Wind, Water, Stone Album Introduction

Sound of Ages next album, Wind, Water, Stone will be released on May 22, 2026. The album is a collection of individual works by composer in residence Andrew Maxfield. Join us for the introduction to the album as we talk over the bit picture, the project genesis, stylistic approach, etc.

The album will be released by Navona records on all major streaming platforms on May 22, 2026. 

https://www.soundofageschoir.com/recordings

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:06

Welcome to episode two of the Sound of Ages podcast. This episode starts a mini-series, if you will, about Sound of Ages' next album. Coming up, the release date is May 22nd, 2026. Album featuring several choral works by Andrew Maxfield. Album called Windwater Stone. Drew and I will be going through each track one episode at a time, doing a little bit of a deep dive. Today is the intro to the album. So get ready for Windwater Stone on the Sound of Ages podcast. Well, we have returned. Back again for episode two of this season, whatever that means in the podcast world. Today we're season of our lives. Yes. Oh, that's good. That's good. Today we're visited once again by composer in residence Andrew Maxfield. Yo. Welcome. Thank you. Today we're gonna talk, we're gonna start a series of episodes that are a little bit shorter, but we're gonna take short but deep dives into each track on our upcoming album coming up in May of 2026. Drew, you want to tell us what it is?

SPEAKER_00 1:48

Well, this is pretty exciting. The album's called Windwater Stone, and it's select choral works by a guy named Andrew Maxfield in a in kind of a I know that guy. Yeah, yeah. It's a product of a long-form collaboration with uh Sound of Ages and Cameron Kavanaugh.

SPEAKER_01 2:05

Whoa. That guy too. Well, I'm getting to know that guy, you know, one year at a time. The um yes, and we have signed a record deal with Novona Records. With Novona Records, and it's really exciting. We signed a little bit ago, and so they're releasing this on May 22nd, 2026. And when Waterstone uh we're gonna talk a little bit about the genesis of the project as a whole, and then uh see where we go from there, and then each episode in this coming session or mini-series, I guess you could say, is again gonna be a deep dive into one of the tracks on the album, so you can know what to listen for, and you can have uh all the nerdy background information you could possibly possibly want to eat me up morning breakfast, you know. Delicious. So Windwater Stone came hot on the heels of First Light in terms of um talking about the project, starting the project rolling, project Genesis, etc. And we did our our first light album came out in September of 2024. And the cool thing about that album is that we m not mistakenly, but by happenstance through logistical necessity, stumbled upon this fantastical artistic innovation, I guess, of having electric guitar with a consort of one per part voices. And if you're interested in that story, I'm sure there's episodes where we talked about darkness starts, but that it came out of this concert where we were collaborating with the guitarist, and they were the guitarist was gonna take part of the concert, we were gonna take part of the concert, and we were like, What if we did a song together? And Drew said, Yeah, I'll write a piece for guitar and voices. And I was like, There's this piece we could do. Drew's like, Well, what if I write one? And I was like, Yeah, I think it's great. And we were concerned, Drew's first concern was the volume, the balance between guitar and voices. And he said, You know, it's really interesting is that even if you amplify the guitar, you have to amplify acoustic guitar to get the right balance, and then you get a lot of that fret noise, and you you lose some of the tone of the guitar. So, what if we did electric guitar and just find pure tone with pure voices? And I said, 100% sign me up. My rock and roll dreams are coming true slowly, because all roads lead to rock and roll. Of course. Of course. And so Darkness Starts came about because of that, and the album First Light, and then we were like, okay, we've this is we gotta keep going. We've got to do more pieces like this. Um and so we had I had approached Drew and said, Drew, what if, or maybe you approach me. A lot of our ideas, I feel like I can't ever remember who comes to who, but we and then we just back ping-pong back and forth until it comes to fruition. But at one point, one of us said, What if we did uh Sound of Ages Canticles and Magnifica and Evensong for what we do seasonally, our Evensong concerts. Because we we stole the name Evensong, so there was this repertoire we were gonna we wanted to kind of tip our hat a little bit more overtly to the even song tradition by having these canticles, Manifica and Nuke Demitis. And I was like, Drew, you gotta write one for guitar and voices. And then over the year, like I can't remember what happened next. How did we get to the idea of let's just make an album? It was like partway through the season, and we just said, let's go for it.

SPEAKER_00 6:23

Well, it's like, you know, people wake up and they're in like thousands of dollars of credit card debt, and you're like, how did this happen? And you know, the and the answer is one day at a time, Cam, one day at a time.

SPEAKER_01 6:44

We got an electric guitar dent, one small decision at a time.

SPEAKER_00 6:49

Well, I'll tell you from my vantage point that the doing the album First Light was really fun because it was the first time that I think we looked at each other and said, All right, it's pretty great collaborating. Let's let's make let's make a recording. And not only was the consort, like one voice for part sound kind of finding its way, but like you said, we stumbled onto this collaboration with um guitar. And my experience with that first piece, Darkness Starts, was that it was such an exciting surprise because it it really was like a convergence of everything that I love about like juicy vocal writing and contrapuntal design and all this kind of stuff intersecting with um all the years that I spent, especially as a teenager, playing guitar. And I never would have guessed that those worlds would collide, but um one thing was certain, which is that like one piece for that combination was not enough because the minute that we finished that one piece, I was like, oh wait. There we have only scratched the surface. I want to try everything with effects, I want to try loop pedals, I want to think about how you voice things on guitar, which is in a way kind of fundamentally different from how you voice things on piano and ergo, how you design chords and all the rest of it. And so, and so we find ourselves slipping into you know musical credit card debt one day at a time. And next thing you know, you base basically have an entire album's worth of material, uh, multiply that by Stations of the Cross, the other album that we just barely released. And now we've done lots of music for that format. I still feel like I've just scratched the surface. It is so fascinating to me.

SPEAKER_01 8:46

Yeah, and and even from the artistic director's perspective, not the composer, I feel like I feel like um Windwater Stone was definitely like the next layer deeper. And then we got there and we realized, oh man, I think there's one of those cool underwater cavern cave lakes down there, and we're still deeper. And we're a couple layers away still from even that. Like first light was like we padded the sand, and then we found this second layer. Stations of the cross is the was another layer, and now it's like, okay, what's next season gonna bring? And we're gonna keep going. But but before we get ahead of ourselves, let's talk about maybe uh a few more specifics about the taking all that music, because because it was there was there were pieces you had written before our collaboration even started. There's pieces that we wrote or that you wrote for us that we were premiering that season, and we we were we had we were just sitting on this body of repertoire and we were like, we gotta this has to live somewhere, this has to live somewhere. So you know, what is your recollection of how we came to the idea of putting these specific tracks, like maybe go through the track list and you know how we came to the album as it's gonna be released.

SPEAKER_00 10:15

Well, yeah, I think that it's um it's a little bit like being surprised by how many things you've accumulated, you know. We're we're score hoarders, man. I'm a scorehoarder for sure, dude. Because I it I think the curse of being a composer is that I'm always interested in whatever my next piece is gonna be. And I have I have this habit of always being curious about the next thing. And the good, I mean, the good thing about that is that it keeps me productive and interested in all that. But sometimes I'm the worst at looking back and seeing what I've accumulated. And we were in the early end or the early part of that concert season, and by that point we had done the first light music, and just as sort of like a dare to self, I I took your challenge to write canticles for this format. And so we I had created the Magnificat for six voices and a guitar that plays in a harmony with itself through a loop pedal, like it plays these long looping canons. And why does that make sense? I don't know. All sorts of things make sense at four in the morning. But um I wrote that uh really as an experiment, and we had a couple fun opportunities to workshop that. We sang it side by side with Kingsangers when they were in town, and um every time we kind of kicked the tires, we're like, you know, this format is kind of cool. And so adding the nuncdamidis to that was the the next natural thing. But then on pretty short order, like really fast after that, um I either wrote entirely new settings or I kind of developed sketches that I had before. So If you love me is a reimagination of the Thomas Talus motet that's totally, I don't know, decomposed, recomposed for voices, but with the guitar woven right into the middle of it. That was written custom for this. Day Is Done. That was an extant a cappella piece that just barely predated our collaboration. Loveliest of Trees, The Cherry Now, that predated our collaboration, but I revised it to sort of customize it for the ensemble. The Bluebird and Invitation to Love were two madrigals that I wrote that the Gisualdo VI originally sang, um, but they had never been recorded on an album. The Lord of Glory is my light, I wrote for Sand of Ages. We had a um kind of a festival festival conference gig thing, and we needed a piece. The Canticles, and then O Orion's. We were doing uh one of our Advent even songs, and we took the O'Orion's chant and did a recomposition um or recontextualization of it. And then finally, Windwater Stone, ironically, that was a that became the title track of the album, and the version that was recorded is literally the third complete setting of that text that I've written. I wrote I wrote two complete settings that in retrospect were not good. They were like what you might call the opposite of good. And I don't even know what to say to that.

SPEAKER_01 14:00

Anyway, continue.

SPEAKER_00 14:02

Well, you know, swing and a miss sometimes, what can you say? But I uh I I had I loved the text and tried a couple times, and I don't know if I just wasn't ready yet, or I wasn't up for it, or I didn't strike on the right ideas, but finally by doing this album together, I came back around to that text and dismantled some sketches that um didn't work out from a previous idea, and then f pulled that together. But all of this stuff came together pretty quickly, and we were in the thick of that season when we just realized, oh man, so much of this is in repertoire, so much of this is scheduled. We better record it while we've got it.

SPEAKER_01 14:46

Yeah. Yeah, I I I remember that too, where it was just like, uh, let's go for it. So we recorded from December of 24 through April of 25, grabbing sessions here and there, kind of as we went throughout the season and had different concerts. And we wanted to make sure we knew that that season's consort was only gonna be a one-year consort because the bass and baritone, Lucas Zeal, and Blake Wayman, respectively, were not gonna be here with us longer than a season. So we're like, well, we don't want to have an album of songs that cross two seasons with two different rosters, so we got till April. Let's capture this from December to April, and then we'll then we'll release it and mix it and master it over the summer, etc. And I just remember being super excited, and we we recorded in June audio, just a studio in Provo, Utah, and Post Malone recorded his Austin album in that studio, and I was pumped because we got to record our Drew's arrangement of Too Cool to Die, which is not on the album, but we we recorded that piece from that album in the same studio during those sessions, and it was it was a party. So studio recording is a little bit different than singing in a bigger space, and we can get all into some of the interesting and cool quirks that came with all of that in a in a future episode, but that's exactly how I remember the project happening and kind of haphazard, and we've stumbled upon something, which tends to be how things work for us in a lot of ways. Of well, it's a little bit like in the cool opportunity zone, you know.

SPEAKER_00 16:40

Yeah, it's like when you're hanging out with your friends and somebody says, Oh, wait, quick, take a photo. This is great. I want to remember this. And that I like I kind of feel that way about this. And the other thing that's worth kind of pointing out is that the album Art it features new works by Aaron Meads, an artist friend of mine, and she's a a really gifted uh figurative artist who does, who teaches gesture drawing, especially and gesture drawing in in visual arts, is kind of a it's like a sub-discipline of figurative art where instead of trying to draw a figure perfectly, you know, photographically with a lot of strategy and structure, you have you give yourself a very short amount of time and you try to capture the basic contours and the energy and the heft and the properties of the character so that you get better at noticing those. And sometimes when you're doing that, instead of a having a model who's sitting down and holding very, very still, you have a model that's striking a very energetic pose for, you know, maybe a minute tops, and then you have to draw with a stopwatch. And so Aaron listened to Aaron and a model actually listened to each of these tracks and did visual art inspired by the music. And those visual art pieces turned into some framed work that we'll have available at future concerts, and also resulted in this album that was features her art and that was gorgeously designed by a designer friend of mine named Doug Thomas.

SPEAKER_01 18:24

Yeah, that's what I was gonna ask next. So that was a perfect segue. I think the art and the art pieces also include, you know, the the they're really beautiful and they're I don't know, they're so cool the way that she incorporated little fragments of your composition. There's little uh kind of spaces where you see staff paper appear and you see little individual lines segments of that particular piece from the score from your sketches. And is that that that's in your handwriting, right, Drew? Like she took that from you, or did she or did she kind of handle trace it?

SPEAKER_00 19:10

Yeah, no, we handed the the pages back and forth. Um we were trying to figure out ways for the visual art and the music, like the notation, which isn't exactly art, but it's kind of artful sometimes. And we're trying to figure out how to connect the two, and so she did her work and then she handed it, handed me the pieces that she created, and I I was, you know, I was terrified, but I sat there and I took my pencil and and wrote out fragments of the music notation for each of these pieces. And it's kind of cool because you know the Magnificat text is all about this kind of like um openness and pleading and these kinds of things. And you get an image that shows you know a figure kind of in that in that form with bits of the music notation. And I'm I'm just a hopeless sucker for all forms of interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, creative collaboration. That's that's my favorite thing.

SPEAKER_01 20:13

Yeah, which I mean one of the one of the themes that we try to do with Sound of Ages more broadly, but particularly with this album, is we're constantly trying to find a third space between ancient and modern. Where it feels like it's timeless, it feels fresh, and then it's been around forever at the same time. And I think that's honestly one of the things that you do really well as a composer. I think it because of your jazz harmonic language and this this um relentless discipline to keep yourself in in the discipline of your craft of real counterpoint. And and and so you know, it makes me think of those scores from uh my my uh lack of true scholarliness is coming out, but the there's a couple pieces of music that are written in canon and the from the Renaissance, and the score is in the shape of a heart, and the other one is Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. The the score is in the shape of a circle, and there's the rows there, and you know, it I think that this is an idea that isn't common and feels new and fresh, but also has ancient ties at the same time.

SPEAKER_00 21:29

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 21:31

So anyway, I I think that that's uh that's a really cool connection that I never really made until just now.

SPEAKER_00 21:38

So Yep, no, that's true. I think one of the things that I've learned, I think, over time is um well, I I used to be really puzzled when people say, like, what's your compositional voice? Yeah. It's a sort of a hard question to answer because uh most of the time it's It leads to like staring at your nose in the mirror or like wandering around navel gazing. Like, I don't know. Do I have a voice? What do I sound like? And how would I know if I have a voice? It's it's this, I don't know, it's mostly induced by academia, but it's a it's a weird thing. Um but my mentor, one of the people that this album is dedicated to, a composer named John Pickard. I was talking to him about it, about the this question of a person's voice. How do you know if you have one and all this kind of stuff? And he he stopped me politely and said, Well, listen, I've been at this a long time. And he said, I don't I'm not even sure what it means to have a voice, he said, but over decades I've noticed that there are certain ways that I like to solve musical problems. And if you look at those patterns over a long enough time span, I guess you have uh what you might call a description of my voice. And I thought that was really helpful to me because if we look at, you know, if we talk about analysis or something, um the reason that Bach sounds like Bach is because Bach made certain kinds of chess moves. There were ways that he liked to tee up a problem and then solve the problem that he teed up. And clearly his chess moves were different than Mozart. Right. Who teed up different kinds of problems and solved them in his own way. And that was different from whoever, you know, we can go down the list, but really I think it's helpful to rather than thinking about like um historical time period, although that's true, or thinking about harmonic analysis and Roman numerals, although that's true to an extent and all this kind of stuff, it's really interesting just just to think about like, oh, there's ways that somebody likes to tee up a problem and solve a problem, ways that are typical of that that sort of typic become typical of that composer's work over a long period of time. And I I think that I wanted a more exciting answer for myself. And then I and I thought, well, okay, so I guess I really like Renaissance Counterpoint and Jazz Harmony, and it hit me very like a very slow-moving ton of bricks over over time, over like writing lots of pieces and especially doing a lot of collaborations with you and with Stan of Ages. I was like, oh, oh, I get it. There are certain kinds of problems that I like to tee up, and then there are ways in which I like to solve those problems. And it really for me, it really is this old plus new equals timeless. I I mean I I can't say anything I write as timeless, but an old fascination with counterpoint, mostly from studying 16th century counterpoint, strict counterpoint, and then a fascination with jazz harmony and especially reharmonization techniques that kind of burst out of the scene in the first half of the 20th century. And you put those two things together, and you and I guess that's how I like to tee up and solve problems.

SPEAKER_01 25:29

Yeah, man. And you do it extremely well because it's idiomatic for the voice. The singers really enjoy singing it. It has an exciting drawing in for the listener. Um so I'd say A plus. Thanks, Cam. If I were to give you a grade, it would be an A plus. So uh so there's the intro to Windwater Stone album coming again May 22nd to streaming platforms near you. And you can be on the lookout for that. Um stay tuned for our next episode where we do a deep dive into track number one. Drew, what is track number one?

SPEAKER_00 26:23

Wind, water, stone.

SPEAKER_01 26:26

The title track being track one. It's just it's just classic rock, you know. It's just classic rock. Okay, we'll see you guys next time.

SPEAKER_00 26:37

Ciao.