Sowash: “Largo Religioso” , Sonata for cello and piano

Whatever your faith or absence thereof, please know I'm wishing that today — Easter Sunday — will be a happy day for you.

I read somewhere the fascinating suggestion that a capacity for religious experience may be genetic.  It’s an attractive notion; it's brought me exhilaration and relief.  It liberates the religious impulse from intellectual tedium.  A person is religious, not because they’ve convinced themselves that they can prove the existence of a Deity or because they’ve somehow reconciled the idea of a loving God with the fact of Evil.  No.  Being religious is simply in their DNA.

Metaphysics interested me when I was a teenager.  I had a dim idea that Great Minds wrestled with such things and that, if I were to have a Great Mind, I was obliged to join in.  You are older now than I was then; you know what follows:  feverish disputation, resentment and sorrow.  These might be endured if there was any hope of a rational resolution to the Great Questions, but eventually I concluded that there was no such hope and grew weary of the whole business.  I set it all aside and found, to my surprise, that I remained quite religious, regardless of the irrationality of it.  I have been at peace with my own appetite for religion, ever since.

It doesn’t need to make sense.  If it’s absurd, fine.  I inherited the religious gene, apparently, along with brown eyes, musical ability and a bundle of other traits.  And that’s that.  I couldn’t be non-religious any more than I could change my eye-color to blue or turn tone-deaf.  It’s who I am.

My dear wife, my partner and best friend, the love of my life for nearly 50 years, hasn’t the slightest feeling for religion.  It does not run in her family.  I go to church every Sunday.  Jo stays home with “Meet the Press.”   I pray and ponder, many times, every day.  If Jo prays or ponders the Will of God, she has never made it known to me.

Our daughter seems to have inherited the gene from my side, while our son is like his Mama, non-religious.  Happily, the non-religious half of our little family gets along just fine with the religious half.  It’s no big deal.  We like each other and religion rarely comes up.  When it does, we’re respectful.  We tilt our heads and listen thoughtfully.  When I give thanks before a family meal, all four heads are bowed.  But we have lots of other things to talk about and most of them are more fun than religion.

I’ve written quite a lot of sacred choral music, ie., music intended to be sung in worship services.  Religious feeling sometimes finds its way into my instrumental works as well.

Today being Easter, I’m inviting you to listen to the second movement of my Sonata for cello and piano, entitled “Largo Religioso.”  I think you will like it, whatever your DNA, “religiously-wise-speaking” (as the great musical humorist Peter Schickele would say).  You don’t need to have inherited the religious gene to enjoy this music.  I know that’s so because my Jo loves this recording!

Jo, and shortly you, are among the very few who have heard this music.  I wrote the sonata in 1990 for my cellist friend and mentor Terry King but it has rarely been performed.  I have never heard it performed live.  It has only recently been recorded and will be featured on a CD of cello works which I hope to issue next year.

To hear my friends — cellist Josh Aerie and pianist Sam Black — playing “Largo Religioso,” click here:
http://www.sowash.com/recordings/mp3/Largo_Relig.mp3

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

I’d love to know what you think of this music; reply if you're inclined.  But please don't feel that you are expected to reply.  I'm just glad you permit me to share my work in this way.

As always, feel free to forward this message to friends who might enjoy it.

Anyone can be on my little list of recipients for these mpFrees (as I call these musical emails).  To sign up, people should email me at rick@sowash.com, sending just one word:  "Yes."   I'll know what it means.   To unsubscribe, reply “unsubscribe.”

Rick Sowash
Cincinnati, OH
March 27, 2016