How wrong we can sometimes be about the things of which we are absolutely certain!

I’m ashamed to admit the following but it’s good exercise for my atrophying humility muscle (musculus humilis).

For many years I sniffed and rolled my eyes when the autumn colors of Vermont were touted. I dismissed such assertions as mere propaganda, a ‘come hither’ pitch devised by a marketing team commissioned by Vermont’s Department of Tourism to attract leaf-peepers.

I expressed my disdain, right out loud, for anyone to hear. Fool that I was, I maintained that "Orange is orange! Red is red! Purple is purple! What appreciable difference can there be between the autumn foliage of Vermont and, say, Ohio?”

Then came an October when we made the drive from Williamstown MA to Burlington VT.

“Gentlemen, I was wrong.”

That’s the line the agnostic journalist H.L. Mencken kept at the ready, rehearsing for his arrival in Heaven, should such a place exist and should such a moment arrive. Mencken told his friends that when and if he should find himself in the august company of the Twelve Apostles, he would simply say: “Gentlemen, I was wrong.”

The things artists know for certain about their own work can be wrong. Mark Twain maintained that his best writing was to be found in his now forgotten historical novel Joan of Arc. Maybe he was right; I’ve never read it; nor, so far as I know, has anyone else in my circle of acquaintances. When I want to pass time in the company of Mark Twain, I re-read Huckleberry Finn.

We artistic types can be mistaken, too, as to whether or not a particular work is finished and complete.

The music I want to share today began as a choral setting of Prospero’s great speech from The Tempest, the one that opens with “Our revels now are ended” and closes with “we are such stuff as dreams are made on and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”

When I finished my setting of that magnificent text, I thought I was finished with the tune. Apparently the tune wasn’t finished with me. A few years later it grew into the second movement of my Piano Trio #4, beautifully and lovingly recorded by the Mirecourt Trio. I had nailed it this time, for sure.

When I heard the Mirecourt Trio play it, I realized that I had been wrong, once again. Oh, they played it perfectly! But at the climax of the movement, I had written the cello part so extremely high that only a consummate virtuoso like Terry King could hope to render it.

I was present for the recording session and Terry did more than sixty ‘takes’ before he was satisfied. Sixty! It was agonizing because I knew that the blame lay upon my own poor judgment.

I offered to re-score the movement but Terry was determined to tackle it. Finally, he did. Beautifully, as you’ll hear shortly.

However, because of that grotesquely high passage, the trio has remained the least performed of my best chamber works.

Here was this richly expressive, autumnal music, secreted away and mouldering, imprisoned and silenced in a piece that few musicians would ever dare attempt to play.

Yet the tune is lovely — it’s a singing tune, a melodic tune, a choral tune, after all!

Some years later, the music grew yet again, transforming itself into another choral work, this time a setting of these wise, autumnal, Prospero-like words by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross:

“For someone who has not first loved, death always comes too soon. But for those who embrace the energies of life, joy in creation, compassion and love, the fear of death has long since disappeared."

At last I knew that I had nailed it.

Time passed.

Then my cellist friend Josh Aerie asked me to write a piece he could play with his flutist and pianist friends in their newly-formed Sylvan Trio. Suddenly, I saw a chance to rectify the ‘problem’ of the cello being required to play the almost impossibly high notes in the piano trio movement: re-score the music yet again and give those high notes to the FLUTE!

I devised a four-movement suite for the Sylvan Trio entitled Seasonal Breezes and the wandering tune has, at last, found its final resting place in the “Autumn Breeze” movement. They plan to record the suite; one of these days I’ll share it with you.

I’ve nailed it at last!

(Or am I wrong, once more? Who knows?)

To hear the Mirecourt Trio (violinist Ken Goldsmith, cellist Terry King, pianist John Jensen) performing the second movement of my piano trio #4, click on the link above.

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

Rick Sowash
Cincinnati, OH

🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶

Rarely have composers been scarred for life while playing ping pong.

As a rule, tune-smiths eschew the rough-and-tumble world of sports.

Mozart was a celebrated billiard player and there are photos of young Charles Ives in his Yale baseball uniform. But if Berlioz was big on badminton or Elgar showed prowess in the tennis court or if Brahms’ fans at Baden Baden leapt to their feet, cheering his audacity at volleyball, these composers' biographers have been strangely silent on the subject.

Me? Although the harrow of Time has gouged my brow, a close inspection still reveals a dashing half-inch scar just above my left eyebrow. I make no attempt to conceal it; nay, I wear it as a badge of honor, the mark of a duel, ardently fought, long ago, not with cutlasses, sabers or scimitars but rather -- with ping pong paddles!

Though ludicrously inadept, I adore ping-pong, a game I have played for hours on end and never more passionately than when I was in my late teens, locked in mortal combat with my brother Jonathan, four years my junior.

Our boyhood home had no space for a ping pong table but we squeezed one into the basement, nevertheless. It was closely crowded on all sides with shelving, luggage, camping equipment, a mud sink, an incinerator (remember those?), a washer and a dryer.

My brother Jonathan and I were, like most brothers, fiercely competitive. If a hamburger was to be shared between us, we would toss a coin to see which of us got to slice the burger as precisely down the middle as possible and then, the surgical incision accomplished, the non-slicer was allowed his choice of whichever half he deemed, upon close inspection, to be ever-so-slightly larger.

When we ping-ponged, it was a death match. Self esteem hung in the balance.

One evening, our parents having gone off somewhere in the family's blue Ford station wagon, leaving the three Sowash brothers at home, we watched “Gunsmoke” and then the older two of us took paddles in hand. I was 19 and Jonathan was 15, having just come to man’s estate by dint of having enrolled in the Drivers’ Education class. He was, thus, more determined than ever to prove himself on the green table of honor. Our youngest brother, Bradley, 9 years old, served as our audience, wide-eyed and admiring.

Victory in ping pong goes to whichever player first gains twenty-one points but only if he is two points ahead of his opponent. If the score is 21-20, the game continues until one player pulls two points out in front of the other. This can induce almost unbearable excitement.

We were neck in neck and the score had stretched into the high twenties. Try as we might, neither of us could pull ahead by the requisite two points. We were tied. Then, Jonathan’s returning ball overshot my end of the table, putting me one point ahead.

One more point and the game would be clinched! Victory was within my grasp!

But the ball, in flying clear of the table, had fallen into the narrow space between the washer and the dryer. I was so excited that I lunged over to the laundry section of the basement, spotted the ball on the floor at the bottom of that narrow gap and, with nary a thought of personal protection, I dove for it.

With all my might and with all the speed I could muster, I stretched my right arm toward the ball, distending the limb in the fashion of a contortionist and, in reaching for the ball, in my extreme eagerness, using all the force of my upper body, I banged my forehead, specifically the region above my left eyebrow, onto the sharp corner of the dryer, bouncing my head and shoulders back to a standing position like a basketball rebounding from a wooden gym floor.

Bright, white stars spun before my eyes, atop a crimson curtain. The amount of blood that gushes from a head wound gives one pause.

The force of this curious, self-inflicted blow nearly knocked me out but Jonathan steadied me before I keeled over. Bradley and he half-pulled, half-pushed me up the stairs, while I clasped the railing with one hand, my frontal bone with the other.

We were scared, there was so much blood. We couldn't reach our parents. No cell phones in those days, no 9-1-1. Like our dad, I was an Eagle Scout, Jonathan would be, soon, and Bradley ‘made Eagle,’ a few years later. We knew to apply direct pressure. It slowed but didn’t stop the bleeding.

After soaking a towel with scarlet mud, we decided to go to the hospital. I was far too dizzy and sick to drive. Jonathan would be our chauffeur, though his knowledge of the craft was admittedly limited. We got ourselves into the Morris Minor, the Three Brothers Sowash-mazov. With no clear notion of how to get from our house to the Mansfield General Hospital, we set out.

“It’s weird,” piped up little Bradley from the back seat. “We were all three born at the same hospital but none of us know how to get there."

Jonathan’s Drivers’ Ed. Class had not yet covered ‘stick shift.’ I tried to explain the clutch. We coasted through the green stop lights but jerked, stalled and restarted at every red stop light and stop sign.

To make a long story interminable, somehow we got to the hospital. When the E.R. doctor asked us what had happened, I had to suffer the embarrassment, not for the last time, of explaining that this dramatic injury was the result of a boisterous game of .... ahem, uh, er ... ping-pong!

The human face can register many expressions. One of them is “Boing!”

Well, they stitched me up proper. To this day, I still carry just the tiniest scar, proving that the story is true. It's somewhat obscured amongst the furrows that crease my brow, now that I am well stricken in years. But in the right light it can still be shown off. Ask me, next time we run into each other and I’ll show it to you. Men love to show off their scars.

Nowadays, of a winter's night, after a substantial and well-digested meal, when the menfolk take their places round the glowing hearth, tug off their shoes with their toes, and lean and loaf at their ease, patting their bulging vests and telling anew the stories of the epic adventures through which they've passed, the narrow brushes with Death, the hair's breadth escapes, the feats of derring-do and the miraculousness of their having lived to tell the tale, I wait until the young’uns have had their say and then I bring out my ping-pong story. The stirring saga is told again, with fresh exaggerations each time. It never fails to achieve its full effect.

Almost the only really athletic music I’ve written is the first movement of my Piano Trio #4, recorded with great gusto by the Mirecourt Trio (violinist Kenneth Goldsmith, cellist Terry King, pianist John Jensen). To hear their rendition, click on the link above.

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