and/or recount how the piece came to be written. But the choice of tempo, dynamics, articulation and what not, I leave to Chris. I may be guilty of having composed the music but in rehearsal, I am just an innocent tenor; Chris is the director.

When musicians ask me, “Do you want it played like THIS?” (tum tee tum, tee tum) “Or like THIS?” (tee tum tee, tum tee), I am almost never know what to say. Sometimes I cannot even discern the difference. Too, I’ve noticed that when I do come down in favor of one or t’other, the musicians often seem puzzled and distressed by my pronouncement. “Oh, really?” they say, with an air of bewilderment. If I’m honest and tell them that I haven’t a clue and that we might as well flip a coin to decide, they say, “But you wrote it. You must have some ideas.” Gulp. They are probably right; I ought to have some ideas. But the truth is, I don’t.

A conductor once took me me to task for this, ascribing my reticence to the characteristically Midwestern disinclination to seem unfriendly or impolite. He said, “You must INFLICT your ideas upon musicians!” Inflict? Golly Ned. The idea of inflicting anything on anybody gives me the Willies.

Once, many years ago, when I was young and foolish, I micro-managed a pianist’s recording of “The Unicorn,” one of my best pieces for solo piano. Every measure and phrase was shaped just the way I wanted it. I insisted on having my way; the pianist was compliant.

I was pleased with the result until someone sent me a recording of “The Unicorn” which they had made all on their own. It was so much more frisky and blithesome than the version I had supervised that I have abjured supervising recordings of my music ever since.

Sometimes, too, it’s not the interpretation that’s in question but the instrument itself. I am both pained and amused when I recall the behavior of a certain singer for whom I had written a song cycle, eventually persuading her to record the work. I rented an acoustically perfect little chapel, deep in the Iowa countryside, a ‘church in the wildwood,’ far from the oompus-boompus of the madding crowd. I hired an accompanist and an engineer; the three of us lugged his recording equipment from his van into the chapel and helped him assemble it.

When the singer arrived, I was surprised to see how much weight she had gained. Not that it was significant, musically, I thought. The first thing she said was, “I don’t think you realize how much my voice has changed since you wrote this cycle for me. Nowadays, my tone is much darker. I have more of a ”Tosca” voice. What you want for this piece is a lighter voice, more like “Papageno.”

I had only the vaguest idea what she was talking about but i said, “I’m sure your voice will be just fine," politely, reassuringly, ever the friendly Midwesterner.

She said, “Let’s try it once, just to warm up and then you must tell me what you honestly think.”

The accompanist played the introduction while I sat in the front row pew, a copy of the score on my lap, a goofy Midwestern smile on my face. The singer took a deep breath and let it rip. I jerked back my head, eyes wide. I thought she was joking, impersonating the clichéd nightmare of a Wagnerian soprano, belting out my delicate song in chesty tones and a vibrato commensurate with the newly-acquired breadth of her beam.

At length, she finished. “Now be honest,” she said. "What do you think?”

It was a delicate situation. I needed a moment to choose my words. “I was just wondering,” I ventured, making little qualifying circles with my left hand, “if you could try to sing it just a little more lightly.”

She took umbrage. She picked up the sheet music, lifted it over her head, then flung it to the floor, scattering the pages. It was umbrage, alright. A clear case of umbrage. She stomped out of the chapel in a huff, a full-blown hissy-fit, a state of high dudgeon.

We heard her car roar out of the church’s parking lot and a minute-and-a-huff later the sound of its engine was superseded by the ceaseless silence that pervades the furthest fastnesses of remotest Iowa. The accompanist, the engineer and I blinked at one another, sighed, disassembled the equipment and returned it to the van. I never saw or heard from the singer again.

I had to wait fifteen years until another singer, possessing the lighter voice that was “right” for the cycle, recorded it — and very beautifully, too.

I had no hand in shaping that interpretation, nor the other interpretations recorded on my CDs. If some of the interpretations seem better than others, credit the musicians, not the undersigned.

Let’s listen to the incomparable Mirecourt Trio (violinist Ken Goldsmith, cellist Terry King, pianist John Jensen) playing the third movement from my Piano Trio #3 by clicking on the link above.

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

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Seven times, I’ve read The Lord of the Rings. Probably that's enough.

I dip into it now and again, when I need to hang out with Tom Bombadil, Treebeard or Gandalf.

No re-reading of the entire trilogy, today, could bring the delight I felt in reading the whole shebang aloud to my son, Chapman, when he was seven years old. He was totally smitten and begged, almost every evening, to hear a little more of the tale. It took us seven months to finish! It’s one of my fondest memories.

I remember his delight, his unease, his suspicions, his deductions, as he projected ahead in the plot, intuiting possibilities from Tolkien's hints.

Vivid-est of all, is my memory of Chap's reaction when Gandalf seemingly dies, bested by the Balrog and disappearing with that foul demon into the unimaginable depths of Moria, the long lost underground dwarf kingdom.

Chap, poor little guy, was terribly upset. He wept and sobbed, piteously. I didn’t know what to do. It was impossible to continue reading. I put my arm around his little, quaking shoulders and patted him with both hands. “There, there,” I said. “People come and go in our lives … and in the world … and in books.” He wailed all the more. It was perhaps not the best thing to say. He was afflicted. I tried to think if I had ever found myself in such a situation and what I had done to comfort the distressed.

Then it came to me. In a soft, sad voice, I ventured, “Chappy, Gandalf the Gray is gone and we’ll never meet him again. But … there is also ... GANDALF THE WHITE!”

Instantly radiant with hope, he jerked his face toward me, his little nose inches from mine. He was amazed. He beamed, joy shining through the tears that still gleamed and slid, glistening, down his cheeks.

He cried out, “You mean he comes back?”

“Yes!”

He pointed his little forefinger at the book and shouted, “KEEP READING!”

What a moment. He felt things so deeply, so sincerely. Such a sweet boy. And now a sweet man, I’m proud to say.

Chap imposed one rule. He insisted that, when I read aloud to him, as I did many, many times, I must read the text PRECISELY as written, even if it included words he was unlikely to have encountered.

As I often read to him from books that were over the head of most seven-year-olds, such as Huckleberry Finn, Treasure Island, The Wind in the Willows, Three Men in a Boat, we would often come upon words that I knew he would not understand. If I tried to gloss over them or substitute a simpler synonym, he stopped me, every time. He would never stand for it!

“No!” he would command. “Read exactly what’s there! Don’t change a single thing!” I finally learned my lesson and obeyed his rule, even when I knew there was scant chance of his understanding. It was a point of pride with him. He didn’t want to be treated like a baby.

His vocabulary grew, became amazing for a person his age. In the years since, he's popped out Big Words as if they ain’t nothin’.

He has reported that when he was ‘on the road,’ on long tours with bands (trombonist extraordinaire, he toured America and Europe multiple times), sometimes the other musicians, filling the long hours in the band’s van, en route to the next gig, would say to him, “Talk, Chap, just talk. We love to hear you talk.”

I know what they meant. People love to hear Chap talk. He expresses his thoughts, feelings and ideas in unique and colorful ways, sometimes even inventing the words he needs as he goes along. Words like “assumedly.”

How have the English-speaking peoples gotten so far without the word “assumedly?”

Gandalf is dear to me; he's the man I want to be. Merry and wise. An Old Guy that can still hack it. I tell my students that I am their school’s “oldest living teacher, the Gandalf of “Leaves of Learning.” (That’s the name of the school.)

My claim to Gandalf-like status is not altogether fanciful. Master of what is, to my students, arcane knowledge, demonstrably accomplished in arts that seem esoteric to them (I teach French and Music Theory), given to shrewd quips, cagey discernments and the not infrequent rendering of affectionate sarcasms, having lived five times as many years as they and twice as many as their parents, quoting the Great Masters, occasionally reciting entire poems from memory, having thrived in a wide range of settings, experiencing adventures they can scarcely imagine, as they took place far beyond the boundaries of their world (the school is their Shire), I believe my claim to being the Gandalf of “Leaves of Learning” is well-founded.

That is why, this coming Wednesday, when the students are invited to celebrate Hallowe’en by arriving in costume, I will once again don, to the delight of all and sundry, my make-shift Gandalf get-up.

Assumedly, you would now enjoy hearing some suitably ‘mock-spooky’ music for Hallowe’en.

Assumedly!

To hear The Mirecourt Trio (violinist Ken Goldsmith, cellist Terry King, pianist John Jensen) performing the first movement of my Piano Trio #3 with their customary verve, click on the link above.

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

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Do you believe in fairies? Do I?

(Now please don’t roll your eyes and say, “Oh, brrrrother!")

Their laughter reached my ears in western Pennsylvania, of all places, at least fifty miles away from the nearest production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

I was forced to conclude that they were laughing at me, since every time it happened, I was the only mortal within earshot.

Think me bonkers?

Forthwith, a scrupulously true account of how it came to pass.

* * * * * * * * * * *

The late Colin Fletcher’s books, most notably The Thousand Mile Summer, inspired legions of backpackers, my younger self among them. He extolls remote places where he walked for weeks, finding solace in solitude.

It sounded good to me. I resolved to hike, solo, the 80-mile Laurel Highlands Trail which creeps across the ridges of the Allegheny mountains in western PA.

Thus, in June of 1989, my good wife deposited me and my backpack at the northern end of the trail, near Johnstown. She would meet me eight days later and eighty miles southwest, in Ohiopyle.

Though less well known than the Appalachian Trail, the Laurel Highlands Trail is a popular backpacker’s trek. I expected to encounter other hikers and I anticipated the pleasure of comparing notes, catching up on the gossip of the trail, complaining about our heavy packs and the weather, giving the fat a good chew and the breeze a good shoot.

But all during that first day, I saw no other hikers, no people, not a one.

I was alone.

I have loved reading about the joys of solitude. Fletcher, Thoreau, Odell Shepard, Annie Dillard, these writers' rhapsodies on solitude have swept me along, page after page.

But actual solitude? A little goes a long way. I can tolerate a few hours of solitude when Jo is out, running errands, “bopping around town,” as she puts it. I read, I write, I watch a documentary.

As an occasional condiment alongside the meat-and-potatoes of a sociable life, solitude is tolerable, even pleasant in small doses. But solitude as an entrée? No thanks. Who wants a bowl of salt and pepper? Give me people. That’s the entrée I crave. Give me lots and lots of interesting, curious, passionate, quirky people, like my chums at church and my students at school.

Oddly, it’s a yearning for people that draws me to writers like Fletcher, Thoreau, et al. I cherish their company. They bring us into their presence; they gift us with the opportunity to get to know them, to discover what they think and feel. Their subject may be solitude but it's their companionship we relish, their wit, their passion, their wisdom, their delight in a well-turned phrase.

Alone in the woods of western PA on the first day of my trek, I had none of that. Evening came. I arrived at the first of a string of shelter areas, each about a dozen miles apart, in which I would pass the next seven nights.

The silence was heavy, brooding. "It was as though the trees were making secret preparations ... I felt that I was watched by many things at once and from all sides.” (I’m quoting Odell Shepard, describing what he terms “the terror of solitude.")

I cooked and ate my supper, read my Shakespeare, said my prayers and fell asleep well before dark.

The next morning, snug in my sleeping bag, my drowsy eyes opened to a world of ferns. Ferns! A wealth of ferns, a fronded wealth, green and golden in the light of dawn, a knee-high bounty, overspreading the forest floor.

The ferns were mine to harvest, visually, all day long, as I traveled south on ’shank’s mare.' In the slanting, yellowy morning light, tiny, numberless globules of dew, each a glittering gem, glistening and buttery, clung to every frond-tip. All week I walked, breathed, lived among ferns, golden in the morning, Kelly green in the afternoon light, gradually graying as the evening light faded.

Did you know that for millions of years ferns were the only plants on our planet? Think of it! A strange and beautiful world of gigantic ferns — and only ferns! — a High Renaissance of ferns. Today, the humble little ferns malingering in the shady corners of our yards are the last remnant of a monarchic dynasty that once ruled the floral world exclusively, seemingly by a Divine Right.

Ferns. I love them so.

All during that second morning I expected to encounter hikers, tramping toward me or overtaking me on the trail. Instead, I had the trail all to myself, all day.

About noon I suddenly heard, not far behind me, what sounded like a short burst of high-pitched laughter, light and playful. It was precisely the sort of laughter that erupts when pre-pubescent boys are wrestling, tussling and tumbling, locked in mock-combat, like puppies at play. I thought immediately that it must be a Boy Scout troop, hiking the trail. I’m an Eagle Scout and a former Scoutmaster; it would be fun to greet my fellow Scouts and ask them about their troop and their trip.

I stopped and turned to look behind me, waiting for them to appear. They did not. There was no one in sight and no more laughter, only the hushed murmur of the woods.

Weird, I thought.

That evening, as I was making my supper, alone in a shelter area, I heard it again. It was so vivid, so convincing, that i stood up and responded with a joyful shout of greeting: “Hello!”

Nothing. No answer. No one.

Strange, I thought.

The next morning, I traveled on without a single human contact, the longest stint of solitude I had ever endured. Twice, before noon on the third day, I heard the laughter again, once a little ahead of me and once perhaps fifty yards off to the side.

Mysterious, I thought.

Three times that afternoon. Once more while I was making my supper in the shelter area and another, one last time, as I was falling asleep. Always the same high-pitched, light and playful laughter.

Eerie, I thought.

What was going on?

I think it was the aural equivalent of seeing the profile of a human face in a cloud formation. A random Rohrschach test for the ears which we will interpret in whatever way suits our memory, our experience of life.

As I walked along, half-conscious of my aural environment, the forest would suddenly emit some random sound — perhaps branches squeaking as they rubbed together in a light breeze, the barely discernible sound of a limb dropping from a distant tree, a chipmunk at play in the leaves behind me or ahead of me — and my brain, being human, would interpret the noise in a way that would make sense to a human being, the sort interpretation one would expect to emanate from a human consciousness.

My interpretation of the sound as human laughter may also have the resulted from three days of uninterrupted and increasingly bothersome solitude. I was hungering for human contact. My consciousness wanted a random sound to have human origin.

The fourth day, a Saturday, I came on some people, at last. Two young couples. Silly gigglers with nothing much to say, they delighted me. It felt good to be with people again. What they said didn’t matter; hearing their voices made me smile.

After that, during the four remaining days of the hike, I came upon people several times a day. I never again heard that peculiar, high, light, boyish laughter, not on that hike nor in the years that followed.

Looking back, I think I may have stumbled into one of the primal adventures of the human race. Alone in the woods for a time, we humans begin hearing voices. Casting about for an explanation, we’ve sometimes advanced the notion that there ‘little people’ out there in the woods. It’s an enduring idea and it has flourished in all corners of the globe. We recall the fairies of England, the gnomes of Norway, the imps, goblins and dwarves of the Black Forest, the leprechauns of the Emerald Isle and the Menehune of Hawaii.

(Hawaiian legend has it that many centuries ago, the Menehune were a mischievous, diminutive people, who lived hidden in the forests of the islands before the first settlers arrived from Polynesia. Some say that they linger still in Hawaii’s remotest corners.)

Hobbits? Fiction, yes. Or should I say ‘Fiction, perhaps'? I don’t know anyone who has met a hobbit but it is well to remember what Tolkien tells us: hobbits are very good at not being seen. I can think of many reasons why hobbits would wish steer clear of troublous human beings.

In “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” the fairies are real enough, right there in front of us on the stage, living and breathing, flesh and blood. We meet Oberon, his servant Puck, Titania and her attendants Peaseblossom, Cobweb, Moth and Mustardseed and others who are unnamed. They are in plain sight for the audience, yet are never seen nor heard by the mortals in the play, save Bottom and even he can’t be sure, afterwards, whether his encounter with the fairies was real or a dream.

“Lord, what fools these mortals be!” says Puck.

I was luckier than Helena, Hermia, Lysander, Demetrius and the rest.

I have never seen the fairies, but I heard them laugh, once upon a time, long ago, in western Pennsylvania ...

If composers have offended
Think but this, and all is mended,
We have but lullabye’d you here
While these ditties did appear.
With our weak and idle theme
We lulled you all into a dream.
Listeners, do not reprehend.
If you pardon, we will mend,
Else Sowash a liar call,
So, good night unto you all.
Lend your ears, if we be friends.
Let our sweet tunes restore amends.

One of my most Puck-ish compositions is the very short fourth movement from my Piano Trio #3, “A Christmas Divertimento." To hear it played by the Mirecourt Trio, click on the link above.

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

🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶

So many seem to be so hungry for money and power.

You’ve noticed that too, eh?

When I fear that someone might think that I am hungry in those ways, that I want to feed my ego and avarice by wringing all the money I can out of the fruits of my God-given creative energy, it gives me what modern day nerve specialists have termed 'the Willies.’

Creative expression is joyful and engaging. When we’re at it, time stands still. It gives meaning and purpose to our lives. It is beyond price. And the ideas just keep coming. Where from? Where were they yesterday? Who can say? And all our ideas come to us for free. Incredible.

I don’t think it’s WRONG to profit from creative work. Indeed, I’ve done it all my life and I still accept contributions, a salary for my teaching, income from the sale of my books and CDs and fees for my speaking engagements. I’m only too happy to deposit the modest royalties ASCAP sends me every quarter.

Still, I decided, six years ago, when I began to share these weekly emails with friends, to give away my life’s work to the greatest extent possible.

What, to ameliorate ’the Willies'? No. There are other, better reasons.

Imagine that we're standing near a bramble of wild blackberry bushes, you and me. If I pick a blackberry and pop it in my mouth, chew it up and swallow it, then that blackberry is … a certain kind of thing. Bear with me here.

Now suppose I picked that same blackberry and said to you, “Hey, will you pay me a nickel for this blackberry?” The glistening little fruit has now become a different thing than it was in the previous instance. It looks the same, smells the same, tastes the same. It has the same name. Nevertheless, it has changed. Spiritually, it has become something else. Through no fault of its own, it has been diminished.

Trying to sell a blackberry which came to us for free changes the blackberry, our relationship to it and our relationship with one another. Not for the better.

The attempt to sell something alters the thing that is being offered for sale as well as the friendship and mutual trust that may exist between the potential seller and the prospective buyer. This is especially true when both parties know that the thing being offered came to the seller for free.

Ideas, blackberries, sunlight, moonlight and a great many other good things come to us for free. The universe provides them.

“And I or you pocketless of a dime, may purchase the pick of the earth,” says Walt Whitman, ardent, jaunty and wise all at once, as usual.

There may be a third way of disposing a blackberry I’ve picked. I have said, “If you’ll give me a nickel for this blackberry, I will donate all five cents to a food kitchen or a school.” Many of you have responded. The blackberry retains its purity, the food kitchen and school benefit. The friendship is unsullied. And it doesn’t give me ’the Willies.'

This notion of plucking berries together is no fiction. We’re all out there, side by side, in front of a bramble of blackberry bushes, both figurative and literal. All we have to decide is what to do with the opportunities that come to us for free.

These weekly emails are meant to offer a refuge where my friends and fans can immerse themselves in aesthetic experience and spiritual purity, altogether removed from the vulgarity, violence, greed and power-lust that imbues so much in contemporary life.

Like many others, I have found much to admire in the works and beliefs of the American religious sect known as the Shakers. I think they were onto this notion I’ve tried to explain above and to exemplify in my life choices.

Mind you, the Shakers were in business; they were farmers, craftspeople, merchants. Like all of us, they had to keep themselves warm, dry and fed. But the acquisition of money and power for its own sake was never their aim. Dealing in currency, a medium of exchange, was merely a means. The end they sought and achieved, for a while, was the creation of a refuge, a nourishing environment where aesthetic power and spiritual purity were cultivated and celebrated.

Did you know that every Shaker was a composer? The Shakers invented and taught one another a simplified form of musical notation so that if God should send (for free, as always) a tune and words to a Shaker, then that Shaker could stop whatever they were doing and immediately write down the tune and the words before they might be forgotten. You don’t want to forget a revelation from God, even if it’s just a simple little tune.

To be sure, some Shaker tunes are inane; many are wonderful.

I studied and sang Shaker music when I was young and pressed into service two of the best Shaker tunes in the fifth movement of my Piano Trio #3.

To hear The Mirecourt Trio (violinist Ken Goldsmith, cellist Terry King, pianist John Jensen) performing that movement with their customary sensitivity, click on the link above.

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