BELLAS LULLABY SHEET MUSIC FOR CLARINET

Two Long Dogs: Solo
I have had a lot of dogs in my life, can't seem to live without them, but Solo was perhaps the oddest: no wagging lap dog shit for him, he was fiercely independent and tolerated me as somehow being a marginal member of his pack. Mainly he wanted to be left alone and if he wanted affection or attention he insisted on it...when he had had enough, with equal insistence he demanded that he be left alone. His wolf heritage as a hunter never quite left him....he brought down a small deer here on the island, several cats and dogs down south, including Shadow (where the moniker Shadowplay actually came from, not from some lofty photographic conceit....I used to love watching Shadow Play....). Shadow had his own karmic debt burden when Solo killed him, having attacked several other dogs for no good reason: he was never right in the head no doubt due to the fact that when he arrived in our lives wandering down from the desert hills, he had a 45 calibre bullet lodged in his head...someone had tried to kill him but the bullet had metastasized into a lump on his head....Solo challenged Shadow from the time he was a ten week old puppy; no matter how we tried to make peace between them (including having both of them 'fixed')...they would leave each other alone for weeks and then one day Shadow, always Shadow, would challenge Solo again go another round. Shadow was a big dog at 100 pounds, sort of Belgian Shepherd but he always lost to Solo at 130 pounds: an ear ripped here, a six inch flap of skin ripped there....one day we came home after a long period of quiet between them and Solo had ripped his throat out....Solo died of natural causes three years ago.....despite his fierce nature, he had the most soulful 'human' eyes of any dog I have ever had....he knew too much, thought too much about the absurd relatonship between man and dog .

Fanciullo, io gia' non ero
come gli altri erano, ne' vedevo
come gli altri vedevano. Mai
derivai da una comune fonte le mie passioni
ne' mai, da quella stessa, i miei aspri affanni.
Ne' il tripudio al mio cuore io ridestavo in accordo con altri.
Tutto quello che amai, io l' amai da solo.
Allora in quell' eta', nell' alba d' una procellosa vita,
fu derivato da ogni piu' oscuro abisso di bene e male
il mistero che ancora m' avvince
-dai torrenti e dalle sorgenti
dalla rossa roccia dei monti
dal sole che d' intorno mi ruotava
nelle sue dorate tinte autunnali
dal celeste baleno
che daccano mi guizzava
dal tuono e dalla tempesta
e dalla nuvola che forma assumeva
(mentre era azzurro tutto l' altro cielo)-
d' un demone alla mia vista.

solo - edgar allan poe

:-) grazie ....