Introducing ... “The Unicorn,” a keyboard piece I wrote in 1976.

Classical music does not age. Listening, could you have guessed when it was written? Recently? or years ago? It's as fresh as cookies just out of the oven.

That is an apt image for today -- my 64th birthday (I'm writing this on January 16) because Jo has busied herself all morning baking molasses crinkles, my favorite cookie; our apartment is warm and fragrant.

This music was inspired by Odell Shepard's The Lore of the Unicorn, a scholarly yet delightful study of the origins and implications of our most beautiful animal myth. As I read the book, a galloping rhythm kept running through my head, the opening phrase of this delicate piece.

I scored the music for harpsichord because the sound of that instrument is, like the unicorn myth itself, peculiar, fragile and antique (though the piece can also be played with good effect upon the piano).

Harpsichordist Barbara Harbach plays it with sensitivity and flair. It was her idea to arpeggiate many of the chords and to vary the customary twang of the instrument by using the more delicate lute stop now and again.

When I hear this music, I picture a shy creature, smaller, more graceful than a deer, with grave, dark eyes, gamboling in the moonlight. Tentatively, cautiously, she approaches, allows herself to be briefly caressed, then caracoles away, looks back mysteriously once or twice, then disappears.

Rick Sowash
Cincinnati, OH
January 19, 2014