I have loved classical music for about as long as I have been able to love anything. My father gave me a record player when I was small—a wind-up portable first, then an electric one—and took to hiding records under my bed for me to find. That is how Tchaikovsky reached me, and that is how Shostakovich reached me, both of them on 78s.

The Shostakovich was a symphony, and it came as three twelve-inch discs in a bound paper album you turned like the pages of a book. The cover was a painting of a man at a piano with the Soviet flag flying above him—Shostakovich himself, I always assumed. My mother took one look at that flag and worried, aloud and more than once, that listening to it would turn me into a Communist. (Which, according to J.D. Vance, it did.) I have written elsewhere about where those records came from, and what I did to some of them.

What I never had was the means to write the music I kept hearing. Composing is not one skill but a dozen, and the last of them is the sheer clerical grind: Tchaikovsky wrote every note of his own orchestration and still needed copyists to turn a score into parts that sixty players could read from. What has changed, abruptly and within my lifetime, is that I can now ask for a piece and be handed one. It is not quite composing and it is not quite not composing. It is closer to being Tchaikovsky with a roomful of gifted amanuenses instead of one or two—amanuenses who, awkwardly, can also play.

These concertos are what came of that. The note below is written in the manner of the record-sleeve essays I grew up reading, and should be believed to roughly the same degree.

Of all the instruments admitted to the modern orchestra, none has been so persistently underestimated as the xylophone. Confined for the better part of two centuries to the depiction of skeletons, comic mishap, and the occasional startled bird, it has waited with great patience for a composer prepared to take it at its word. In Paul S Cilwa it has found one.

Cilwa came to composition by an indirect route, having first been a radio announcer, a truck driver, a lifeguard, and a programmer of some distinction— occupations which, he has observed, differ less from one another than the casual listener might suppose, each being fundamentally a matter of maintaining tempo while somebody watches. It was during his tenure at the wheel of a tractor-trailer, on the long descent into Flagstaff, that the opening figure of the First Concerto is said to have arrived unbidden. He was obliged to hum it for four hundred miles.

The manuscripts gathered here come to us from sources of uneven respectability. The Concerto No. 1 survives complete, though the autograph bears on the second page of its Fugue a distinct ring left by a coffee cup—a mark which the eminent Cilwa scholar Dr. Hyacinth Trevelyan-Boake has argued at considerable length is not a stain at all but a fermata of unusual generosity. Her reading has not been universally accepted. It has been adopted here.

The Concerto No. 2 arrived, if the composer is to be believed, all at once, and survives as six numbered sheets bearing no titles, no tempo markings, and no indication of where one movement is meant to end. It is presented here in the order the numbering suggests, that being the only suggestion anybody has made in writing.

The two shorter works are of more contested provenance. Reflective Path was discovered folded into a service manual for a 1974 Oldsmobile, and Renaissance Flaire exists in three simultaneous versions, none of which the composer will identify as the original, and all of which are presented below on the reasonable grounds that one of them must be.

These performances were recorded over four sessions in a hall selected for the warmth of its acoustic and the adequacy of its parking. The xylophone is a modern instrument with rosewood bars, played throughout by a soloist whose name has been withheld at the soloist's insistence.

You can listen to the whole album here, or visit each work listed below to read about it and hear its movements individually.

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Xylophone Concerto #1

By: Paul S Cilwa	Posted: 9/11/2026		Page Views: 68
Hashtags: #Music #Classical #Xylophone #Concerto
Four movements, one coffee ring, and a tempo marking that may not be one.
Estimated reading time: 2 minute(s) (400 words)

The Concerto No. 1 is cast in four movements and lasts a little under half an hour, which its composer has described as "about a tank of gas." It is the only one of the four works presented here whose manuscript is complete, legible, and unambiguously in his own hand, a distinction he regards as overrated.

Reflective Path

By: Paul S Cilwa	Posted: 9/11/2026		Page Views: 53
Hashtags: #Music #Classical #Xylophone
Recovered from the glovebox of a 1974 Oldsmobile, and presented twice.
Estimated reading time: 2 minute(s) (239 words)

Of the four works in this collection, Reflective Path has the least secure provenance and by some distance the most devoted following. It was found folded into the service manual of a 1974 Oldsmobile Delta 88, between the section on wheel bearings and the section on the heater core, in handwriting the composer has described as "probably mine."

Renaissance Flaire

By: Paul S Cilwa	Posted: 9/11/2026		Page Views: 46
Hashtags: #Music #Classical #Xylophone
Three simultaneous versions, no original, and a title nobody has dared correct.
Estimated reading time: 2 minute(s) (353 words)

The textual situation of Renaissance Flaire is without parallel in the composer's output. It exists in three complete versions, none of which can be shown to precede the others, and all of which the composer maintains he wrote first. Editors have generally responded to this by printing all three and declining to discuss it.

Xylophone Concerto #2

By: Paul S Cilwa	Posted: 9/19/2026		Page Views: 55
Hashtags: #Music #Classical #Xylophone #Concerto
Six movements, no titles, and a manuscript numbered on the wrong side.
Estimated reading time: 3 minute(s) (508 words)

A concerto in six movements is not, strictly speaking, a concerto. It is a concerto that declined to stop. Cilwa has been pressed on the point more than once and has answered each time that he counted them the same way anybody else would have, and that six is simply what there were.