My Trio #11 for clarinet, cello and piano was written in 2003 for les Gavottes, French musicians who have played and recorded my music with great sensitivity and enthusiasm.

Originally, I subtitled this trio "Nous Chantions, Nous Dansions" which translates as "We Used to Sing, We Used to Dance." That's a little awkward in English, so I simplified it to: "We Sang, We Danced." But it doesn't mean quite the same thing. "We used to sing, we used to dance" is a little wistful, something we might say with a sad smile and a sigh for the good old days ... that is what the trio’s Tango movement attempts to express.

It is, however, a fiction. The truth is, I've never danced a Tango in my life. I am not and will never be a person who can look back on the days when I used to go Tango dancing. Sigh. Such a beautiful thing, the Tango, a little sentimental, a little over the top. In the end, the piece is about my imagining what it might be like to look back and remember having sung and danced the night away, back in the long-lost days of our Youth.

I must admit, however, that even as I write those words, they seem faintly ridiculous. Well, so is this Tango, I admit. Occasionally, I've attempted to write music that hovers on the very line that separates an homage from a parody. This Tango is one such instance.

When you hear this Tango, I wonder what you'll think? Will you hear it as a loving homage to a marvelous genre? or will you think that I'm parodying the Tango? Is it possible for music to be both an homage and a parody?

See what you think.

I have never heard this trio performed live. Les Gavottes dis-assembled before they were able to perform it. It has only been performed in public twice and I was not able to attend either concert. The mp3 that is 'linked' below features the premiere, recorded at a home concert in the Manhattan apartment of my clarinetist friend Joe Rosen, sixty floors above Broadway, playing with his friends Adiel Shmit on cello and Taisiya Pushkar, piano. The technical quality is only adequate, but I think you'll find that the enthusiasm of the musicians more than compensates.

To hear the "Tango" movement from my Trio #11 for clarinet, cello and piano, performed by Joe Rosen and friends, click on the link above.

You can see a PDF of the score by clicking on the link above.

Rick Sowash
Cincinnati, OH
March 9, 2014

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Before Thomas Hart Benton put paint to canvas, he rendered in clay the scene he planned to depict, sculpting the figures, the hills, even the trees and the clouds. He began to paint only when the clay diorama was complete, using it as a three-dimensional model, noting how the shadows fell. When the painting was finished, he destroyed the model, reusing the clay in preparation for his next painting.

Knowing his approach gives us a peek into his studio; it partially explains the peculiar muscularity of his figures, his oddly anthropomorphic trees, his sinuous clouds.

As a composer, I have often employed a similar technique though less deliberately, less systematically.

I will set a poem to music, expressing the poet's words and images musically, matching the contour and rhythms of the melody to the rise and fall, the rhythms and the meanings of the words, transforming the poem from something read on a page into something to be sung.

Then, sometimes years later, the song grows into a larger instrumental work. Though the words are removed, the rise and fall, the rhythms, the wisdom or whimsy of the poem remain, rendered non-specific, left undefined.

Musicians and listeners often comment on the ‘lyrical’ quality of my instrumental works, little guessing that the music began life as a song with lyrics, just as Benton’s paintings were realized from a model he first sculpted in clay.

The first movement of my Trio #11 for clarinet, cello and piano, subtitled “We Sang, We Danced,” began as a setting of a poem entitled “The Picture” by Frederick Sylvester.

The Picture -- by Frederick Sylvester

“There’s a pool in the ancient forest,”
The painter-poet said,
“That is violet-blue and emerald
From the face of the sky o’erhead.”

So far in the ancient forest,
To the heart of the wood went I,
But found no pool of emerald,
No violet-blue for sky.

“There’s a pool in the ancient forest,”
Said the painter-poet still.
“That is violet-blue and emerald,
Near the breast of a rose-green hill.”

And the heart of the ancient forest
The painter-poet drew,
And painted a pool of emerald
That thrilled me through and through.

Then back to the ancient forest
I went with a strange, wild thrill,
And I found the pool of emerald
Near the breast of a rose-green hill.

I’m not quite sure what the poem means. Maybe it's a parable about the power of the arts to enhance our perception.

I set it to music for soprano and piano, later expanding it and re-scoring it for clarinet, cello and piano.

The movement begins with the cello alone, arpeggiating lovely chords. When the clarinet finally enters it is “singing” the first line of the poem and, though the rest of the piece strays from the poem, you’ll hear its rhythm and feel its mysterious energy throughout.

Very few have heard this music; the work is rarely performed and does not appear on my CDs. The only recording features my friend, the NYC clarinetist, Joe Rosen playing it with his friends in his living room on the 60th floor of a Manhattan skyscraper.

Take a peek into that living room and watch Amy Gurowitz’ short film, “Sowash on the 60th Floor,” featuring Joe and friends performing the last movement of the work, my only tango, by copying and pasting the next line into your browser.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZ-D1TVnnMc&feature=youtu.be

To hear the opening movement, “Prelude," from my Trio #11 for clarinet, cello and piano, subtitled “We Sang, We Danced,” performed by clarinetist Joe Rosen, cellist Adiel Shmit and pianist Taisiya Pushkar, click on the link above.

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

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Once again, right now, if you can spare 2-and-a-half minutes, you can hear music that almost no one has heard.

The only people who have heard this music are the twenty friends of clarinetist Joe Rosen who gathered in his Manhattan apartment for “a home concert” where Joe featured and recorded my Trio #11 for clarinet, cello and piano, subtitled “We Sang, We Danced.”

Today, I’m inviting you to listen to the third movement, which sings.

Consider: music leans in one of two directions: toward singing or toward dancing. Singing music puts the emphasis on the melody, the tune. Dancing music puts the emphasis on the rhythm, the beat.

The design of this four-movement work is: the first and last movements dance, the inner movements sing.

In the third movement, the clarinet and cello do the singing. The piano is assigned a strange role; she is the interrupter. She interrupts the singing with strange, short, stinging gestures that slash incisively, surgically, into the melody played by the other two instruments.

The movement opens with that slashing piano gesture. Let’s look at it, closely. Consider four notes of a rising chromatic scale; that’s musical jargon for a series of notes rising by half-steps, followed by those same four notes played in reverse. So it’s up-and-back, one time, very quickly, with the last note being allowed to “sound,” i.e., to keep ringing even as it fades, as only a piano can do.

Now consider that alternating notes among those four notes are displaced an octave distant from one another. The gesture is to be played as rapidly as possible, marked secco in the score, meaning “dry”, making a dissonant, almost avant garde sound, very rarely heard in my conservative music. (I’m politically liberal, musically conservative.)

This strange piano gesture is immediately followed by the lovely singing of the other two instruments.

What’s going on here? Contrast.

Think of the piano’s gesture as the seasoning, the salt, pepper, herbs and spice that we set out on the counter as we prepare a creamy soup.

After the piano interrupts the singing clarinet and cello with this same gesture five times, you start to accept it. You categorize it as something alien, something thrown into the mix, something opposed and un-blendable with what the other instruments are doing.

But listen! When the piano plays the gesture for the sixth time it plays slightly more slowly than before, the seventh time more slowly yet. And the notes, the eighth time, are no longer chromatic but rather diatonic, rising by half and whole steps within the B flat major scale in which the other two have been playing.

The last time the piano makes this gesture, at the very end of the movement, it is played slowly, and the notes all arise from the tonic chord, a B flat major chord with an added 6th to make the soup creamier yet.

What has happened? The salt, pepper, herbs and spice have blended, after all, into the creamy soup the clarinet and cello have been simmering for us. As the piece unfolded, the piano, at first as far removed as possible from the other two instrument, gradually advanced toward them and finally joined them, you see?

Dissonant, dry and rapid through the first two-thirds of the movement, seeming permanently aloof, the piano gradually transforms, blends, as if accepting an invitation to befriend the other instruments, to learn to speak their language, to commingle like seasoning in a soup.

Thus, the movement ends satisfyingly. A metaphor, if you like, for seasoning a soup, for a reconciliation of opposites, for interaction among humans.

Or, if you prefer, you can think of it as “just” music.

To hear the third movement, “A Pretty Air," from my Trio #11 for clarinet, cello and piano, “We Sang, We Danced,” performed by clarinetist Joe Rosen, cellist Adiel Shmit and pianist Taisiya Pushkar, click on the link above.

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

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"Trio # ELEVEN?” you gasp. “R.S. wrote ELEVEN trios for clarinet, cello and piano?”

Yes. In fact, I wrote THIRTEEN, numbered, multi-movement works for that marvelous combination of instruments, plus two more that are not numbered (one is the single-movement “View from Carew” and the other is a version of my cello concerto scored for just those three instruments).

Why? I was inspired by the interest the French trio 'les Gavottes' had shown in discovering my work. I wrote almost all my works for that combination under the impression that, sooner or later, ‘les Gavottes' would perform and possibly record them. They did perform and record the first three, and very beautifully. But not long after, the trio ‘divorced’ and went their separate ways.

Some of the trios I wrote for ‘les Gavottes’ have since been professionally recorded by other musicians but numbers #11, 12 and 13 exist, as yet, only in ‘living room’ recordings. Who knows? Maybe they’ll be recorded some day. Maybe not. I don’t worry about it. It’s in God’s hands, a way of saying that it’s not in MY hands.

(When you stop to think about, very little is ‘in OUR hands.’ Nothing at all, really. What would it even be? Whether or not to reheat my coffee in the microwave? Who knows? I might drop dead of a heart attack halfway between my easy chair and the kitchen.)

The movement from Trio #11 I hope you will permit me to share with you today began, as has been the case with so much of my instrumental music, as a song, a setting to music of words for voice and piano.

The text is a poem from the Irish-born writer James Joyce’s early work, “Chamber Music.” (That will be the only reference to Irish culture in this message. I am well aware that today is St. Patrick’s Day and I give it a hearty nod. But I’m just not Irish. You don't hear much about the O’Sowashes.)

Here’s the poem:

From dewy dreams, my soul, arise,
From love's deep slumber and from death,
For lo! the trees are full of sighs
Whose leaves the morn admonisheth.

Eastward the gradual dawn prevails
Where softly-burning fires appear,
Making to tremble all those veils
Of grey and golden gossamer.

While sweetly, gently, secretly,
The flowery bells of morn are stirred
And the wise choirs of faery
Begin (innumerous!) to be heard.

Beautiful, yes. Explicit, no. What is it about? Dawn. That much is clear. But what is “love’s deep slumber?” A lovely phrase, but what does it mean? Are those grey and golden veils clouds or foliage or both? Are the “bells of morn” bird calls? What are we to make of “the wise choirs of faery”? Again, a gorgeous phrase, but ….

This poem, for me, “means” in much the same way that music “means.” It’s a vague incantation, not a recipe or a road map. The feeling of the poem is important, not the logic, and the words are merely a way of evoking a particular feeling, just as notes of music, beautifully played, can do.

In this movement the clarinet and the cello entwine intimately, tenderly, like impassioned lovers embracing in a hushed, secret, shadowy place. The piano is NOT one of the lovers here; it is merely the setting in which the two lovers find themselves. That is why the instrument is given relatively little to do. If this were a love scene in a play, the piano would be the canvas backdrop behind the intertwined actors.

To hear the second movement, “Bells of Morn," from my Trio #11 for clarinet, cello and piano, subitled “We Sang, We Danced,” beautifully performed by clarinetist Joe Rosen, cellist Adiel Shmit and pianist Taisiya Pushkar, as recorded in Joe’s living room, click on the link above.

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

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A tango by Rick Sowash? Why not?

Written for French musician friends, my Trio #11 for Clarinet, Cello & Piano is subtitled, "Nous Chantions, Nous Dansions.”

Translation: "We Used to Sing, We Used to Dance.”

That's a little awkward in English, so I simplified it to: "We Sang, We Danced." But it doesn't mean quite the same thing. When we say "We used to do something,” we sound wistful, heaving a sigh or two for the good old days … that is what this music attempts to convey.

It is, however, a fiction. The truth is, I've never danced a Tango in my life. I am not and will never be a person who can look back on an earlier time when Tango dancing was part of my life. Sigh. Such a beautiful thing, a little sentimental, a little over the top. But not for the likes of me.

I once had a friend who went salsa dancing most Friday nights and not with her husband. The undersigned would never do such a thing. I was always “a good boy.” To a fault, perhaps. I can’t help it. It’s my nature. We are who we are.

In the end, the piece is an imagining of what it would be like to be able to look back and remember having danced and sung the night away.

I must admit, however, that even as I write those words, they seem faintly ridiculous. Well, so is this Tango; I admit that as well. Occasionally, I've attempted to write music that hovers on the very line that separates an homage from a parody. Such is this Tango.

When you hear this Tango, I wonder what you'll think? Will you hear it as an homage to a marvelous genre? or will you think that I'm parodying the Tango? Is it possible for music to be simultaneously an homage and a parody? a Lifetime Achievement Award in the form of a pie in the face?

See what you think.

To hear the "Tango" movement from my Trio #11 for clarinet, cello and piano, performed with gusto by clarinetist Joe Rosen and friends, click on the link above.

You can see a PDF of the score by clicking on the link above.