Sound of Ages Podcast
Sound of Ages is a professional vocal consort based in Utah. They specialize in performing music of all styles, genres and time periods, with a focus on the timeless fundamentals from medieval and renaissance times.
Hosted by Founder and Artistic Director Kam Kavanaugh and Composer-in-Residence and Chief Strategist Andrew Maxfield. Discussions range from musical concepts, entrepreneurial strategy, live concert streams, interviews with fellow professionals in the industry, and essentially, all things choral music related.
Previously known as "Early Music Monday," Kam has already interviewed a variety of choral rock stars from around the globe including Nigel Short, Eric Whitacre, Owain Park, Cecilia McDowall, Andrew Crane, Chris Gabbitas and many more.
Sound of Ages Podcast
Deep Dive Into Track 1: Wind, Water, Stone | Andrew Maxfield
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Join us as we discuss the title track of our upcoming album Wind, Water, Stone in depth. We discuss many of Drew's compositional methods such as word painting, counterpoint, genre-bending, and much more.
Wind, Water, Stone the album is set to launch on May 22, 2026.
Welcome to episode three of the Sound of Ages podcast. Today, Drew and I sit down to take a deep dive into the first track and title track of Sound of Ages upcoming album, Wind Water, Stone. Discuss the text, poem by Octavio Paz, and get into some of Drew's specific musical devices that he employs and all the great sounds that you're gonna hear. And then at the end, you get to be the first to listen to the track in its entirety before the album comes out. So buckle up for Windwater Stone.
SPEAKER_02I was content, she would keep sticks, but when she would keep sick.
SPEAKER_01Justly accused. Today we're gonna talk about the first track on the album, the title track. We're gonna do a deep dive, talk about the text, talk about some of the you know compositional features, Drew's voice and the performance. And you will be able to then hear at the end of the episode, you'll get to hear the track in its fullness, which is incredible and awesome. So, Drew, when we were talking about the album, we were trying to come up with a title, we were trying to come up with the name. What's this album gonna be called? And this piece was the last piece written for the album as like for two reasons. One, it was for our end-of-year concert. We wanted something really special for that performance. And then also we were looking for a piece that would maybe be the one single, you know, keystone, linchpin, whatever metaphor you want to use to tie the themes musically and textually, thematically of the whole album together. And you found this. Talk me through how you found it, what spoke to you, what kind of musical ideas came as you were reading it, et cetera, et cetera, that made you want to set this text.
SPEAKER_00Well, I think the first thing is that we were at the time we were sitting with a tentative album title of More from Drew's Dustbin, and it just felt like maybe that wasn't the way to go. It's hard to hard to say.
SPEAKER_01It's hard to sell.
SPEAKER_00Hard to sell, yeah. You know, yeah.
SPEAKER_01You were going for that grunt rock and roll, and it just didn't quite have the same ring.
SPEAKER_00Yep, yep. And since the the meatloaf covers album didn't pan pan out, um we needed something else. We needed something with a with title potential. And really, we were looking at a collection of everything except a title track. It was hilarious to look at it to look at a list of good rep that had not a title inside of it at all. It was weird.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. I've never it's it's really weird. I had never I had never experienced that before.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Because you know what, well, and to interject, I guess, when when you're when when I come up with titles for programs, I don't look at it the same way because it's you can you can make the title of the program the theme or a or like a featured piece or something a little bit more abstract and and unrelated to you know you can you can get away with more things, I feel, and be way generic and broad. So like Love is the name of this concert. Songs of Love.
SPEAKER_00Why didn't we go with that for the album title?
SPEAKER_01Because there are no songs of love on that. No, I'm just kidding. Okay, good point. There's one if you love me. But then it's interesting, for an album, none of it felt right. And was like, why doesn't this feel right? Anyway, anyway, keep going.
SPEAKER_00Well, so I went digging and um Wind Water Stone, this poem by Octavio Paz. I have loved this poem for years, and I remember writing, attempting to set it two different times, like two completely different settings. One in probably about 2018 and another in about 2020. And in both cases, it was um it was kind of a swing and a miss. And I think one of the things that I had the third time around is that I actually had specific human voices in mind. And this sounds maybe kind of funny, but through the course of our collaboration, since I've written so much for Stand of Ages, I don't think about it as just like writing generic choral music, S-A-T-B, whatever. I really think about the individual singers, and it gives me a lot of inspiration and joy to imagine writing lines that that just kick butt for those human beings. And so I came around to this text that I knew pretty well because I'd attempted to set it a couple of times, but with this newfound attachment to the singers of Sand of Ages and also the this kind of key idea of using the electric guitar. Um and so for some reason it felt like, ah, now it's time when it hadn't quite been time. But sometimes creative stuff is like that. Like you have to you have to kind of fall on your face twice and then get up a third time. And so the I don't even remember where I discovered the text the first time. It's been so many years. Um and of course I'm I'm reacting to an English translation of what would have been a Spanish source text, and I I don't feel particularly comfortable setting languages that I don't speak. Um and so it's a setting of a translation of Wind Waterstone, which is you know the way these things happen. And um little tiny fragments of one of the original compositions survive inside of this thing, but it's essentially a new composition written in order to come up with something that felt like a title track to pull this project into focus.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and it's you know that that makes me think of the um makes me think of a couple things. Like, first of all, you know, it's great to see the pros, quote, you know, the the A-League pro composers, you know, don't always necessarily get it right the first time. You know, and it's like, oh, you have to work at it. It's like reminding that the 10-year overnight success, there are 10 years before that, you know. It also makes me think of the the concept that I learned when I was in Christian Aspin's class in my master's degree, where he talked about how, you know, as a composition professor who also taught undergraduate theory, some of the some of the best, quote unquote, best compositions he received were from his undergrad theory students, not from his private composition students, because there were so many more parameters to follow beforehand instead of just like, here's a blank canvas, go forth. Right now you're you're paralyzed by the the quantity of possibilities. And so putting a parameter on it of six voices, these six voices, an electric guitar. Now all of a sudden, even that, I mean, you could parameter that down even further, but I think there's something that opens the creative mind when you give yourself those parameters too. So that's really fascinating. Yeah, what interest you had with the text.
SPEAKER_00When I started composing, I don't which I don't know when the start date is on any of this, but you know, a decade plus ago, I think I was kind of a an intuitive songwriter who was pretty good at voice leading um and pretty good at chords, but I didn't yet have a very deep toolbox of composer tools. And I feel like I've got a slightly deeper box of composer tools now, and it feels good to fill your toolbox, and so coming back to a text that was familiar but with a deeper toolbox, you know, that's that's I guess that's just part of the game. I'll probably have the same feeling two years from now when I come back to something, uh you know, a sketch or a text that I know and say, oh, oh, how little I used to know, or how poor of a craftsman I used to be. But anyway, that's how we got here. Wind, water, stone.
SPEAKER_01That's awesome. I don't want to read the text now. This is the English translation by Elliot Weinberger. Water follows stone. Wind scatters water. Stone stops the wind. Water, wind, stone. Wind carves stone stones a cup of water. Water escapes and is wind. Stone, wind, water. Wind sings in its whirling. Water murmurs going by. Unmoving stone keeps still. Wind, water, stone. Each is another and no other. Crossing and vanishing through their empty names. Wind water, stone, wind.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, he's tricky because it it changes its order every time it shows up.
SPEAKER_01Every time, and and it's uh but but that's that's really intentional, obviously, and really profound in and of its own right, right? This circle, this kind of circle of life, circle meditative, cyclical um idea. Anyway, yeah. So that there it is, and it opens with a fantastic little guitar bit, which we ended up actually cutting and just starting right on, right?
SPEAKER_00Well, we cut part of it and it so it's a shorter introduction, which was uh uh you know part of it. That's right, it's just two measures. That's right. Just two two measures. Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that guitar intro kind of just like gets us into the sound world for a second. We you know, we it was a little bit long and we realized it didn't need to be all of that, but it just kind of needed to alert our attention for this slight little bit, and then and then let the voices start telling the story.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think part of it the utility of the introduction is that it kind of announces to the ears of the listener that hey, there's an electric guitar in here.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And that's and it's great.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and it's it's weird, uh, you know, uh this of before we get into maybe some of the other details, it makes me think of your matrices that you developed for your doctoral portfolio and doctoral thesis or uh dissertation with it, it feels like wait, is this a pop tune or is this a classical tune? It doesn't feel it feels like both and neither. You know, each is each is another and no other, I think at the same time. Yeah, yeah, a lot of ways. And it's it's got that, it's it really draws you in.
SPEAKER_00Well, to to kind of drill in on that a little bit, for any listeners who are interested, you if you can kind of imagine an x-axis and a y-axis and the intersection of them creates four quadrants, you know, kind of a two by two matrix. And an x-axis, you can describe a composition by the degree to which it tends to be it its identity is derived from being melodic on one end versus motivic on the other end. And the more melodic something is, the more distinctly, unforgettably melodic it is. Ironically, the harder, in a way, the harder it is to develop the material because the melody is doing such a such a job on your imagination and your memory. And then on a y-axis, you can um you can imagine pieces um that are what I call reducible. So something that's reducible, totally reducible, can be reduced to a lead sheet where there's just some sort of melodic representation accompanied by shorthand for for harmonic information. So a lead sheet for a song, anything out of the fake book, would be that. Um on the other end of that spectrum, on the other end of that axis, you'd have something that is effectively irreducible, where if you were to um try to symbolically reduce some aspect of the notation, you would make it less than what it really is.
SPEAKER_04What it is, yeah.
SPEAKER_00And what I like about this, I call it the malleability reducibility matrix, but what I like about that is that instead of talking about music on a style basis, like is it a pop tune or is it an art song? It gives you a descriptive approach to just say, well, to what extent can this be reduced to a lead sheet? And is it primarily, does it get its sound, its identity, primarily through melodic content or motivic content? Like how how malleable is it? And I think that it's quite an interesting framework. It's a it's a useful descriptive framework because sometimes we fall short, we start evaluating we try to pit high art against low art in really useless ways. But when we look at it, you can see that composers uh sometimes they have a really tiny footprint and they make things that have a uh sort of a they they make a lot of things that have kind of a narrow band of attributes that fit in like just one quadrant. Great songwriters might all fit in there. But then composers might have a larger footprint writing things that are, you know, one day it's something that's totally irreducible and highly malleable, that a lot of symph uh symphonies and large orchestral works, things that have to propel you over long spans of time, tend to tend to live there. And a piece like Windwater Stone, I was already curious about exploring different little nooks and crannies in in that playing field, because that in and of itself is both interesting analytically, but also it's it's an it's interesting creatively. Like you were saying, writing for six specific singers is a creative constraint that's different from just generically writing something that's kinda SATB or something like that. And in this case, um there are parts that will feel like they're derived from a uh a sing-song-y melody with chords underneath. But then if you the more you listen, it doesn't behave the way that it should if it were an arrangement of a pop tune. It starts becoming very polyphonic and uh driven by melodic or sort of like um motivic development. Right. And that's that's me just kind of exploring different aspects of that terrain.
SPEAKER_01And again, the thing that's interesting to me about that is that you get pop tunes and well, I I don't like this nomenclature either, but I I haven't figured out another way to say it. But what would traditionally be called high art and low art, classical music versus pop music, occupying the same space on that quadrant because you know, a poolank art song for children's voices that's 30 seconds long for a soloist, you may think, oh yeah, that's reducible, and it is high very complex and not reducible at all, and it's very melodic. So it's like half of it feels like a pop song, the other half of it really doesn't. You know, on the x-axis it feels just like a pop tune. Uh hard to develop melodic idea, but on the y-axis, it is completely irreducible, and so you know, it it it puts different pieces that we're used to analyzing in in generic form and stylistic constraints and blows all of the takes down all of those boundaries and borders and barriers and puts them in a new framework to look at. And it makes it makes me like when I first when you first introduced that concept to me, it's like ah, I look at music differently ever since. All music that I listen to, it's all like very different now, and it's like, ooh, because I'm trying to figure out the nature of the sound. And so I think there's a lot of like you said, some specific elements that are that way through the whole album that live in different quadrants of that kind of matrices, and there's some stylistic when we talk about having a voice, you have your you know, some elements that are unique to you that we can go through now in Waterstone and dive into a little bit. And so what's the if you had to say what are some building blocks on your foundation of this piece, you know, when you're first starting, etc.
SPEAKER_00Well, when you read the text, um and when you look at it on the page, you can see that uh Octavio Paz is creating these uh stanzas that kind of loop around each other. They're sort of recursive structures where this notion that wind, water, and stone maybe aren't three separate things. They're just like a continuum or a cycle or something like that. And I don't know why I'm drawn to things that feel kind of circular, but I totally, totally am. You know, anytime I can sneak canons into a piece or build musical structures based on circles or repeating patterns or something like that, I'm probably gonna do it. It's just it makes me smile. And so this whole piece is based on repeating cycles. And in fact, there's there's an underlying chord progression, a shaccoon, if you will.
SPEAKER_01Um big, big kid word right there.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I know, I know. But uh there's a repeating pattern of chords that whether you notice them on the surface all the time, or it's underneath there almost all the time. So you can listen for repeating structures and you can listen for little microcanons and echoes of things. Um and I um I don't think my musical language is particularly dissonant. I I don't really I don't know what that means exactly. Um this one, you know, I feel like when people are encountering new music by a living composer, they're like bracing themselves for this kind of um complex sonic experience. And I just get slapped on the wrist by some theory teacher if you use any recognizable harmonies. And I don't really buy into that as a way of thinking. Um and so you won't hear that stuff for the most part, you know. Like occasionally I'll use like aleatoric or kind of like random elements and pieces, but in a piece like this, it's getting I'm more interested in like creating uh almost sensation like waves of water. You know, there's kind of they're lapping against the beach, and you could say they're distinct waves until you watch them and realize it's the same water that's just kind of like rising and falling, and you're not sure. Where one wave starts and the next one stops. And that's a sensation that I think is cool and uh and interesting. And the other thing. Yeah, keep going there.
SPEAKER_01Well, I was gonna say I hear that in the in the idea of you, you know, you have this set in a simple meter of four to start, very and you have that wada. That just step, this one simple step. But then in the guitar, da da in groups of three that aren't triplets, they're still eighth notes in that simple thing, but it has that cascading group of three. You know, there's three words wind, water, stone, and it has that cycle feel underneath the four that kind of gives it this floating on waves. There's no solid ground beneath you, but it's not crazy, it's just kind of floating through space-time kind of feel, and that m-da m like comes back. And I think that's maybe the first iteration of that sort of cyclical um um sensibility, I guess.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, well, I mean we you know, in music theory, although it shows up mostly in music history and lit, we talk about word painting. And uh it can be overdone for sure, but I also feel like it would be silly to miss the opportunity to to treat water like water. Yeah, yeah. Right. So uh yeah, so there's um there's plenty of text painting. Uh there's um, you know, when on words like whirling, whirling sings in its whirling, whirling, whirling, there's there's just kind of a whirling sensibility.
SPEAKER_01Uh I'm even looking at measure 14, which I mean, you don't have the score at home. I don't know why I said that, but the first time we get to like well, not the first time, but the end of that first stanza of water, wind, stone, and these sondos kind of down with these just guitar power rock and roll power chords in in the bass and baritone voice, just sli like moving down in fifths, very grounded, earthy, stone-like, you know. Anyway, there's another example of that too.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, a little heavier than the water, so to speak.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Completely. Now, one other question I have then, as we get to because when you when you first like it, it really does. It I think you weave through this needle really well where it's like, it feels like a song. A lot of classical musicians will say, oh, that's a piece of music versus calling it a song. But I but I feel like um like when when you we have a a a song that we're singing, or it's like a it's one of the the hits, one of the tracks from the album, or whatever the Beatles, what did the Beatles used to call it? Another a number. Feels like a number from one of the albums. This is the first number. But it's like but it but there are really intentional and cool, complex little structures inside of it that well, it's not quite a song, and I think you thread that really well. And I think one of the moments that I really feel that the most is measure well is when we get to the each is another and no other totally grooves. So it's like we're we're we're word painting, we start out, maybe this is a song, and it melts into okay, no, no, this is like a choral piece, and then we get to that and be like, no, this is a this is a groove, man. Each is another thing. Even though the meter doesn't feel like that, it's what it makes you kind of want to tap your toe a little bit.
SPEAKER_00Well, sure it does. I remember Brian Wilson referring to good vibrations as a a pocket symphony.
SPEAKER_01Ooh, nice.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that's cool. You know, and I suppose I suppose musicologists might look at him and say, Whoa, what a pocket symphony, yeah, what's that? And it just is what he says it is. It's a pocket symphony. And why would it not be one? And so, in uh the case of a piece of music or a numba like this one, um what if wind, water, and stone are three separate entities, but they're not so separate, and they flow together kind of cyclically in this kind of image that is unified by poetic language, by kind of earthy descriptions, um, by recursive uh rhetorical structures. Um and so the music is is kind of that way too. You know, you have things that feel song-like, that are sort of like micro movements that are made up of the same each one is made up essentially of the same things tonally. Um and they kind of riff off each other and melt into each other. And by the time you get to the end, I think you would hear it, you'd say, Oh yeah, I get it. It's kind of like wind, water, and stone. They're all kind of part of each other. Okay. And so you have a piece of music that's like a pocket symphony, it's like, oh, I get it. Add some parts and they all fit together.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And I just every time we get there, I just it really does groove. And it and you know, that peach is a da-dom dee-dom, that same water, that like just that cascading step down, but now it's in this groove, this pocket groove, um, and then melts back into you know, uh the the material that makes it feel more like a a piece as opposed to a number on the track. Right.
SPEAKER_00And my one of my mentors, Philip Lasser, would he he likes to talk about contrapuntal motives, which are sort of micro small units of counterpoint, a couple steps up, a couple steps down, maybe a small leap, but these are what you might think of as like the stitches that in aggregate make up a stitch pattern. And in a piece like this, I'm very interested in creating coherence through contrapuntal coherence, and not so interested in giving it a discernible form that's like sonata form, rondo form, song form. Rounded binary, binary formary form. Because those are I feel like those are all they're not none of them are untrue, but none of them are very creatively inspiring to me. I right when I when I start a piece of music, the question I have no interest in fitting a new thing into some sort of textbook container. Um what I am interested in doing is saying, well, this will have a beginning, it will have an end, and between those there's a middle. How am I gonna propel myself from beginning through the middle to the end and keep myself interested and at all costs not be boring? That's that's the question I have for myself. And so that's what I I think that's kind of kind of how you'd explain the formal structure of this. It's it's supposed to feel a little bit swirling and recursive, but it's stitched together with the contrapuntal motives that you've already pointed out.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and I think it r I mean I think that that really reflects you know I am no poet expert poet interpreter. But to me it's like it's kind of like a cycle of life in a lot of ways, and a cycle of i anything, really like all things are cyclical, where it it it starts and it it's like an archetype of the hero's journey. It starts in one place and it goes through something, and it comes back to that place again, but changed, and it goes and it goes on to another new place, and it comes back but changed, and it just keeps having this. And I think that this piece embodies that really well and sets up the the sound world of the whole albums. So before we go through now and listen to Windwater Stone, keeping those things in mind, what are I mean you've listed a couple maybe indirectly, but directly, what are a few techniques or um devices, I guess, that you tease up in this piece that we can look forward to on other numbers on the album. Well, the numbers, my best live live-pudle in accent uh with Beatles.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that's Cam, that's pretty good. That's pretty good. Um okay. Well, there's a few things like things to listen for, things to notice. So inside this piece, you might notice how the guitar interplays with the vocals. Um in the score, there's a spot where the annotation says lean into the bluesy stuff.
SPEAKER_01And I think side note, by the way, I think that it is a travesty if Drew never gets to write a piece for you because his score annotations are them that are so hilarious. It's stand-up comedy material for anybody reading his music, and no one gets to see it. So maybe we'll put big watermarks on it that say perusal copy, and we'll let you look at it so you can look at things like lean into the bluesy stuff.
SPEAKER_00Well, I mean, I use, you know, an average amount of Italian stuff like everybody else does, but why not just uh say it like it just call a spade a shovel, you know? Anyway, so you'll things see things like lean into the bluesy stuff. And part of that is because um I mean we work with a fabulous, fabulous guitarist, Sam Handley. And Sam, if you're listening, ple please never move. Don't go anywhere where I can't collaborate with you. You're not allowed. Um not allowed, Sam. Uh, but even you know, it I feel like you kind of have to give people permission to do the thing that you think you're not supposed to do with classical music, and that is to lean into the bluesy stuff. Like you should absolutely do that. I mean, you know, Lenny did. Yeah, William Byrd. William Byrd totally did, Billy. Yeah, Tommy Alice. You bet, leaned into those gnarly cross relations, and uh, I feel like uh we know no need to be too um proper, even if we're singing stuff that doesn't, you know, doesn't have such a sharp edge. So there's bluesy stuff, and then there's an annotation like uh put your put a slide, like a guitar slide, on your finger while a certain note rings. And then the guitarist, Sam, uses a slide like you would expect in blues guitar to do these doubled harmonies with the singers. And the thing that's interesting about that as a um tool is that you can deliberately play in the cracks instead of you know accidentally, which happens plenty of times, never with standard ages, but once in a while, once in a while, you know, there there may be singers that find themselves in the cracks. But um but it's a I think it's really interesting because we spend a lot of time in our lives musically looking at a piano and thinking that it just exists. And we we assume that you know equal temperament uh is uh is a done deal until you actually listen to singers. If if you know if singers are left to their own devices, they're frequently intuiting their way into just intonation.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And if you look at a guitar, the the interior tuning of the guitar, because it's stacked in fourths, is so different from a piano. And then you think about how you can bend strings or you can slide a slide between frets, and you're just in this, then you really are in something that feels like water instead of these like rigid, you know, you feel like you know, playing the piano all day. It feels like you're running up and down like concrete steps. And uh but when you put a slide on the guitar and you pair guitar with voices, it feels like you're more, it's more like you're in a wave pool or something like that. And I think that's a kind of an exciting sound. Um and then maybe the other thing to listen to is regardless of whether you're coming to this music having seen a score or having any kind of like music background or whatever, to just sort of notice when it feels like it's a song and when it feels like it's a piece of music, because they kind of blend into each other. You'll be in this kind of like mellow melodic thing, and then it will build into this kind of like exciting chord.
SPEAKER_01Like the whirlings and yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00So it it's kind of two things at once, you know? It can be it can be a song and a piece. Why not both? It can be a a piece of song. Love it. A piece a piece of something, that's what this is. Why don't we Why don't we have a listen?
SPEAKER_01Let's listen to it.
SPEAKER_00Join us next time for another and another installment of the Sound of Ages podcast with me, your host, Cameron Kavanaugh.
SPEAKER_01It sounded just like me. I'm keeping that in the recordings. This is how the episode's gonna end. And it's gonna have the the the outro music going literally right now. Do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do. That's actually what I was gonna use instead of um for Richards, but I mean that'll be in the same key and it's great. So we'll see you see you guys next time for the next track deep dive on Windwater Stone. Drew, what's the next track?
SPEAKER_00And now for something completely different. It is a setting, a resetting, a reconceptualization of the Oriens antiphon. Love it.
SPEAKER_01A little bit more overtly mixing, explicitly mixing old and new.
SPEAKER_00Yes, but it will not be marked as explicit on the No, it doesn't have the little E.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah, clean clean version only.
SPEAKER_00Clean cut, O Oriens.
SPEAKER_01See you guys next time.
