Hello —

Whatever your faith or absence thereof, please know I'm wishing that today — Easter Sunday — will be a happy one for you.

I read somewhere the fascinating suggestion that a capacity for religious experience may be genetic. It’s an attractive notion; it's brought me exhilaration and relief. It liberates the religious impulse from intellectual tedium. A person is religious, not because they’ve convinced themselves that they can prove the existence of a Deity or because they’ve somehow reconciled the idea of a loving God with the fact of Evil. No. Being religious is simply in their DNA.

Metaphysics interested me when I was a teenager. I had a dim idea that Great Minds wrestled with such things and that, if I were to have a Great Mind, I was obliged to join in. You are older now than I was then; you know what follows: feverish disputation, resentment and alienation. These might be endured if there was any hope of a rational resolution to the Great Questions, but eventually I concluded that there was no such hope and grew weary of the whole business. I set it all aside and found, to my surprise, that I remained quite religious, regardless of the irrationality of it. I have been at peace with my own appetite for religion, ever since.

It doesn’t need to make sense. If it’s absurd, fine. I inherited the religious gene, apparently, along with brown eyes, musical ability and a bundle of other traits. And that’s that. I couldn’t be non-religious any more than I could change my eye-color to blue or turn tone-deaf. It’s who I am.

My dear wife, my partner and best friend, the love of my life for nearly 50 years, hasn’t the slightest appetite for religion. It does not run in her family. I go to church every Sunday. Jo stays home, watching “Meet the Press.” I pray and ponder, many times, every day. If Jo prays or ponders the Will of God, she has never made it known to me.

Our daughter seems to have inherited the gene from my side, while our son is like his Mama, non-religious. Happily, the non-religious half of our little family gets along just fine with the religious half. It’s no big deal. We like each other and religion rarely comes up. When it does, we’re respectful. We tilt our heads and listen thoughtfully. When I give thanks before a family meal, all four heads are bowed. We have lots of other things to talk about and most of them are more fun than religion.

I’ve written quite a lot of sacred choral music, ie., music intended to be sung in worship services. Religious feeling sometimes finds its way into my instrumental works as well.

Today being Easter, I’m inviting you to listen to the second movement of my Sonata for cello and piano, entitled “Largo Religioso.” I think you will like it, whatever your DNA, “religiously-wise-speaking” (as the great musical humorist Peter Schickele would say). You don’t need to have inherited the religious gene to enjoy this music. I know that’s so because my Jo loves this recording!

Jo, and shortly you, are among the very few who have heard this music. I wrote the sonata in 1990 for my cellist friend and mentor Terry King but it has rarely been performed. I have never heard it performed live. It has only recently been recorded and will be featured on a CD of cello works which I hope to issue next year.

To hear my friends — cellist Josh Aerie and pianist Sam Black — playing “Largo Religioso,” click on the link above.

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

Rick Sowash
Cincinnati, OH
March 27, 2016

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I want to give you a ‘sneak peek’ into a new CD of my music, due out next year. The CD will be titled “Seasonal Breezes” and will offer premiere recordings of several of my cello works played by a superb cellist, my friend Josh Aerie.

Today, you’ll be almost the first to hear one of the tracks.

The central work on the CD will be my Sonata for Cello and Piano, a deeply felt work I wrote in 1990 for another superb cellist, my friend and mentor, Terry King.

1990? The CD coming out in 2018? That’s 28 years! It takes a long time to get a piece recorded and issued on a CD. Everything happens slowly in the world of classical music.

I have waited until this weekend, just prior to September 11 with its tragic connotations, to share this deeply felt music with you.

Twice now, I’ve termed this music “deeply felt."

What is meant when we say music is “deeply felt.” To whose deep feelings do we refer? In whose psyche do those profound, unsettling feelings reside? Whose tragedy is experienced when tragic music is played and heard? Who is experiencing it?

The musicians? No. If the musicians permit themselves to experience the full extent of the sadness that is evoked when they play deeply sorrowful music, they would be reduced to weeping, rendering themselves unable to perform. Musicians, when performing, are not at liberty to be overwhelmed by their emotions. They have a job to do, a technically demanding job that requires intense concentration.

The composer? No. The composer’s task is even more demanding, technically, than the musicians’. Tremendous concentration is required. I do not feel sorrowful when I write sorrowful music, nor joyful when I write joyful music. The emotions I’ve experienced while writing music are mostly anxiety and fear. More on that in a moment.

The listeners? Yes. The majestic sorrow in majestically sorrowful music is yours; it evokes your sense of the tragic, your sorrow in contemplating the losses you’ve suffered, the thought of your own departure, the attendant loss it will bring to the people whom you love and who love you. At the moment of performance and perception, those feelings are neither the musicians' nor the composer’s. Those feelings are yours.

Understand from this assertion how important you are as a listener; understand that you are crucial to the experience of music. Unheard music is as meaningless as a painting that never gets painted, a book that never gets written.

Non-composers are curious about the feelings of composers. A friend asked me, "What does it feel like, what emotions do you have, when you are composing?”

We can be honest with a friend. I ventured an honest answer. My emotions when writing music are: initial excitement, soon followed by an irksome anxiety and growing fear, leading to a mingling of regret and tentative delight, finally arriving at relief.

I am unaware of any other composer who may have tried to explain what I mean. So instead of quoting another composer, by way of explanation, I will quote two great writers.

This from Gustave Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary.”

“Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.”

And this from Virginia Woolf's "To the Lighthouse.”

"She could see it all so clearly, so commandingly, when she looked: it was when she took her brush in hand that the whole thing changed. It was in that moment’s flight between the picture and her canvas that the demons set on her who often brought her to the verge of tears and made this passage from conception to work as dreadful as any down a dark passage for a child. Such she often felt herself—struggling against terrific odds to maintain her courage; to say: “But this is what I see; this is what I see,” and so to clasp some miserable remnant of her vision to her breast … "

These writers know. Note the phrase, “as dreadful as any down a dark passage for a child.”

In creating music, what I have feared is that, once again, I will ‘blow’ it, I will compromise. I am afraid that as what I was trying to capture slips away from what I envisioned, from what I aspired to, I will deceive myself, pretending that I am satisfied or, worse, that I will convince myself that no one will notice the compromises I make, the many passages which I settled for less. I have sometimes found myself literally holding my breath in fear as I plunked ahead on the piano, scratching the notes onto score paper or keyboarding the notation on my computer.

Years after a piece is finished, when I hear it, I can still spot the places where I caved. I curse myself for those flaws. Damn! I came so close! If only I had tried harder!

No musical ideas come to reality without being diminished in the process by a great many compromises. The finished work always falls short of the hopes I cherished for it when I commenced to write it down.

Only one thing can overcome the paralyzing effect of all this fear: the conviction that the idea is GREAT, that it MUST be to brought to reality, that it is divinely inspired will of God, that it expresses and extends the trajectory of the human race, that it affords an invaluable glimpse ahead into what my painter friend Sean Sexton calls “nextwhere,” that the existence of this new work will extend consciousness, change lives, change the world, will fulfill the purpose of music that Schubert proclaimed when he said that the reason he composed music was “to improve Reality."

To move forward in spite of fear requires a very strong ego, strong enough to have sufficient faith in the importance of one’s own ideas, even though we know that, in the greater scheme of things, the value of our ideas is scant, that “a hundred years from now, what will be the difference?” Our precious ideas will have been forgotten. This is easily proven. How much music that was written by American classical composers a hundred years AGO — that is, in the year 1917 — is remembered today?

People say that artists are egotistical. Of COURSE they are. Artists MUST be egotistical to muster the gumption to create anything.

When the piece is finished, the struggle over, I feel regret that it didn’t turn out as well as I’d hoped, delight that it turned out as well as it did, and relief that, for better or worse, I know that I did the best I could and completed the task.

Much of the above described emotional journey parallels the emotional content of the first movement of my cello sonata, the music that’s waiting for you to discover today. The excitement is there, the anxiety and fear, the delight in moments of beauty and a certain majesty.

You may find your own sorrows and joys reflected in it as well. May your hearing of it comfort you on this weekend of the remembrance of the events of September 11.

To hear my friends cellist Josh Aerie and pianist Sam Black playing the first movement of my Sonata for Cello and Piano -- so beautifully! — click on the link above.

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

🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶

Today? A ‘sneak peek’ into a new CD of my music, to be unloosed upon an unwitting world sometime later this year. The CD will be titled “Seasonal Breezes” and will offer premiere recordings of several of my cello works played by a superb cellist, my friend Josh Aerie.

The central work on the CD will be my Sonata for Cello and Piano, written in 1990 for another superb cellist, my friend and mentor, Terry King.

Today I want to share the sonata's third movement. Except for the audiences present when Josh has played this work in recitals, you will be the first to hear this music.

That’s exciting, don’t you think? Most of the ‘classical’ music we hear comes to our attention already festooned with ‘seals of approval.’ Not this time! You’ll be using your critical faculties untrammeled by generations of critics who have long since pronounced upon the value of the music. In the world of ‘classical’ music, that is a rare experience.

Composed in 1990? The CD coming out in 2018? That’s 28 years!

Yep. It takes a long time to get a piece recorded and issued on a CD. Everything happens slowly in the world of classical music. The compensation is that the music doesn’t age, has no ‘shelf life,’ comes with no warning: “best if consumed before February 4, 2018."

Hearing this music, you could not guess if it was written three weeks ago, three years ago or three decades ago.

I’ve said it was written in “the ’90’s,” but you will listen in vain for the influences of Madonna, Michael Jackson or Prince. It doesn’t sound like “the 90’s."

It might be a little easier to guess where it was written because it is clearly the work of an American composer coming to terms with Beethoven, especially in the louder, triumphant parts.

Beethoven’s spirit is alive in this work, intentionally. It is an homage to the master, the greatest of all composers in my opinion. In three or four of my works, I deliberately tried to allow his great spirit to breathe again and afresh through my music. I’ve attempted to mingle Beethoven-like gestures with the American musical vocabulary inherited from Copland, Barber and the great Hollywood film score composers.

I might have subtitled this music, “Beethoven Goes West” but that risked trivializing it.

When the new CD is available, I will announce it in an email and ask for the address to which you want me to send your free copy. Some of you will want to send me some money in return and I won’t refuse it. In fact, some of you have already sent me some money in support of this CD's production costs.

Too, as I have done with all my CDs, I will send this new CD to 165 American classical music radio stations. The packaging and postage are expensive. So … “all contributions will be gratefully accepted” … and sincerely appreciated … but neither necessary nor expected.

Simply an exchange of gifts. That’s how I see it.

It is my pleasure and my calling to share my work with anyone who is interested in discovering it.

To hear my friends cellist Josh Aerie and pianist Sam Black playing the third movement of my Sonata for Cello and Piano -- so beautifully and with such energy! — click on the link above.

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

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One of you, in response to last week’s email, replied with this marvelous and telling anecdote:

<< Years ago, a dear friend who is not particularly religious asked me about the difference between spirituality and religion.

I said that spirituality is the feeling evoked in us by looking up into the sky on a winter night, pondering the billions of galaxies we’re told are ‘out there’ and realizing that you are a minuscule part of a great and mysterious creation.

Religion is when after doing that, you say "Thank you." >>

I do perform this ritual star-gaze late every night and early every morning. Not because as a spiritual discipline but rather because our dog must be given a few moments in our fenced-in backyard before turning in and again at the start of the day.

However inspiring the night sky may be, it’s darned cold out there! But only for a few more weeks. Winter will soon loosen its icy clasp. Eager as I am for Spring, I find my thoughts straying backward; I recall some of the deeds I’ve done in the depths Winter and under star-strewn skies.

In Scouts, we mastered the demanding techniques required when winter camping. The cold is ruthless and relentless. All energy was required merely to keep warm, dry and fed. Only the boys who were 14 years of age or older were allowed to participate. Only the self-responsible can hope to manage the techniques and inherent risks of winter camping.

On one such winter campout I went a step further than the other Scouts. I made a sort of igloo and slept in it. I found a dead bush about the size of a small Christmas tree, covered it with a tarp onto which I sprinkled water, which froze rather quickly, hardening and stiffening the tarp.

Then I piled snow on all sides of the tarp and finally over the top, completely covering it. I gently tugged the bush out from under the tarp, leaving the structure standing.

That night, inside, I lit some candles to generate a little heat. It warmed up quickly …. from the candles and my own body heat. We don’t think of ourselves as generators of heat but I’ve read that each of us gives off about as much heat as a 110 w. light bulb, too hot to touch. The interior of my ‘igloo’ became drippy. For fear of my sleeping bag becoming wet from the drops, I soon put out the candles and lay there, in the total darkness, listening, though there was nothing to hear. At length, I slept, cushioned by a thick mat of straw I’d brought along to keep me off the cold, cold ground. I stayed warm all night.

The next morning when I poked my head out of my igloo, the air upon my face was very cold, I think about 10 degrees. Snow had fallen during the night; the forest floor was trackless.

There was work to do. We built a fire. It was difficult to find firewood because the snow was deep. We had to settle for dead branches that were still on the trees. When all the branches are devoid of leaves how do you determine which among them are actually dead? By how easily the branch snaps. Green branches do not snap easily; dead branches do.

I am glad that I did some winter camping. I am also glad those days are over now, for me. I no longer feel compelled to construct an igloo and sleep in it. Been there, done that.

Another winter memory …

About fifteen years ago Jo and I were in Yosemite National Park during a very wintry March. We went on a ’snowshoe hike’ led by a ranger. Before we departed, he instructed a group of us in the use of snowshoes. He stressed the importance of knowing how, if you’ve fallen over, to get back up on your feet. It is much more difficult than getting up off the floor.

If you are lying on the floor and decide to stand, you put your palm on the floor and oomph yourself up. But snow that is many feet deep is, in effect, bottomless. It’s like laying on a massive amount of popcorn. If you put your palm on the surface and push down, you plunge your arm into the snow, all the way up to your shoulder and you don’t hit solid ground. Instructing us, the ranger used that popcorn image and I’ve always remembered it.

So … what you do is, you roll over on your side and assume a fœtal position. Then you slowly, awkwardly try to roll back over onto your side and then on to your feet. Can you picture that?

Guess who was the only member of the party to fall over. Jo and I were the only ‘oldsters’, the rest being college-aged kids. Everyone cheered me on as I struggled to get to my feet. It was a tad embarrassing but I finally managed it. I know I couldn’t do that now; my (replaced) knees no longer fold like a jackknife, the way they did when I was young.

The ranger cautioned us to stay far away from the trees. Why? The trees were conifers and each one sat in what appeared to be a little well in the snow. The snow was about 8 or 10 feet deep but the pine boughs had prevented the snow from clustering beneath them. If someone got too close and fell into the ‘well’ from which the tree rose, it would be very difficult to get free, even with help.

The ranger was very agile on his snowshoes. At the end of the hike, he invited us to join him in a race down a steep hill. Jo and I declined, but most of the party took off with him. He was amazing, leaping six feet or more with each bound, laughing and exuberant. I thought of Legolas.

To hear my friends cellist Josh Aerie and pianist Sam Black doing something like the musical equivalent of racing down a snow-covered slope in snowshoes, i.e., playing exuberant music with consummate skill! — click on the link above.

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