from the Sept./Oct., 2002 issue of Fanfare Magazine...

Rick Sowash, Outsider Composer

by Raymond Tuttle

Composer Rick Sowash loves Ohio. If you don't believe me, look at the end-flap of his book Heroes of Ohio - it says so right there. "His book?" you say, "I thought you said he was a composer." Well, he is a composer, but to say Rick Sowash is just a composer is like saying Heinz just makes good pickles. His music has been played all over the world and recorded by the Gasparo CD label. Recently, Sowash started his own label (reviews of his two self-published CDs follow) and a website, www.sowash.com. Here you can order his CDs and find out more about "Rick Sowash, author AND composer!"

If you get the impression that Sowash is a little bit of a character, somewhat like the figures from Ohio history that he enjoys writing about, you're in the right ballpark. Several interviews would be needed to do justice to his various interests and careers. As Fanfare is a music magazine, however, Sowash was asked, first of all, to speak about his musical beginnings. "There wasn't a specific moment when I decided that I wanted to be a composer. I was always a little kid who liked to make stuff up, be it little songs or stories or plays or whatever. When I was quite young, I used to play around with 'sound effects' on the piano; I would do things like imitating the sound of a train starting up. Even then, I liked programmatic effects in music, and far from disdaining them today, I still embrace them. I've always liked to play with the metaphors that we make from sound and music. Anyway, when I was a little older, maybe eight or nine years old, my mom showed me how I could make a song by taking a three- or four-note musical shape, and then repeating it, going up or down a step each time. I was instantly intrigued by that, and I've been intrigued by that ever since!

"By the time that I was in the seventh grade, I could notate simple musical shapes, but I didn't know how to indicate rhythms, so I developed my own kind of shorthand code. I was living in a rural part of Ohio, but there was an amateur symphony nearby, and my mom took me to hear the Dvorak Cello Concerto. It was the first big piece of serious classical music that I'd ever heard, and, believe it or not, Leonard Rose was the soloist. That really got me interested in composing.

"Then, as I got older, I was lucky to have two outstanding music teachers in public school, which was just a little rural school in Lexington, Ohio -- not a performing arts school. They realized that I could write music, and they encouraged and helped me. If it hadn't been for them, my interest in being a composer might have gone no further. One of those teachers was Mr. Roderick Evans, and he was a composer himself. When I was in the seventh grade, he noticed me fooling around on the piano before music class started, and he suggested that I write a piece for the choir. He invited me to find a text I liked - a poem, a Bible verse, anything - and he'd help me to set it to music. Well, I had no concept of this, and I didn't even know where to begin, but he kept pestering me. Finally he said, 'OK, if you can't find a text, then why don't you just write an "Alleluia." Just have the choir sing "Alleluia" over and over again, and at the end they sing "Amen." I thought I could handle that, so I agreed. He told me to come back to him the next day with four notes - one for each syllable of "Alleluia." He showed me what my mom had shown me about repeating those four notes higher and lower. With a lot of help from Mr. Evans, my "Alleluia" slowly grew. The choir performed it in the spring concert. Even though he had played a large role in the composition, Mr. Evans announced to the audience that I was the composer. I took the bow and got the credit, everyone made a fuss, my parents were pleased, and I was really proud and happy. Looking back, I can say that that was a major moment in my life. I took every music class that Mr. Evans taught. My band teacher, Mr. Jan Dunlap, was equally enthusiastic, and because we also had an orchestra in our school, I wrote an orchestral piece in my senior year; I even got to conduct it myself. Truly, 90% of what I needed to know to be a composer came from Mr. Evans and Mr. Dunlap.

"As a high school senior, I thought that I'd been exposed just to the tip of the iceberg, and that when I went to college, then I'd learn about all of music's intricacies. But just the opposite was true! College was almost a complete waste of time and money. A long time ago, I made a policy of not telling anybody where I went to college or whom I studied with. I don't want to give the college or my professors any credit! Lots of composers like to make long lists of all the big names that they've studied with. What we're supposed to derive from that, I suppose, is the sense that those big names have imparted some tradition or secret to their pupils. That's just hooey! It's of scant interest to me. For many years after I graduated, I used to tell people about who I studied with in college, and where, and they would nod and look sage and say, 'Oh, that's a good school' - it's one of the more famous ones. This made my stomach turn, so I decided not to put myself in that position anymore. In fact, I left college twice, vowing never to go back. However, my parents, who had come through the Depression and World War Two, had a dream that their kids would go to college. It was of transcendent importance to them, and they couldn't comprehend that, to me, it was just folly. So I went ahead and got my diploma entirely to please them, and that's that."

Sowash has, by any standards, a most interesting curriculum vitae. "For the last eleven years, I've lived entirely by my wits. I'm a full-time author, and with that, I'm also a kind of performer. Authors tend to get invited to a lot of places, and I do visits to schools, and occasionally to libraries, conventions, banquets, and the like. When I'm invited somewhere, I tell stories from my books, which occupy a very strange little niche. My books are about Ohio; I like to call myself an "Ohio-ologist" as a sort of a joke. Specifically, I've written about Ohio's folklore and history. I have a new book of animal stories, all of which take place in Ohio, and these stories indirectly relate the story of Ohio from ancient times to the present. My books are written for older kids, but I hasten to add that they're not written and illustrated in a manner that makes them seem like children's books. Many grownups read these books with pleasure, and they never dream that the primary market is older elementary kids. Some people say I'm a storyteller, but I think that word has a kind of corncob-pipe connotation, so I prefer the word author. I expect I'll just keep on writing, because writing has been very good to me, and it gives me the freedom and leisure to do whatever creative work I want to do.

"I don't teach anywhere or anyone, and I never have. I often think that if someone asked me to, I could show him or her how to compose in about ten minutes, as long as they knew the rudiments of music. But teaching composing is like teaching chess: you can show people how the pieces move around the board in about five minutes, but it takes a lifetime to become good at it and to play imaginatively." However, Sowash is interested in teaching young people about his music. His website offers a study guide that can be used in classrooms in conjunction with several of his CDs.

"Before I was an author I was an elected public official, a County Commissioner. I like to say, jokingly, that I'm the only American composer of classical music ever elected to a public office. Before that, I headed up a community effort to save and restore a historic 1500-seat movie palace that had been slated for the wrecking ball. After it had been restored, I operated it. And before that, I was a classical music radio broadcaster at WOSU in Columbus, Ohio.

"Being a radio broadcaster was an important part of my life as a composer, because classical music radio stations are right on the front-line of classical music. Radio is where it's at for the contemporary composer. When we played something that was abhorrent to the listeners, we heard about it immediately. On the other hand, when we played something that listeners found new or charming or wonderful or fresh, we would hear about that immediately too. Ever since then, without pandering, I've always written music with an ear to how it will come across on the radio. I can get my CDs aired all over the United States - and I do - through radio. Here in Cincinnati, the classical music station plays my music more often than the music of any other living composer. Today's classical music stations play the roles that conductors and superstar virtuosos played in the nineteenth century, because they decide what contemporary pieces the public is going to hear. They get deluged with unsolicited CDs, and most of those CDs end up in the trash or selling for cheap at the local used CD store. On the other hand, mine seem to be embraced and aired, and that's really exciting for me. Radio is where the connections between music and listeners can be made. The people who have the potential to hear a new piece of music on a classical radio station far outnumber the ones who would hear it in a chamber music or symphony concert. So, having been a radio broadcaster and programmer myself, it helped me get a much firmer grasp of what today's musical public really wants to hear and what it responds to."

For Sowash, because he is an author, composing is not an economic necessity. What would his life be like if composing were all he did? "I think I'd be very bored! I don't dream of doing nothing but composing; I'm a person who has many interests and who does many things. I cook, I speak French, I travel all over the world, I hike, and I canoe. I wouldn't want to be only a composer and have composing be the only thing that I did. Everything else in my life enriches my composing, and vice versa. Composing doesn't take place in isolation.

"My music is almost always written for particular performers, sometimes performers who also are my friends. I don't sit around dreaming something up and then finding someone to play it. It starts on the opposite end. For example, my friend Angelo is a clarinetist. He plays in local chamber groups and in an amateur orchestra, and he also has played some of my music. Last year, the conductor of the orchestra suggested that Angelo pick a piece that he wanted to play with the orchestra. Angelo thought about the different clarinet concertos that he could have played, and then it suddenly occurred to him: why not ask Rick Sowash to write a piece? Angelo is Italian, and he asked me to write him a very lush piece for clarinet and orchestra. It had to be Romantic, even operatic. It also had to be easy enough that the orchestra could work it up in just a couple of rehearsals. This is just the kind of challenge I like, and so I responded with what I think is a very lovely piece. That's how it happens. If I were in isolation, I wouldn't have those kinds of opportunities.

"And they're not always musical opportunities, per se. I have a non-musician friend who got married seven years ago, and at the time he asked me to write a piece for the wedding, scored for oboe, violin, and cello - that was all he could afford! Recently, he and his wife had a baby, and he asked me to write a lullaby scored for cello and piano for his newborn child. That's a delicious opportunity.

"There's always a very strong, immediate, and human connection between what I write and why I write it. Sometimes it's a person or people, and at other times, it's an expression of a certain place. Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton were regionalist painters; I like to think of myself as a regionalist composer. In a number of pieces, I've tried to catch the spirit of a particular location. This is a hugely rich source of inspiration that most American composers, for whatever reason, seem to be deaf to. Most new music gives the listener no idea about where on the planet it came from - it's just vaguely contemporary. In contrast, look back and listen to the music of the past; there are dozens of composers who relished and celebrated places. They wanted the world to know what they had to say about Norway, England, Bohemia, Finland, France, Russia, and so on. Although the most 'universal' composers - people like Bach and Mozart and Beethoven - aren't thought of as regionalists because their music is so transcendentally great, they were just as German as they could be. I think an artist has to be rooted in the soil from which he and she arose, and you cut yourself off from that at your peril. I'm as American as one can get, but my mother's family came from Slovenia, and my father's family is French - the name Sowash comes from the French word "sauvage," meaning wild or untamed, a derivation I've always liked. One way of describing my music is to call it a kind of amalgam of Eastern European, French, and American influences.

"Regionalism also provides a marvelous access point for listeners who 'don't know much about classical music.' If you write a piece about a place that they know, at least they can relate to the place, and then maybe they can make a connection with the music. Whereas, if you write an abstract piece - and I hasten to add that I write abstract pieces too - then you're counting on the listener to do a great deal more of the work, and they're not all connoisseurs. I always want to write music that I know my grandmother would like. She had no musical training at all, but she loved music, and she loved to come to my concerts. Naturally, some of it was just her being proud of 'Little Ricky,' but also, my music was accessible and entertaining, and deliberately so. I suppose some composers might be ashamed to say they write entertaining music, but part of music is entertainment. Only a fool would deny that. It seems like it's an obvious truth that somehow gets missed too often."

I asked Sowash how he felt about the dire predictions that classical music's days are numbered. What was he doing to save it, at least until the end of the current century? "I feel very strongly about that. I don't mean to sound pompous or self-aggrandizing, but if every town and city in America had a dozen composers who were trying to connect with people like I do, who were sensitive to what radio stations like to play and to what audiences like to hear, and who were devoted to that ideal instead of writing avant-garde music that nobody wants to hear, then music would be saved. My music really does touch people, and I don't think I'm bragging by saying this. The classical station in Cincinnati doesn't play my music as often as it does just because I'm a nice guy, it plays it because the music gets a good response from listeners. If composers would awaken to the truth that new music should touch and entertain people, I think that things would turn around. There would be a surge of interest in classical music. My generation of composers should forget what they learned in college; maybe composers shouldn't go to college at all. People want to embrace something fine, but it has to speak to them, not in a condescending way but in an honest way. I don't know why this is so obscure and not widely understood. Maybe it's because there was a period in the arts when the conservative establishment forbade and shunned everything avant-garde, and the best talent went in the direction of the avant-garde as a result. But now, we have exactly the opposite situation. The arts establishment, both in the visual arts and in music, embraces the avant-garde, and so composers and artists who are of a conservative nature become outsiders, even though their work speaks to all kinds of people. Just as there are outsider painters, I consider myself an outsider composer. In arts councils, the panels that decide whose work gets funded are made up mostly of professors from out of state, and of course those professors adhere to avant-garde standards. Those standards make them sneer at music like mine.

"For composers like me, there's little outlet, little access to new audiences and to funding. Other than through radio, I haven't had that much luck getting ahead musically, so it's good that I'm an author too. I can't interest orchestras and superstar virtuosos in my music; I've never had any attention from that quarter. That shows that their focus is not the public, it's a tiny slice of the arts establishment. This is causing a slow strangulation of classical music, and if it keeps up, it will be fatal. The number of classical music stations keeps shrinking, and orchestras keep going out of business. The generation that fled to the United States from Europe in World War Two is dying off, and they've been major supporters of classical music. If classical music is to survive in America, it's time for American composers to recommit to the true needs and hungers of the listening public.

"A lot of the new music that I hear is careful and cautious. It's what I think of as 'not too' music: it's not too loud, it's not too soft, it's not too dissonant, it's not too tonal, it's not too fast, it's not too slow . . . it's like there's a kind of desperate attempt being made not to offend by going to any extreme. And so, it just sounds all the same to me - a bland, gray oatmeal kind of music that you can't quite like and that you can't quite dislike. If anything, I want my music to be the opposite of that. I'd rather my music be "too much" than "not too" - anything but bland! I like slapstick laughter sometimes. That's why Peter Schickele [P.D.Q. Bach's "father"] is my favorite living American composer. I like belly laughs, and I like teardrops. I wrote a sort of manifesto for myself many years ago. In it, I said, 'I want to write music so wonderfully fresh, funny, touching, stirring, inspiring, lovely, or whatever that listeners will be lifted from suffering and effort and, for a little while, breathe a grander, more rarified air.'"