Rick Sowash
        Composer as Neighbor

*  Trio No. 2 "Enchantement d'avril"
*  Trio No. 1 "Voyage de l'esprit"
*  Trio No. 3 "Ombres de novembre"

Les Gavottes
Available from the composer at www.sowash.com Total time: 53:07

*  Sunny Days
*  Convivial Suite
*  Impressionist Suite #1
*  Piano Trio #5 "Eroica"

Paul Patterson (violin), Anthony Costa (clarinet), Phil Amalong (piano),
Laura Bossert (violin), Terry King (cello), Mark Ostoich (oboe), Ron Aufmann
(clarinet), Mark Ortwein (bassoon)
Available from the composer at www.sowash.com Total time: 71:51

*  Harvest Hymn & Harvest Dance: Homage to Willa Cather
*  A Little Breakfast Music
*  The Cliffs above the Clear Fork
*  Une Pavane Americaine: Homage a Ravel
*  Cape May Suite

Terry King (cello), John Jensen (piano), West End Chamber Ensemble, Barb
Sink (flute), Phil Amalong (piano) Available from the composer at
www.sowash.com Total time: 66:42

*  Sanctuary at 3 AM
*  Lullabye for Kara
*  Variations on a Hiking Song
*  Impressionist Suite #2
*  The View from Carew

Anthony Costa (clarinet), Phil Amalong (piano), Jeff Schoyen (cello), Mark
Ostoich (oboe), Ron Aufmann (clarinet), Mark Ortwein (bassoon)
Available from the composer at www.sowash.com Total time: 52:45

Summary for the Busy Executive: Franco-American.

Composing has become an occupation of hermits, the refuge of amateurs.
The United States alone could claim thousands of composers, if only
Americans, even interested Americans, knew the names.  I refer to
composers professionally trained, rather than to the home hobbyist or
the self-convinced genius (often one and the same).  We tend to know the
lucky - luckier, indeed (because so few), than those who have won millions
of dollars on a lottery ticket. A composer of classical music can secure
a living or even performances only with difficulty, so the tendency is
to grub away in isolation, writing to satisfy, not a consumer, but an
inner need.  The problem is that, contrary to our Romantic illusions of
the solitary mastermind, great things are seldom achieved in total social
isolation.  If you look at the great periods in art - Paris, Berlin,
Vienna, and London in the early part of the Twentieth Century, Elizabethan
drama, London and St. Petersburg throughout the Nineteenth Century, New
York in the Thirties and Fifties, even the Transcendentalists' Concord
- you hear poets, painters, and composers talking to one another, fighting,
admiring, and changing because of the contact.

Rick Sowash lives in Ohio.  I've actually heard his music before this:
a choral piece called "Philosophical Anecdotes" on a wonderful CD led
by Gregg Smith (Songs of Humor & Satire on Premier PRCD 1030, nla), which
sets anecdotes about the Cynic philosopher Diogenes - a score of wit and
genuine humor.  Sowash has never made or sought to make a living as a
composer, either in commercial or in academic contexts.  He's written
books on Ohio folkways, managed a theater, worked for a radio station,
and at one point served in public office as a commissioner for Richland
county, in the north-central part of the state.  Indeed, Sowash makes a
point of his outsider status and takes as his career, if not his musical,
model Charles Ives.  But, then again, as I've tried to point out, most
American composers are outsiders.

More important than any of this, of course, is the music Sowash writes.
I liked some pieces very much and some better than others.  In fact, a
couple I found a little weak, for reasons I'll talk about below.  However,
what struck me immediately about Sowash's music is its "authenticity."
The music seems to express a real person and to address the lives most
of us lead, rather than to scale mountains with the goal of reaching
God.  The tone of a lot of it is what I've taken to calling American
Common Sense - incidentally, not all that common.  It's usually adopted
by somebody really brilliant, who's trying to fly in under the ever-vigilant
anti-intellectual radar: Robert Frost playing at the simple New England
Farmer, Gertrude Stein writing the dazzler of a sentence, "America is
my country, but Paris is my home town," the temperance of William James.
It's a strategy almost exclusively confined to the U.S. Europe, by
contrast, seems to favor obscurantists, although the British sometimes
come up with a similar type, like Chesterton or Shaw, who tries to make
even the most outrageous things sound reasonable.  Since I'm from Ohio
myself, I associate the type most strongly with the Midwest and with
poets like William Stafford and Jared Carter.  Sowash seems to find the
music for that tone of voice.  It has a modesty, ingrained rather than
put on.  Musically, I'd compare it mainly to French composers like
Francaix and Poulenc, although Sowash lacks Francaix's love of clockwork
artifice and Poulenc's unashamed religious grandeur.

The clarinet trios, written for Les Gavottes, give Sowash at his best.
The second trio, subtitled "Enchantement d'avril," originated as a group
of songs Sowash wrote for a friend.  Apparently, a lot of Sowash's music
gets produced for friends or with friends in mind.  Indeed, this set of
trios was probably written for Lucien Aubert, clarinetist of Les Gavottes
and another Sowash friend.  Opening with some Poulenc-y chords, the first
movement sings, in a very direct way, of the awakening of Spring.  Sowash
may follow some classical structure.  However, the melodies so consistently
seduce me, that my analytical listening goes to hell.  Like the American
composer Jerome Moross, Sowash's music gives the impression of "just
song." It's not, of course, since the textures often spring from imitative
counterpoint, yet without calling attention to themselves as such.
The craft, though important, remains secondary in my mind.  I react
to Sowash's work mainly on how well I like the tunes.  The ones in the
clarinet trios stand out.  In the liner notes, the composer tells us of
his state of mind in composing the works.  The music may be modest, but
the composer has invested some Big Ideas - spiritual journeys to God and
Certainty, and so on.  Nevertheless, this isn't Bruckner.  It's not that
Sowash's music can't express such things, but that it does so on a human,
rather than on a titanic scale.  Furthermore, if you don't read the
composer's comments, those ideas wouldn't come to you, at least not
immediately.

Sunny Days, written for a violin-clarinet-piano trio about to tour
Byelorussia, sets four of the region's folk songs.  It sounds to me in
the line of Prokofiev's Quintet, though lighter in heart.  The Convivial
Suite counts as one of my favorite Sowash works.  A violin-cello duet,
Sowash wrote it for two couple friends who played those instruments.
One couple, violinist Laura Bossert and cellist Terry King, play it on
the CD. It's a little suite in d-minor, an odd key for conviviality,
but it mostly lives up to its billing.  It also talks of romance, in a
paradoxically grand, sweeping waltz for the two instruments.  The variety
of mood and texture throughout - a march, a blues, a brief adagio of
surprising weight, a "zany" (to quote the composer) finale, and so on -
impress me greatly.

The two Impressionist Suites - for oboe, clarinet, and bassoon - began
life as one.  Sowash thought the work too long and so split it in two.
I think of the first suite as Famous Impressionists (Monet, Renoir,
Manet) and of the second as Not-so-famous Impressionists (Cassatt,
Caillebotte, Sisley & Bazille). I prefer the second suite to the first
(especially the 3-part canon of the Caillebotte movement, "Precision"),
although I love the Renoir movement, subtitled "the play of colors,"
where often only one instrument sounds at a time. Yet the little piece
remains seamless.

Although Sowash's music may appear simple, the fifth piano trio, "Eroica,"
shows exactly how hard his style is to work with.  He wrote with the
death of his father, twenty years earlier, in mind.  Undoubtedly, he
wanted to write a "big" piece, something to honor his father.  Unfortunately,
I can't call it a success. A lot of it just goes by me.  To work, Sowash's
music in general seems to need a wonderful idea. The style is so direct,
that he can't cover up with a lot of notes or rely on manner alone.
Sanctuary at 3 AM has the same problem - great ambition which adds up
musically to little.  Sowash's program notes talk of personal sanctuary,
as well as the "sanctuary" of tonality, whatever that may mean.  Does
he think Schoenberg and Berg will beat him up?  But if the music had
caught fire, I doubt I would have objected to the note.

Yet Sowash does bring off big things.  The Harvest Hymn and Harvest Dance
for cello and piano has a stark, Romantic, yet human-scale dignity. To
some extent, it echoes Henry Cowell's series of "hymns and fuguing tunes."
A Little Breakfast Music (an obvious bow to Mozart here) and the Cape
May Suite show a fine wit and a vein of real poetry.  A Little Breakfast
Music - for oboe, clarinet, and two violins - manages nearly twenty-five
minutes without a true bass instrument.  Sowash's solutions are elegant,
especially because you really don't sense a stunt.  Again, it's a piece
written for a bunch of friends who happened to play those instruments.
Cape May - a little more conventional in its scoring - I take as an
homage to Sowash's marriage.  The composer and his wife vacation there.

The performers - especially Les Gavottes, cellist Terry King, and pianist
Phil Amalong - play this music like they love it.  If you're in such a
mood that you just don't want to have to soar with Mahler, you might
give these discs a try.

Steve Schwartz