Beset by crises, both personal and private, where shall we direct our minds?

My dear wife had major surgery three days ago to repair multiple injuries she suffered in a bad fall. She is miserable. She faces many weeks in a cast / sling, followed by at least six long months of physical therapy, trying to heal. Until healing comes, she’ll be in bad shape.

My dreadful president, elected in a bad Fall, daily inflicts multiple injuries on my dear causes, our suffering world. We are miserable. We face at least seventeen long months in a figurative cast / sling followed by many years of political therapy, trying to heal. Until healing comes, we’ll be in bad shape.

When crises beset me, here’s one thing I do: I sing these words, to a tune of my own devising:

“Be still and know that I am God.”

If you want to hear those comforting words sung to that tune right now by the Harvard Univ. Choir, copy and paste this link into your browser:
http://www.sowash.com/recordings/mp3/be_still.mp3

Another thing I sometimes do, when crises loom, is to imagine trees conversing.

What would they discuss? The wind, the rain, the sun, the stars and the moon, the squirrels, chipmunks and birds, the passing seasons, the suppleness of their youth, the strength of their maturity, their eventual return to the soil. Oh, and astonishment at how quickly the little saplings are growing up.

But the conversations of trees may be otherwise conceived. Consider this: save the flute, brass and percussion, musical instruments are made out of trees.

Think of it! Clarinets, cellos and pianos are mostly made of wood that was once, somewhere, a green-leafed, growing tree.

When ligneous instruments play together, their respective trees of origin share an audible conversation!

When my trios for clarinet, cello and piano are performed, humans are conversing through the trees from whence their instruments came!

The clarinetist pushes breath past an Arundo donax reed, through a long cone carved from mpingo , African blackwood or grenadilla.

The cellist draws a catgut bow across strings resonated by a shapely, polished box of maple, spruce, boxwood, willow or rosewood.

The pianist directs felt hammers to strike taut strings that ring from the body of an instrument fashioned out of close-grained, quarter-sawn Sitka spruce.

Think! Just think!

Our debt to trees is incalculable. Music may be the least of the blessings they confer upon us. The table on which my computer sits as I write these words, the chair upon which I sit, the floor upon which the chair sits — are entirely made of wood. As are the hiking sticks of our youth and the canes and crutches of our old age. As are our cradles, our bedposts, our coffins.

The flotsam and jetsam of our lives are mostly made from wood: pencils, paper sacks, cardboard boxes, matchsticks, trays, salad bowls, picture frames, cupboards, window sills, mopboards, crown moulding, turpentine.

We are nourished and delighted by almonds, walnuts, apples, oranges, lemons, tangerines, maple syrup.

Perhaps best of all, trees bless us with shade. What have humans done for trees that they should shelter us with the blessing of shade?

Trees enrich the very air we breathe, converting our exhalations of carbon dioxide into oxygen suitable for inhalation. No breath? No conversation, no singing. Indeed, no life. Forgive me for stating the obvious; sometimes the obvious needs to be articulated.

We don’t have to feed them; they flourish all by themselves. Long before we achieved consciousness, trees figured out how to eat sunlight, a comparable achievement.

Dogs are well and good, but the best living allies we have on this planet are trees.

Their support is spiritual as well, even philosophical. Like good parents, they teach us, not by verbal instruction but by noble example.

"It is precisely in growing like a tree that we become ever more fully human -- that is, by solidifying the past into a support and structure for the present, and by adding every year a new ring of growth."

I wish I could claim to have penned those wise, beautiful words. I did not. I plucked that sentence from a dendrophile’s memoir, The Cabin Down the Glen, by Odell Shepard.

Here's a bit more of the verbal magic he spins on the subject of trees:

“Twilight is falling in the glen. Hues of pearl and amethyst are thrown back from every rock and twig and bole. Every leaf reflects a ray from the deepening west. The boughs where the shadows gather, the layered leaves, and all the expectant multitudes of the fern, are very still. Once more the trees sink into meditation, groping down that endless road of thought or dream which claims them every night and all the winter long. So still they are, so breathless, that one might think them carved in jade or painted in a picture. They seem to be holding their breath to listen.”

Are you listening? It’s a moment for music. Let’s listen to three trees conversing.

To hear Trio da Camera (clarinetist Laurel Bennett, cellist Teresa Villani and pianist Carol Alexander) performing the opening movement of Trio #4, “Conversation of the Trees,” click on the link above.

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

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There is a relationship, a rapport, between the clarinet and the cello that is unique among pairings of instruments.

Just as the clarinet is the cello of the wind family, the cello is the clarinet of the string family.

Hearing them separately, you wouldn’t mistake one for the other. But when just those two instruments play together, the relationship is consummated, a magical blending, the two become almost as one.

As in a good marriage, each diminishes its individual identity in complementing the other; the sum is greater than the parts.

Our marriage is like that, to a degree that sometimes startles me, as when I realize that whatever opinion, feeling or reaction “I” might have, if I were merely an individual, is subsumed into the larger opinion, feeling or reaction that “we” have as a couple.

What ‘BigTrips' shall we venture upon in our remaining years? If it was up to me alone, I’d go straight back to France. Why go anywhere else? But I’ve been there eight times already and Jo doesn’t speak French. So I give slim odds to the possibility of returning to France, even though it remains my favorite country.

Instead I ask what Big Trips “we” would enjoy. The British Isles, Vancouver Island, Crete, Alaska? Shall we return to places we’ve discovered together: Kauai, the Olympic peninsula, Tuscany, Cape May, Cumberland Island?

The wishes of “the one” remain dimly formed, easily dismissed, quickly forgotten. The wishes of “the two” come clear and are eventually realized.

As Ovid says in his Metamorphoses, “We two form a multitude.”

Well, the clarinet and the cello, when they play together, “form a multitude.”

One coupling that forms that multitude is heard when the clarinet plays higher than the cello. Another is when the cello plays the higher than the clarinet.

Another sound, distinctly different, is when the cello plays its open D and A strings while the clarinet sounds the third of the chord, an F or an F sharp. The sound is so unexpected that you would think that triad was being played by a third instrument.

Think how much the sounds of both those instruments change as they run their respective gamuts from their lowest registers to their highest. Pair them low, pair them high, surprising new sounds are heard, new feelings evoked. A multitude indeed.

The second movement of my Trio #4 for clarinet, cello and piano is scored for only the clarinet and cello; the piano is silent.

The solo clarinet begins, intoning a mysterious tune, pausing between phrases. Listen carefully to what happens exactly 52 seconds in. The cello enters and, for a little while, you’d almost think it was a second clarinet.

For me, this movement is a nocturne, the instruments susurrant, ‘au fond du bois,’
You’ve heard the expression, “Once in a blue moon”? This music is the once the blue moon is in.

At the end, the two instruments seem to become aware of us, the listeners. They whisper, "Hush! We are observed!” … they stop, still as stones ... and as silent.

As my Trio #4 aspires to be a colloquy of trees, you’re invited to ponder this movement as a dialogue between the two trees that were harvested, carved and fashioned into this particular clarinet and cello.

To hear the second movement of my Trio #4 for clarinet, cello and piano, "Conversation of Trees,” played by clarinetist Laurel Bennett and cellist Teresa Villani, click on the link above.

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

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One Sunday morning, a few years back, our pastor challenged us, mid-sermon, by asking and demanding the following:

“What gives you joy? Turn to your neighbor in the pew — not your spouse or partner, someone else — and tell them what gives you joy.”

I had never asked myself that question so directly but I immediately knew my answer.

“What gives me joy,” I said to Jim Norman, my octogenarian friend and fellow tenor in the church choir, who happened to be seated next to me, “is making people smile.”

“What gives me joy,” Jim said, in turn, “is singin' in the choir, especially when we sing your music.”

Writing this now, smiling, tears come to my eyes. Jim is gone; he had a stroke and faded away. I will remember our exchange for a long time. It was a supreme compliment.

There are many ways of prompting smiles, many sorts of smiles. Wistful smiles, thoughtful smiles, grateful smiles, kindly smiles, even sad smiles. In my music, my writings and my interactions with people, my aim is to elicit smiles.

I try to be kind, to ask after others and to listen to their replies. I’m not very good at it but I do my best. As someone said, “Be kind because everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.”

Being funny is much easier. I have a good memory and can usually pull out a quip to suit the occasion.

Last Thursday night our church choir had just stumbled through a difficult piece, reading it for the first time, and I remembered a comment my high school band director made, forty years ago, after a similarly miserable reading. I quoted it to the choir: “Well, as my high school band director said, you weren’t together but at least you were out of tune.” It prompted a good laugh.

We usually associate humor with verbal wit or sight gags. But music can be humorous, too. A humorous piece of music? What would THAT sound like? It certainly would not be cast in a minor key, since everyone knows that music in a minor key is SAD.

Oh, really? Not if it’s exuberantly self-mocking. Let me give you an example.

To hear Trio da Camera (clarinetist Laurel Bennett, cellist Teresa Villani and pianist Carol Alexander) performing the third movement of Trio #4, “Conversation of the Trees,” click on the link above.

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

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If you listen to the music I want to share today, please be patient.

It begins darkly. Gloomily even! You might say to yourself, “Whoa! With bad news pounding us from all directions, who needs THIS?”

Be patient. It’s a set-up! There’s a very big surprise, unmistakbly American, that pops as soon the piano enters, precisely 2 minutes and 27 seconds after the movement begins!

But first, a few thoughts ...

Almost everything you are likely to hear at a concert of ‘classical’ music in an American concert hall or on an American classical music radio station was written by composers from nations that were, or aspired to be, empires during the late 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries.

Why? Is it an accident that almost all of the composers we hear performed live or broadcast just happen to have come from those countries?

Consider ...

The Austro-Hungarian empire’s capital was Vienna, in its day the most important city, musically, in the world. It gave us Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Mahler.

My beloved France: Debussy, Ravel, Saint-Saens, Gounod, Franck, Chopin, Berlioz.

Russia: Tchaikovsky (the most frequently performed of all ‘classical’ composers -- did you know that?), Rimsky-Korsakof, Borodin, Glazounov, Mussorgsky, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Stravinsky.

Great Britain: Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Holst, Finzi, Britten.

The little countries around the edges of these Great Powers are, seemingly, each allowed one or two ‘great’ composers. None of them are performed as frequently as the Big Names from the Imperial countries.

Finland? Sibelius.

Norway? Grieg.

Denmark? Nielsen.

Spain? de Falla. Maybe Granados.

The former Czechoslovakia? Dvorak and Smetana.

Italy? Verdi and Puccini.

I know a thing or two about music but I cannot name a single composer from Sweden, Portugal, Belgium, Holland, Slovenia, Estonia, Lithuania, Luxembourg. I cannot name a single composer from the Western Hemisphere (unless they are from my own country, of course). Nor from Africa, Asia or Oceania. How many composers from those continents can you name? Not one? Me neither.

Why is this? I think it’s because there is a consensus among American conductors, musicians, radio program directors and academics -- and, yes, listeners -- that, when it comes to ‘high culture,’ we train a colonial mentality by accepting the notion that the old imperial European powers “really know” and that we, out here in their former colonies, must bow to their judgment.

How does America fit into this scenario? We have exported our pop music but relatively little ‘classical’ music. My French musician friends know Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” and Bernstein’s “Candide Overture” and that’s about it. Name Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber, Virgil Thomson, Randall Thompson, Roy Harris, Ferde Grofé or Charles Ives and they shake their heads.

We’ve exported plenty of pop culture, to be sure. Hollywood, Elvis Presley, Rock, Jazz. Some of it is good stuff, some of it is tripe. But I have often been surprised by how little my French friends know about ‘serious’ American artists. One friend, a very bright woman, a retired teacher, assured me that she had never heard of Mark Twain or "Huckleberry Finn." I began to quiz her, trying to discern what she knew about ‘serious’ American artists. She knew “Whistler’s Mother,” having seen it in the Musée d’Orsay, but she had no knowledge of “American Gothic.” She knew about Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, since they had lived in and written about Paris, but knew nothing of Emerson or Thoreau, Melville or Hawthorne. She had heard the name “Walt Whitman” but had read nothing he’d written.

Let’s return to music. Are we to believe that compositional genius just happens to be limited to countries with imperial ambitions? Really? Can there be no great composers of ‘concert music' from, say, Trinidad, Taiwain, Crete, Iceland, Viet Nam, Croatia, Corsica or … dare I say it? Ohio?

Conlusion: classical music appears to be rigged, a word we often hear nowadays.

How shall an American composer respond?

We could imitate the Great European Masters. Been tried and it don’t work (sic).

Or we could simply BE American and let the chips fall. That’s the case with the music I want to share with you today, a gumbo no European could have concocted.

That’s why I made bold to say, at the beginning of this message, that the music I want to share today boasts an unmistakably AMERICAN surprise at precisely 2:27.

To hear Trio da Camera (clarinetist Laurel Bennett, cellist Teresa Villani and pianist Carol Alexander) performing the fourth movement of Trio #4, “Conversation of the Trees,” click here:

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

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Back in August, when I shared the first movement of my clarinet-cello-piano trio #4, “Conversation of the Trees,” with y'all I received a flurry of responses.

Many of you were intrigued with the idea of trees conversing. Several of the musicians among you kindly requested that I send PDFs of the full score and parts and mp3s of all five movements, which I am very glad to do for anyone who is interested, and for free. My gift.

It is my policy nowadays to give away my life’s work to the greatest extent possible.

In selecting music to share in these weekly emails, I usually bounce around among my works, varying the offerings between vocal and instrumental works, light and serious works, long and short movements. But when y’all seemed enthusiastic about the first movement of “Conversation of the Trees,” I decided to share the remaining four movements over the following six or seven weeks.

Today I want to share the Finale of “Conversation of the Trees."

The Finale aspires to convey the perky parlance of slender trees, to wit, birches, poplars and the like. The music strikes me as being simultaneously Bach-ish and American-sounding, another of the quirky confluences that are everywhere in this work.

These trees are smiling as they converse and I hope that you will be smiling, too, as you listen.

To hear Trio da Camera (clarinetist Laurel Bennett, cellist Teresa Villani and pianist Carol Alexander) performing the fifth movement of Trio #4, “Conversation of the Trees,” click on the link above.

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

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In France, truly, time is not spent, saved or wasted. It is not invested or budgeted, not something one has or gives. The French don’t say that a flat tire cost them an hour or that someone is living on borrowed time. Time isn’t something they can use profitably or might run out of.

“Time is money” is American. In France, time passes, only passes. Like gravity or air, in France time simply is.

An American finds this, initially, a little bewildering. When I’ve finished my meal and am eager to get back to exploring Paris, why on earth does it take so long for the waiter to bring “l’addition?” More than once, I’ve had to rise from my seat, put on my hat and ostentatiously head for the door in order to induce the waiter to come running after me -- finally! -- with ‘the tab.’

After a couple of weeks in France, the psychic muscles that audit my expenditure of time begin to unclench. I gradually remember how to relax and let events unfold at a pace not of my choosing.

“Shall we attend a ”cirque” tonight?” asked my friend Sylvie, in French, correctly using the subjunctive. A retired teacher of French, the equivalent of what we term “an English teacher,” Sylvie insisted that we speak only French in her home, where I was a guest. She and her son, Vincent, 12-years old at the time, instructed and corrected me as we conversed, a joyous and effective way to improve one’s foreign language skills.

“Bien sûr!” I replied. Being American, I imagined we would be seeing a “circus” with a ringmaster, clowns, trained elephants, dogs doing tricks, bareback riders, a tiger or a lion, trapeze artists, a brass band. You know the scene.

Wrong. A “cirque” is a very different spectacle, more ballet than circus. If you’ve seen or heard about the “Cirque du Soleil,” you know. Acrobats and music, yes, but far different than Barnum & Bailey.

Sylvie, Vincent and I arrived at the theatre about a quarter hour in advance of showtime and bought our tickets at the box office through a window opening onto the sidewalk. A crowd of perhaps 250 was standing about, waiting for the doors to open. I thought it a little odd that the doors would still be shut, fifteen minutes prior to showtime.

Did I ever mention? Back in 1980, I rescued, almost single-handedly, an historic 1500-seat movie palace -- the Renaissance Theatre -- built in 1925 in Mansfield, Ohio. It barely escaped the wrecking ball. During the six subsequent years, I served as the theatre’s Executive Director, managing operations. When we presented a show at “the Ren,” the doors opened at least a half hour in advance. People would gather in the lobby, buy concessions, visit and chat, waiting for the show to begin. Show-goers were never made to wait on the sidewalk.

An American crowd, denied entrance to a theatre fifteen minutes in advance of showtime would be restive.

But here we were, 250 French people, showing no signs of restiveness. We waited and waited. Showtime came and went. Nothing. I heard not a murmur of discontent.

By ten after, an American crowd would be furious at this waste of precious time. Having gone to all the trouble of preparing an early supper, driving downtown, finding a parking spot and arriving well ahead of showtime, they would be bitterly resentful to discover that the show was not beginning on time. In another ten minutes, they would be pounding on the doors, some of them demanding a refund. Making them wait any longer than that, with no explanation, could spark an insurrection.

At 20 minutes past showtime, the door opened and a costumed performer emerged and stood looking at us, waiting until he had our attention. In his rapid explanation, I caught the phrase “difficultés techniques.” Sylvie filled in the blanks: he was announcing that the show would be delayed by another 40 minutes or so.

If, as theatre manager, I had made an American crowd wait that long and then delivered that explanation, the women would gasp and wag their forefingers, the men would shout and shake their fists.

How did the French crowd react? They all seemed to react just as Sylvie did. After making the famous ‘French shrug,’ she suggested we set out in search of ice cream. Everyone else seemed to have a similar idea. The crowd quietly and, as best I could judge, contentedly set off in various directions.

I could scarcely believe it. I shared my astonishment with Sylvie and she laughed it off. “Ce n’est pas grave,” she said. French for “No big deal.”

“But you are the people who tore down the Bastille!” I said. Seeing I was serious, she and Vincent laughed and shook their heads. “C’était différent!”

We found an ice cream parlor, made our purchase and sauntered back to the theatre where the crowd was gathering again. We all stood and chatted, relaxed and happy. Time was neither spent, saved or wasted. It simply was. Like gravity or air.

An hour after the advertised showtime, the doors opened and the crowd entered. The show was fabulous though I found the death-defying acrobatic stunts unsettling. Again and again the performers came within inches of being permanently maimed. Their narrow misses were almost as astonishing to me as the crowd’s passivity during the pre-show delay.

We got back to Sylvie’s house an hour later than we had thought we would.

So what? We’d chatted happiy together, enjoyed delicious French ice cream and seen a great show. The events of the evening had not transpired in the time frame we had anticipated but … “Ce n’est pas grave.”

To hear the leisurely first movement of my Trio #4 for clarinet, cello and piano, “Conversation of the Trees,” written for my friends, the French musicians who call themselves “les Gavottes”: clarinetist Lucien Aubert, cellist François Adlof and pianist Jean Tatu, click on the link above.

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

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What happens when musical styles clash within the confines of a single movement. Can a stylistic contrast be too extreme? Where is the limit? If the music pushes past that limit, what are the consequences? Is the seriousness of the movement, as a whole, so badly undercut as to render it laughable or can a stylistic clash be taken as sincere?

A listener justifiably brings expectations along when she enters into the little world expressed in a piece of music. She expects a degree of consistency, that the music will be unified, that the musical ideas will unfold smoothly. Some contrast is necessary to maintain her interest. Will too much contrast put her off? or make her laugh? If she laughs, will she be laughing AT the music because it is ridiculous or WITH the music because it’s genuinely funny?

The music of Charles Ives raises these questions. Ives is one of my heroes; I have studied and admired his work for more than fifty years. One of the ways I’ve emulated my hero is to try my hand at aligning strongly contrasting musical styles within a single piece.

In the movement I would like to share with you today, two very different musical styles are aligned: a dolorous lament is heard before and after a Tin Pan Alley-style song. Heard separately, the sincerity of these expressions would not be doubted. Positioning them cheek by jowl in the same movement raises a question: is the composer joking? being coy? is he “messin’ with us?”

The music in question is the fourth movement of my Trio #4 for clarinet, cello and piano, “Conversation of the Trees.” It begins very darkly. The tonality is elusive. What key are we in? For two and a half minutes the clarinet-tree and the cello-tree share their sorrows in a doleful two-voice fugue. At ms. 47, the music hints at a Blues sound. It’s a frontier, a shared border between two alien styles. Or a bridge.

When the piano finally joins the other two instruments, she immediately reveals a sunny disposition, as different from theirs as morning from midnight. She plays a jazzy tune that is solidly in E flat major.

The clarinet and cello acquiesce and follow her lead and the three of them “have a blast.” Afterwards, the lament is heard again, played in the Blues-y “frontier” that bridged the opening section to the middle section, but now the lament is not quite so dark. Perhaps, after playing along with the piano’s fun-loving spirit, the clarinet and cello have had their spirits lifted? The movement ends with an improbable A major chord, a very great distance from E flat.

Thus, two contrasting, even opposing styles and moods are aligned in this movement. Aligned yes, but are they reconciled? With music in two such dramatically different styles, does the movement as a whole still hang together? What are we to make of this music? Is this music sincere or ironic?

To be honest, I am not sure -- I am the person who wrote it!

To hear Trio da Camera (clarinetist Laurel Bennett, cellist Teresa Villani and pianist Carol Alexander) performing the fourth movement of Trio #4, “Conversation of the Trees,” click on the link above.

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

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“Scherzo” is Italian for “joke.”

This guy is standing in line at the Farm & Fleet store, waiting to pay for a 50 lb. bag of dog food when a woman, also in line, takes notice.

“You must be a dog owner!” she says with a smile.

Does the guy say, “Duh!” or “How did you guess?”

No. A gentleman, he says instead, “No, ma’am. I’m going back on the Dog Food Diet.”

“The Dog Food Diet? I never heard of that.”

“Oh yes. It’s quite effective. I was on it for six months and lost 87 pounds.”

“Oh my gosh!”

“Yes, but then one day I woke up in the hospital, a total mess, with hoses up my nose, being fed intravenously by one of those I.V. thingamajigs.”

“Lordy!” she gasped. “Were you poisoned by eating all that dog food?”

“No, ma’am. I stepped out into the street to sniff the hind end of a Golden Retriever and a car hit me.”

There you have it: a dark story featuring deceit, the need for dieting, serious injury, a hospital stay, fear of poisoning, aberrant behavior and a pedestrian struck by an automobile. Nothing funny about any of that, until we view those dark things from a different angle. The miraculous result is humor.

Same with music in a minor key. Sad, right? Nothing funny about the key of C minor. Unless it’s really exuberant. Like “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen,” “Fifteen Men on a Dead Man’s Chest” or the opening movement of Beethoven’s Fifth. Nothing sad about those! Particularly not in the Beethoven. His peculiar dark energy shoves sadness aside, as if to say, “We could mope like everyone else -- but we have more important things to do!”

When I told that joke to a friend, she replied, “That sounds like the sort of thing you would do.”

I didn’t know whether to feel proud or ashamed!

Today I want to share some cheerful music, albeit in a minor key.

To hear Trio da Camera (clarinetist Laurel Bennett, cellist Teresa Villani and pianist Carol Alexander) performing the third movement of Trio #4, “Conversation of the Trees,” click on the link above.

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

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Have you noticed vines entangling trees? Strangling, I might almost say.

I have seen vines, of course, all my life. Even swung on them, Tarzan-style, when I was a boy. I gave them no thought until riding the bike trail this past winter.

My rule is not to ride the trail if the temperature is below 50 degrees. It’s just too cold. Dress how I might, passing through the cold air at 15 mph beats me up. I have tried to pretend that it’s bracing and that I enjoy it. I don’t. A day comes, sooner or later, when the temperature hits 50 and then off I go.

Without foliage to hide what is going on, the vines are revealed. They are everywhere. They smother young trees and snake up the trunks of noble, old trees. Their leaves bask in the sun, depriving the host-tree’s leaves of the sunlight all plants need. The weight of the vines hanging from the branches of a great tree would be measured in tons. Trees are strong but there is a limit to how much weight their branches can bear. High winds bring down the vine-laden branches, sometimes killing the trees.

There is real drama in this. Stories of conflict and struggle are happening all around me on the bike trail. I was blind to what was happening but now I see.

Some of these ‘plant stories’ are in the opening chapters, with vines as slender as my thumb. Some of these ‘plant stories’ have reached the final chapters, when the vines have become as thick as my thigh.

The vines sometimes seem to have risen as if by magic, stretching straight up from the ground to a branch ten feet above. How do they do that? With nothing to grab on to, how do they grow so high? and straight up, too!

No human interferes. One might think that the park service musters volunteers with chain saws to take down the larger vines, with state-employed arborists overseeing the endeavor. This is not the case. It would be an impossibly huge task to sever all the vines that grow on either side of the bike trail, even if the effort was limited to clipping only those vines that thrive on either side of the trail, within a few feet of the asphalt.

That battle would be lost before it began because the vines, once severed, immediately begin to grow again, scaling the trees once more.

This drama of the trees and the vines moves me. The aspiring tree, hampered by the parasitic vines, is, for me, a hero. How often have my own aspirations been frustrated by … ? oh, all sorts of things. No need to list them here.

After musing all through the spring, I finally took action a month ago. I bought a pruning saw and a large V-shaped clipper, with two handles that you work with both hands. I carry them in my bicycle basket and, now, every time I go out biking, I stop for a few minutes somewhere along the trail, dismount, and sever some vines.

It’s futile, it’s hopeless. Silly, even. We can never conquer all the vines. I don’t care. I like doing it.

I like to imagine that the trees are grateful to me though we must be careful about anthropomorphizing plants. Thinking in those terms, we must admit the possibility that the vines have feelings too! And not feelings of gratitude for this pesky, bearded old kook who brings a pruning saw along with him when he rides the bike trail! They probably hurl their silent curses at him from all directions.

Let’s agree to deny that plants have feelings for us. What about the Ents? Remember the Ents in “The Lord of the Rings?” Tree shepherds? I know they would approve. “And that,” as Gandalf says, “is an encouraging thought.”

To hear the leisurely first movement of my Trio #4 for clarinet, cello and piano, “Conversation of the Trees,” written for three French musicians who call themselves “les Gavottes”: clarinetist Lucien Aubert, cellist François Adloff and pianist Jean Tatu, click on the link above.

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

I'd love to know what you think about this music; reply if you're inclined. But please don't feel that you are expected to reply. I'm just glad to share my work in this way.

As always, feel free to forward this message to friends who might enjoy it.

Anyone can be on my little list of recipients for these mpFrees (as I call these musical emails). To sign up, people can email me at rick@sowash.com, sending just one word: "Yes." I'll know what it means.

Rick Sowash
Cincinnati, OH
July 21, 2024