Sowash:  “Geese in Flight” for clarinet, cello .

Because I had never heard the sound, I mistook it for the insane barking of a huge pack of wild dogs, surging toward me through the woods.  But the sound approached more rapidly than dogs can run.  Eyes straining, I peered into the underbrush, expecting the first of these high-speed dogs to burst through any second.  Half-panicked, I half-twisted myself around, ready to run at the sight of them.

Then something overhead caught my eye.  I looked up and saw — for the first time in my life — a flock of Canada Geese flying in V-formation above the hillsides of Bellville, Ohio, where I lived at the time.  I had mistaken their raucous squawking for the sound of beserk barking.  It was 1976 and Canada geese, once nearly extinct, were beginning to rebound.

It’s difficult to believe today, but for the first quarter century of my life I never saw Canada geese.  They did not exist in Ohio.  Today, they are found wherever there is water.  They’re so abundant that they present an unsavory problem.  As David Letterman said, “They evacuate but they don’t leave!”

All the same, seeing them in flight is a thrill.  The V-formation of geese in flight seems the very essence of The North.  It’s as powerfully suggestive of the vast majesty of this continent as the canoeing song, “Our Paddles Keen and Bright,” which Frank Culp, our Scoutmaster, taught us back in my Boy Scouting days.  He told us the Voyageurs had sung this song as they canoed the endless regions between the Great Lakes and Hudson’s Bay.

Years later, now an adult volunteer on a High Adventure excursion for older Scouts, I sang that song again, paddle in hand, canoeing the lakes of Ontario’s Algonquin Provincial Park.  I was in the bow and Dick “Grippy” Ferrell, my oldest friend — he was my patrol leader when I joined Scouts in 1961 at the age of 11 — was in the stern.  We sang it loudly as we splashed along by day, we sang it reverently round the campfire by night …

"Our paddles keen and bright
Flashing like sliver
Swift as the wild goose flight,
Dip, dip and swing."

My Trio #12 for clarinet, cello and piano is subtitled “Voyageurs:  Homage to Canada.”  The opening movement is entitled “Geese in Flight.”

It begins with a musical depiction of geese flying in V-formation.  The skittery cello and raucous piano energetically declaim an E flat; the cello quickly descends, step-wise, while the piano ascends at the same pace, creating the effect of a widening V-shape.

Then comes “Our Paddles Keen and Bright,” played in the lowest register of the cello, as if the song is rising from the pure, cold depths of Algonquin's lakes.

The clarinet enters with the first three notes of Max Steiner's main theme from “How the West Was Won,” a motif that, for me, still resonates with heroism and spaciousness.

These three musical figures — the V-shape, “Our Paddles” and Steiner's three-note motif — are developed as the movement unfolds, made into little fugues, expanded, overlapped.

The V-shape is heard four times.  The last time, at the end of the movement, it is played in reverse, the outer notes converging, narrowing until they reach the same E flat that began the movement, to suggest the flock disappearing in the distance.

This music has never been professionally recorded;  very few have heard it.  To hear Trio da Camera (clarinetist Laurel Bennett, cellist Teresa Villani and pianist Carol Alexander) performing the first movement of Trio #12,” entitled “Geese in Flight,” click here:
http://www.sowash.com/recordings/mp3/geese.mp3

To see a PDF of the score, click here:
http://www.sowash.com/recordings/mp3/geese.pdf