How lovely mature elm trees must have been.

I’ve never seen one. The Dutch elm disease lowered the curtain on them a generation before I was born. The chestnut exited soon after and, in the last two decades, the hemlock followed.

Forty-five years ago, backpacking in the northern third of Shenandoah National Park, I came upon the Limberlost Trail, celebrated for its giant hemlocks.

In 1920, George and Addie Pollock, who were instrumental in the creation of the park, bought the acreage hosting a hundred hemlocks, near their Skyland resort, to save the trees from logging. George named the area the Limberlost Forest after Gene Stratton Porter's novel A Girl of the Limberlost.

There’s an irony in that. The Limberlost Swamp was a 13,000 acre wetland in eastern Indiana, a remnant of the period immediately following the last retreat of the glaciers. It was an incomparable wetland, the Everglades of the Midwest. You won’t be surprised to learn that, a little more than a hundred years ago, it was completely drained and turned into farmland. Recently a conservation group has purchased 1500 acres of the area and are trying to recreate a tiny sliver of the once-vast wetlands.

George and Addie’s Limberlost Forest, like its namesake, is no more. When we visited the park as a family, I told our kids about the magical forest, dense and gloomy, that we would enter, the sort of place where you’d expect to encounter Hansel & Gretel or the Big Bad You-know-who. But when we arrived at the Limberlost Trail, all the hemlocks were gone. Saved from the loggers, they were felled by an insect, the woolly adelgid.

Now America’s eight billion ash trees are facing extinction from another insect. It appears that each generation experiences the loss of a major tree species. Those were sorrowful losses but at least they were not the result of human interference with Nature.

Not so with the exiting of frogs, butterflies, bees and birds (3 billion less in the US now than in 1970). And that’s to say nothing of what’s gone missing in the oceans.

What’s ahead? God knows. Mayhem is too weak a word.

The great American playwright Thornton Wilder wrote, “Every good and excellent thing in the world stands moment by moment on the razor-edge of danger and must be fought for.” He did not anticipate that the world itself, “the great globe and all which it inherit,” would have to be fought for.

This challenge is new and requires of us strenuous energy and epic ingenuity. It’s that, or despair.

I have a scant supply of energy and ingenuity to offer, however desperate the cause. If I busted myself to save the planet, would it really make any difference? The levers of power are beyond my reach. So, then what? Despair?

Despair seems warranted, but despair is not my style, not to my taste. A state of constant alarm precludes good health and happiness. I try to strike a balance between activism (I sign petitions, phone my elected officials, insulate my home, carpool, recycle, etc.) and the respite I find in “all things wise and noble.”

Namely: music, poetry, art. Friendship, gardening, cookery. Even with my broken ankle, I climb into the hammock I've stretched between two ancient pines (not hemlocks) in our backyard almost every day and just swing. I don’t read, I don’t pore over my laptop, I don’t listen to the radio. I just swing. Time in a hammock is time in the bathtub except that the water isn’t gradually getter colder and you don’t have to towel yourself afterwards!

One writer I greatly admire is Odell Shepard, who was, among many other things, an ardent dendrophile. He wrote beautifully about the elms of New England. If he knew that the species was doomed, he kept silent about it.

I set to music one of his elm-poems, scoring it for SATB chorus and piano. A few decades later, it grew into the piece for cello and piano which I want to share today. I will include the poem below in case you want to read it while you are listening to this music.

(I particularly love the lines evoking stars peeping through branches:

Snaring the little silver fish
That swim in her silent sea.)

The Elm Tree

The Mountain pine is a man at arms
With flashing shield and blade,
The willow is a dowager,
The birch is a guileless maid,
But the elm tree is a lady
In gold and green brocade.

Broad-bosomed to the meadow breeze
The matron maple grows,
The poplar plays the courtesan
To every wind that blows,
But who the tall elm’s lovers are
Only the midnight knows.

And few would ever ask it
Of such a stately tree,
So lofty in the moonlight,
So virginal stands she,
Snaring the little silver fish
That swim in her silent sea.

But hush! A hum of instruments
Deep in the night begins;
Along those dusky galleries
Low music throbs and thins --
A whispering of harps and flutes
And ghostly violins.

For what mysterious visitor
Do all her windy bells
Ring welcome in the moonlight
And amorous farewells?
The elm tree is a lady.
The midnight never tells.

To hear cellist Josh Aerie and pianist Greg Kostraba performing Elm Trees in Moonlight from October Reveries, click on the link above.

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

🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶

This perfect little poem by Odell Shepard may be my favorite ...

The Town Beyond the Mountain

The Town Beyond the Mountain
Where we have never been,
Shines in a sunset glory
Ineffably serene.

Above the small white houses
Its lofty elms trees blow
A more mysterious music
Than any trees we know.

Noon wears the color of eve there,
And the song of its narrow stream
Comes down from a hidden country
Deep in the hills of dream.

There Quietness keeps her dwelling
And Peace descends like snow
On the Town Beyond the Mountain ...
Where we will never go.

It doesn’t mention the time of year but, to me, the final line, so simple, so wistful, lends the poem the feeling of October.

Like autumn, the final line is inevitable and satisfying ... yet we try not to see it coming. I find myself thinking, “Maybe this year the leaves will just keep on being green and never leave us.” Oh well.

To hear cellist Josh Aerie and pianist Greg Kostraba performing Where Quietness Keeps Her Dwelling from October Reveries (music which grew out of my setting of this poem as an art song), click on the link above.

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

🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶

Today, October 20, is one of the ‘high feast days’ on the Sowashian liturgical calendar. It’s the birthday of Charles Ives!

Ives is one of my heroes. HIs portrait hangs on the wall of my ‘cubbyhole’ (my study, a little room comprising the second floor of our 1830 house) along with Henry Thoreau, Theodore Roosevelt, Odell Shepard, Gandalf and Babar the Elephant. Heroes, all!

Ives was tremendously important for me during my early twenties, when I was finding my voice as a composer. I studied his scores, listened to recordings, visited his home and grave in Danbury, CT, interviewed people who knew him including John Kirkpatrick and Charles Seeger (Pete’s father).

Ives was an inspiration and a model for the young Rick Sowash. Not that I imitated his music. As Whitman said, "He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher.”

Don’t take too seriously that verb “destroy.” Walt loves to make us gasp, remember. I did not “destroy” ives in honoring him. Rather, I kept at bay his penchant for musical experimentalism and his curiosity about dissonance and poly-rhythms and embraced, instead, his determination to write music that was true to his authentic self and to make his way well outside of the musical establishment of his time.

Charles Ives and I both strived to create a music that would express our lives as experienced in a particular geographical location. South-western Connecticut for Ives, north central Ohio (originally Connecticut’s Western Reserve) for me.

We both dismissed pressures to cater to what the mainstream establishment of our respective times was blessing. In Ives’ day, the musical establishment was conservative; thus, much of his music was avant garde. In the 1970’s, when I was coming of age as a composer, the musical establishment embraced serialism, John Cage and the avant garde, pronounced tonality dead; thus, my music was conservative, tonal, melodic.

Ives’ music sounds American. So does mine.

We both wrote books and were inspired by literature and Nature.

Ives gave away his music to anyone whom he thought might find it interesting; I do the same.

We both married once and for keeps. We supported our families by working outside the world of music. Oh, and we both sported white beards; we both favored wool sweaters and hats.

That’s a lot to have in common with another composer, even if my music sounds nothing like his.

The writer Odell Shepard was another Connecticut artist at odds with the cultural establishment of his day. He eschewed the influence of modernist writers like Hemingway and wrote “tonal” prose that was old-fashioned but authentic.

He wrote poems, too, including the following, which served as the basis for the final movement of my “October Reveries” for cello & piano:

A Spirit dances down the world
On swift and shining sandals
Who makes the woods rejoice and spills
A splendor of flame upon the hills
And lights the sumac candles.

Her clear voice calls my very name --
Calls, and will have an answer;
And all my heart is bound away
Into the colored hills to stray
After that hidden dancer.

Farewell to friend and wife and child
And all things wise or sober!
For I have drunk deep of vivid stains
And feel like magic in my veins
The wild wine of October.

To hear cellist Josh Aerie and pianist Greg Kostraba performing The Wild Wine of October from October Reveries (music which grew out of my setting of this poem as an art song), click on the link above.

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

🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶

In our home, my domain is the kitchen and everything pertaining to it. I plan the meals, draw up the shopping list, push the cart around the grocery, assemble the ingredients, cook, serve, eat and clean up.

The meals I prepare are almost always good but, alas, almost never approaching great. My cooking almost never “pops.”

I might say the same about my music: almost always good but, try as I might, almost never approaching great. It rarely “pops.” I keep trying. In fact, I just finished writing a new string trio in E minor, four movements, and pretty darned good. Great? Does it “pop?” Maybe, but that’s not for me to decide. Once it gets played, recorded, broadcast … we’ll see what listeners have to say about it.

Returning to food prep, I can follow a recipe but I lack the genius that a great cook possesses. My son has it. He tastes and knows immediately what is needed to “balance out” the dish. He says a dish has three elements: richness, acidity and saltiness. His aim is to balance those elements. Me, I taste it and it almost always seems fine. I do not have the knack of discerning what is missing.

Still, I relish all the little things that go into preparing a meal. For instance, the colors on display at Kroger’s. Sometime when you are at a grocery, try for a moment to forget the objects you are seeing and just try to take in the colors … all those different colors in the produce department and on the boxes and jars that crowd the shelves, each one vying for attention. What a painting might be made of the shelves of a grocery store!

What other environment, besides a grocery, offers up so many colors so densely packed? Not the post office, not my garden, not the bike trail, not even the sanctuary of my church, though it comes close: it has magnificent Tiffany stained glass windows.

Back home from Kroger’s, bags deposited on the counter, I put on my Kelly green apron, which I love. I relish its soft texture and faded color; it has been run through the washer a thousand times. I love the decisive, clean cut of a sharp, heavy knife through an onion or a carrot or a fat clove of garlic. I love how our dog (his name is Billy Bones) assumes sentry duty while I’m cooking, his head tilted to the side, pressuring me to toss him a nibble.

Cooking and composing, two disparate activities with a great deal in common.

The very essence of good cooking and good music seems to me to be what I term “a reconciliation of opposites” or, if you prefer, “an alignment of contrasts.”

For example, the music I hope to share with you today, “The Wild Wine of October,” is scored for cello and piano. Two “opposing” or “contrasting” instruments will be “reconciled” or “aligned,” playing simultaneously as the the piece unfolds.

It’s not only the instruments. Other musical “opposites” will be presented and then reconciled: loud and soft, fast and slow, starting “here,” going “there” and then returning in the final bars, wiser for the experience, to the music that was heard in the introduction.

Now compare that to cooking. Let me be specific. Here is one of the few recipes I know which “pops” every time. I could not have invented it. It springs from the genius of James Haller, chef and owner of the legendary Blue Strawberry in Portsmouth, NH, a restaurant long since closed but fondly remembered by many.

Notice that the very name of the dish is a presentation of opposites or of sharp contrasts -- mustard and maple syrup!

Baked Chicken Thighs Basted in Mustard and Maple Syrup:

Preheat oven to 500 degrees.
Rinse 6 or 8 bone-in chicken thighs and pat dry.
Put two T. olive oil in a large baking pan. Toss chicken in the oil. Sprinkle both sides with salt, pepper, paprika, thyme, marjoram and minced garlic. End with thighs skin-side up. Bake in 500 degree oven, uncovered, for 20 minutes.
Remove. Pour a cup of white wine over the chicken, cover, and return to oven at 450 degrees for 30 minutes.
In a small pan, combine a third-to-half cup of Dijon mustard with a third-to-half cup of maple syrup and a handful of slivered almonds. Gently simmer.
Remove chicken and pour wine-broth into the mustard-syrup mix. Return chicken to oven for 15 to 20 minutes more, basting with the wine-mustard-syrup mix.

When the baking is finished, there will be a thick sauce at the bottom of the baking pan. During the final twenty minutes, be careful lest the sauce burns and hardens. Keep an eye on it. If necessary, add a little wine to loosen it up. When serving, spoon the sauce over the chicken and onto the rice served along side.

Delicious! Writing about it makes my mouth water. Maybe I’ll make it for supper tonight.

To hear cellist Josh Aerie and pianist Greg Kostraba performing “The Wild Wine of October” from my “October Reveries," click on the link above.

There's also a link to a PDF of the score.

🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶

A thought comes to me several times each day. I’ll bet the same thought comes to you. It is this: Over and above the layers and layers of nonsense that make the news, Nature is quietly doing her thing “as if no artifice of fashion, business or politics had ever been.” (That’s how Walt Whitman put it.)

The Canada geese fly over us in their iconic “V” formation. The ferns turn golden with accents of rust round the edges. Thousands of pine cones are clustered in our trees; they will drop any day now and the yellowing, reddening and “purpling” ( ? ) leaves from our deciduous trees will soon follow.

October arrives … right on schedule, regardless of executive orders, the shadow docket or the government shutdown.

What we call “Americana” is often similarly impervious to what is going on at the time it is created. Lately I’ve been revisiting, on line, the paintings of Grandma Moses. She began making art in 1938 at the age of 78, continuing until she passed at 101. Think of that. During a quarter century of economic depression, WWII, the descent of the Iron Curtain, the onset of the Red Scare, and other forms of mayhem too numerous to list, she quietly and determinedly painted what she called “old-timey scenes of New England.” For me and many others, she is an inspiring figure.

My short piece, “The Wild Wine of October,” is also a bit of “Americana.” That is the title of a song I wrote for baritone and piano which I later re-scored for cello and piano. It is the final movement of a three-movement cello-piano suite titled “October Reveries.”

The text for the song is yet more “Americana,” this marvelous little poem by Odell Shepard:

A Spirit dances down the world
On swift and shining sandals
Who makes the woods rejoice and spills
A splendor of flame upon the hills
And lights the sumac candles.

Her clear voice calls my very name --
Calls, and will have an answer;
And all my heart is bound away
Into the colored hills to stray
After that hidden dancer.

Farewell to friend and wife and child
And all things wise or sober!
For I have drunk deep of vivid stains
And feel like magic in my veins
The wild wine of October.

I want you to hear the cello-piano version but first I must praise the work of the two superb musicians you are about to encounter. As you listen, notice the dynamics, the balance, the gusto of the opening and closing, the wistful way they play the brief middle section and the long pause separating the two section, just long enough to make you wonder if the piece has ended early or if the players have taken a bathroom break! I am touched and honored that such fine musicians brought their artistry to this recording, one of many they made for the CD of my music titled “Seasonal Breezes.”

(I don’t intend for the above to constitute a commercial, but -- just so you know -- all of my CDs may be purchased at kickshawrecords.com/. The profits that arise therefrom are partly how I fund the making of the recordings you hear in these Sunday morning emails).

Even as you read this, the pianist, Greg Kostraba, is preparing to perform a recital of my clarinet-piano music slated for next week at Taylor University with clarinetist Dr. Christopher Bade, after which they will record a CD of that same repertoire which will be issued early next year.

To hear cellist Josh Aerie and pianist Greg Kostraba performing “The Wild Wine of October”, click on the link above. There's also a link to a PDF of the score.