Sowash:  “Lento” 1st movement  from Three Piquant Pieces for oboe, violin and cello.

There’s something uniquely poignant about a solo wind instrument heard over a ‘cushion’ of strings.  To me, it’s the most appealing of all musical textures and combinations.

And, oh, the oboe.  That lovely, strange, piercing sound; it reaches our heart of hearts.

I wrote these Three Piquant Pieces for Carol Bernhardt, an oboist friend I knew in my twenties, back in 1977, when I still lived in my home town, Mansfield, Ohio.  In 2001, I revised the work.

Most people have a notion that writers do a lot of revising, turning out draft after draft.
But do composers revise?  Isn’t music different somehow?  Doesn’t it just ‘come out’ of their imaginations, fully formed and perfect, when they see a sunset, the stars at night or the first dandelion of Spring?

Well, sometimes, it sort of does.  But, at least for me, the inspiration is followed by a lot of tinkering.  What does this mean?  What does a composer revise, specifically?

When I’ve revised works I wrote many years earlier, the main thing I do is to let them “breathe” to put ’space’ between the ideas.  When I was younger, I pieces had too many ideas, coming at you too fast.  Good ideas, I thought, but I jammed them together too tightly, a new one every couple measures, like paintings covering every inch of a wall.  Better to feature instead just one or two well-lit paintings on a wall.

Here’s an example.  When you listen to today’s mp3 you’ll hear the oboe immediately, playing a melancholy, descending line for the opening four measures.  Then the oboe pauses for just a bit while the strings do a little 'business' of their own.  The oboe then continues with a second phrase.

Well, when I was 27, that little interlude of ‘business’ in the strings wasn’t there.  The oboe simply went right ahead, with hardly a breath, between the first and second phrase.  When I revised the piece, at the age of 51, I saw that the ideas were packed too tightly, the phrases coming too quickly upon one another.  So I inserted that little ‘business’ in the strings, almost as if they are interrupting the oboe or commenting on the opening phrase.  See?  That little ‘interruption’ is heard, now, throughout the movement.

That’s one example of how the older R.S. revises a work by the younger R.S.  But a revision like that doesn’t have to wait 24 years.  It might happen the same day an idea comes into existence.  Revising is time consuming, somehow both tedious and fascinating.  Ideas come in a thrilling flash.  Revision is humdrum and can take days, weeks or years.

isn’t that your experience, too?  Conceiving and developing a musical idea is, after all, not all that different from the conception and development of any idea.  Music seems mysterious to non-composers but it’s really very much like any other form of creativity.  We all know what it’s like.  All of us, now and then, have occasion to say, “Hey!  I’ve got an idea!  Let’s do this!"

To hear the first movement, “Lento” from Three Piquant Pieces [featured on the CD “Pastorale”] played by oboist Amy Dennison, violinist Marion Peraza de Web, violist Katherine Cinelli and cellist Ellen Shertzer, click here:
http://www.sowash.com/recordings/mp3/piquant_pieces_I.mp3

http://www.sowash.com/recordings/mp3/piquant_pieces_I.pdf