Ancient & Modern Collide | O Oriens | With Andrew Maxfield

Today we take a deep dive into track 2 of Sound of Ages upcoming album Wind, Water, Stone: O Oriens. This ancient chant melody is masterfully woven into contemporary textures and harmonies by composer in residence Andrew Maxfield. We discuss elements of the piece, philosophical approaches, specific passages, and calling back to ancient techniques. 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_06 0:06

Today on the Sound of Ages podcast, we launch video.

SPEAKER_05 0:12

We'll see how it goes. When it's a one-man crew, it's a little uh sketchy, if you know what I mean. Today, we're gonna sit down with Andrew Maxfield once again for the next episode in our Windwater Stone series, where we take a deep dive into track number two. Oriens. It's a harmonization slash recomposition using original chant melody from Oriens. And we'll take a deep dive into it. So sit back, buckle up. This is the Sound of Ages podcast.

SPEAKER_00 0:49

She would keep sticks up with the case.

SPEAKER_06 1:02

Thus, Dolph, we have one Andrew, Sir Andrew Maxfield, here to talk about O'Oriens. Oh boy, here I am. Yep.

SPEAKER_05 1:18

Welcome back to Sound of Ages Podcast. We today are talking about the second track on our Wind Waterstone album, O'Oriens. This is part of our reimagining kind of set, I guess, for lack of a better word. They're not really coupled together or set together on the album, but we Drew and I had this idea that Drew would write some reimaginings of some Renaissance works, excuse me, and put this new spin on them. And so O'Oriens is one of those. And the one that we're going to talk about today. Yeah, dude. Drew, help us start in.

SPEAKER_01 2:13

But frequently it's kind of connecting those dots within single works. And so on the Wind Waterstone album, if you zoom way out, you could say that in general, there's kind of a connection between old counterpoint and new harmony. That's a theme. But then if you zoom in a little bit, then you could look at Orients and you could look at If You Love Me and say, ooh, these are um kind of a new recontextualization or recasting or something like that of old source material. And um, you know, that's that's kind of old news in the compositional world. Everybody likes to look backward in order to figure out how to move forward. And um, if you think about grabbing bits of plain chant, it could be um the DSE ray, and you know, it shows up in all sorts of compositions, whether it's Berlioz or wherever else, uh it's kind of an an old game that composers play, which is um kind of hanging their hat on existing material or adding like a little link to a chain that stretches way back. And I like that frame of reference. In fact, if you go back, you know, to the Renaissance, the there were there wasn't really a word composer, there was just musician. And if you were the kind of person who made music, you know, a craftsperson of the musical craft, what you did was you took what existed and you added a link to the chain. And it wasn't such there wasn't this kind of modernist obsession with being original or making something that nobody had ever heard before. I'm putting words in their mouths a little bit, but I I think that's a true assessment. There was really just um learn how the notes work, learn how patterns work, and then be a good little craftsperson. And uh that meant using a lot of inherited material, received material to make whatever it was you were gonna make. And I don't think there was such a weird um, again, kind of modernist attachment to intellectual property and this kind of stuff, right? Right, and and and uh I I think that these days in our uh compositional landscape, certainly in composer school, there's a total obsession, a blinding obsession with self-expression and making things that nobody's ever heard before. And the only reason I say this is that when I auditioned to Juilliard for my master's program, I sat down with a well-known composer who was in an audition, who was kind of conducting this audition, and he was looking at my score, and I'd I thought I'd be clever and um ask him, like, well, what are you looking for? And he he paused and he said, Well, I just I just want to hear something I've never heard before. And it's so interesting to me that that that was the the basic screening function of the audition, and it puts this wild prize on quote unquote originality, whatever that actually means.

SPEAKER_05 5:49

Or ingenuity or uh yeah, like real. You think about well, it it's okay. Sorry to cut you off, but I I I'll I'll let you keep going in a second, but I don't want to lose this thought. So it's like the I think of it also when people talk about it in business of you know disruptive innovation, and you you everything has to be brand new, completely unrelated from what's before it, and then that's how you've said something new. But even something like Apple or composers who may like I don't I can't even think of composers like Schoenberg, who you may think just on the surface, whoa, they said something so new, completely out of a vacuum. No one had said anything like it before them. And it's just not true. Like that they're they're taking all of this history, they're saying something significantly new based on their depth of study down to what they perceive as the foundational principle of X. And so it's like I like the comment of the more fundamental a thing is, the more things are connected to it. So it's like you take one strand down to Renaissance counterpoint, late medieval, early Renaissance modernity, and you follow that thread singularly up, and you can find your way to Schoenberg and innovations in certain areas, but the rest are very strongly anchored to the foundation of Western music as a whole. And so it's just interesting to me that that that is the perception because then it shows that, oh man, you might have a little bit more homework to do if you think that that's the if that's the goal, if that's what you're trying to do, you actually have more to study from behind the past in the past than trying to come up with something no one's ever done, you know.

SPEAKER_01 7:48

Yeah, well, I've sp I've spent a fair amount of time thinking about that, and maybe you can't avoid thinking about it if you're trying to compose. Uh because you you know, you want to say something that hasn't said been said before. I think that's a reasonable goal. But how you do that is worth thinking about because I think the common wisdom is, you know, you you plop some kid down in a conservatory program and you say, Go forth, don't sound like anything that has come before you, no pressure.

SPEAKER_05 8:23

And I can't think of anything more paralyzing than that.

SPEAKER_01 8:28

Well, and it's just dumb.

SPEAKER_05 8:30

Right. It's just genuine. Right, because it's a it's a paradox, right? The best composers are ones who have a very unique voice that are saying something new and original, but that paradox on the other side of it is like tons of history and study of what came before them.

SPEAKER_02 8:49

Yeah. Right.

SPEAKER_05 8:50

And that those two things married together is what actually propels things forward. And so I I like as a conductor, I really enjoy exploring that paradox too, because uh for whatever reason, being a being uh ensemble that's like, let's just do new works, only new works, living composers doesn't really interest me. And when we started, when Sound of Ages first started, we were gonna be Renaissance only, and I wasn't gonna do anything later than Mozart. And then I realized that that is not a good idea for me to do because there are other groups who are already doing that. Number one, and number two, Mozart is actually very different and hard to program with Thomas Talis. So if you're gonna have, and the market here is asking for different things, and I care way more about connecting with the audience and like real elevating, heart-opening connection, forging experiences. And so that that's when I feel like, oh man, there's this cool ancient world that if we can find the thread to that foundation from today, we can take the audience with us, you know. And so that that's why your works and and our collaboration, finding old and new, both as composer and conductor, has been so thrilling and fulfilling. And I think, like we mentioned last podcast, we've I think we've barely scratched the surface, you know. There's infinite left to explore.

SPEAKER_01 10:26

Yeah, well, kind of connecting some of those dots, you know, whereas I think it's kind of a um a tall order and a bad idea to tell some young composer, you know, go forth, be original. Um, by contrast, I think it's good advice to say um go all the way to the bottom of the well. Like love your love your craft, love the history, and instead of trying not to sound like your influences, wrap your arms all the way around your influences and figure out what ignites you about those uh pieces or composers or what have you. And I think what happens is that if you if you respond with affection and interest to the tradition and to your influences, and you keep uh asking questions and answering them by practicing the craft, at some point on the long end of that, you might inadvertently say something in your own voice. And that's that's how you find your voice is it ensues. You don't you don't really pursue it directly, you pursue the craft, and you do it with love and curiosity and generosity, because that's the only thing that sustains a craft like this. And then on the on the far end, sort of as a leap of faith, something that happens to you eventually is that you s you figure out what your little tiny little tiny contribution might be. And I think the best goal for any composer is just to be a good and interesting link in the chain. And now that could be a really revolutionary link. You could make something, you could really end up making something that nobody has ever heard before. It could be radically different from what came before it. And you could be a standout in the, you know, the sort of the textbook summary of music history or whatever. That's all fine. But I think that the way that you find find your way there with integrity is loving the craft, loving the tradition, going all the way to the bottom of the well, and then continuing to ask questions about why you love what you love and what interests you and responding to them with your own work. And I noticed in myself um for a long time that for whatever reason my ears perked up when I was listening to um early music. Like I'm way interested in what's going on in that music. And I think part of it is that it doesn't quite add up in tonal terms, in like common practice terms. And it just, you know, you expect things to go right and they go left instead. It's just awesome that way. And then for whatever reason, like my ears and my brain get a little sleepy, kind of early 1700s, mid-1700s, and I continue, and it's like, you know, I I'm sure I'd get bad grades for saying this in a music lit class or something like that, but I just get a little sleepy from there through the beginning of the 20th century. But man, like the minute that um, you know, the minute that the common practice uh uh kind of starts cracking in the margins and people start asking fundamental questions again, like you were talking about, kind of getting down to the foundational stuff, then my ears light right back up. And so as a person, for whatever reason, no good reason at all, I'm just drawn to the old and the new and trying to figure out what they have in common. And I, to me, what's interesting about that commonality, which I think points at some of our collaborations and uh maybe what Sand of Ages is for and what it does and all this, is that I think that before the common practice uh answer was sort of cemented in everybody's brains, people were still trying really hard to figure out what music was and how it worked.

SPEAKER_02 14:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 14:43

And oh yeah, right, like it's not that the music is early that makes it interesting, it's that it's primal and it's exploratory. And the you know, you had composers um who were also, you know, theoreticians who are writing these little treatises and and all this kind of stuff, and you read them, and they're having big debates about what is consonant and what isn't. Right. That's that's inherently interesting, right? Because it's like pure pure math or particle physics or something like that. And then everything gets get kind of gets answered and cemented in place by the time the broke is happening, and we have this kind of like templated answer for what the language is and how it works, which is basically that you have four note four-note chords, but you only have three pitches and a triad, so you have to double something. And what gets doubled and why is the common practice. Like that's that is the answer.

SPEAKER_05 15:45

And right, and there's this hierarchical order of which chords, which harmonies in that particular scale set tend to be the most important down to the least important, yeah, is kind of the next step on top of the doubling, I think, because because you when you think about when you think about a piece, uh a chant, let's say, or all that early, quote unquote, early music that's based on a final, and it doesn't, but it doesn't really work that way because it's on that was you know the pure modes were only for monophony. Then you get into polyphony and it's like, well, it's still in this modal realm, but there's no like four, five, one. It's just like here's the final chord, but we can cadence kind of anywhere at any time, and you feel it going around, and you don't have this tritone pull the way that the common practicers, common practitioners would have thought of it. And so it's like which notes to double and hierarchy of harmony, I guess, for lack of a better word, is really like what comes to my mind. And that it makes it so what's the word? It's like it's it's predictable, I guess. Where it there's the four there's formulaic and it has this even a deceptive cadence is like, ooh, deceptive cadence, so deceptive of you.

SPEAKER_01 17:18

Yeah, yeah. Well, formulaic, I think, actually is the right word because what was being determined when they figured out a common practice for which note gets doubled in how the hierarchy works, what they were coming up with was the syntax or the formula of harmony, right? I mean, literally formula the one goes to the four, the four goes to the five, the five goes to the one, and all of the variations on that theme. And the thing is that like it's a beautiful formula, and there ain't nothing wrong with that formula. And I, you know, all the music that happened inside it's like when they defined, when they sort of said, ah, we've we cracked it. This is how the language, this is how the tonal language works. There were so many composers that wrote exquisitely beautiful music using the language to do what that language can do. And there's still an infinite number of things that you can do in that language. And I love even when I was joking that my I got a little sleepy, I love the music that that's happening as the common practice was clarifying, and then it became more colorful and inventive within its own parameters as um you developed a an increasingly chromatic and shifty way of using that same language. But my I mean, the argument that I say all the time is that by the end of the um 1800s, you know, when you have Strauss and Mahler and these guys, like they basically max out the chromatic common practice language. Um, you can't use any more chromatic pitches than they used, uh, and you can't fit any more players on the stage. So it's like or even in the concert hall for that matter. I mean, it's just so extra. It's just it's just big big, big, biggity big, and you can't get any bigger. And so somebody wakes up at the turn of the century, whether it's WC waking up or whether it's Schirmberg or Bartok, or I mean we can go down the list, but everybody wakes up saying, uh, okay, so they used up all the notes, they used up all the players. What do we do now? And I feel like that's a really important moment because they're asking themselves in a way the same things that their Renaissance ancestors were asking, is like, hmm, what is this language? How does it work?

SPEAKER_05 19:57

How does sound work? Yeah, right. How does sound even function? And I think that's what's so, you know, it's um because because you could even take that to this is not to disparage again, we we joke and we tease, but I love Mozart. I just love Mozart, man. There's some of his choral stuff that I could just do all the time, you know. Absolutely and the formula is beautiful, and I think, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me, as a non-aficionado of jazz, that jazz is a hyperextension of in terms of its harmonic progressions, you have a lot of uh common practice inspired harmonic things, right? Like five one is still a very jazz thing, right?

SPEAKER_01 20:48

Well, here's the thing is like I I really am fascinated by that early 20th century kind of fissure, right? I mean, you have political orders that are collapsing and you have harmonic orders that are collapsing all at the same time. And um, if you look at these various answers of how do you say something after Strauss and Mahler used up all the notes and all the players, you get different answers. Um, like you have a W a WC answer, which is like, well, let's let's keep the basic material of the language, but let's mix up the syntax, let's loosen the syntax. You have a Schoenberg answer, which is like, well, let's keep the individual pitches, but let's completely do away with the syntax. Let's let's do away with the you know the you know third based harmony and see what we can see if we can create meaning and coherence without those parameters. And of course he was um you know a master scholar in Beethoven and whatnot. Really understood the common practice, but but he had an interest in saying, like, could we create something coherent without it? And I think Bartok is another interesting response where you say, How do we make meaning without doing it exactly the way that these uh uh the guys that came just before us did? Um but then jazz actually is another really important answer to that question because you have um you have uh you know the basic parameters of common practice syntax, no question. Um but you have a tension-rich and highly highly chromatic decoration, and then even the and then you have harmonic substitutions that start taking the where you have one sonority taking the place of another, and then before too long, it's gets harder and harder to spot the underlying common practice template. And I think you can argue that it's it's almost always there under the surface, but it gets a little farther and farther under the surface. Um but it's a player's language, it's an improviser's language, and um, you know, academia always runs the risk of turning it into a historical artifact, but it is, I think it's one of the most interesting responses to the collapse of the common practice tonal language. And so for whatever reason, you know, if if we take this sort of like we're we're just we're doing the the Artemis thing here where we've like looped around the moon and now we're on our way back. But um, yeah, if we use that as like the long return towards the O'Orians track two on Windwater Stone, it it's inherently interesting to me to say, like, well, okay, so um I feel like what we think of as like modern music at the dawn of the 20th century, what does it have in common with early music? Well, I think they I think they're asking foundational questions about how sound works, about how do we create coherence if we're not leaning hard onto the prefabricated answers of common practice harmony? Um, what is consonant? What is dissonant? Why do we perceive things as consonants and dissonants? You know, how does how does tension and release work? And I think what they have in common are these kind of like primal questions and primal interests. And I'm not, I mean, my my setting of Orions, I don't I don't think of it as particularly harmonically uh adventurous or whatever, but it's just me exploring those questions and saying, like, huh, you know, can modal chant have something in common with modal jazz? Uh and can you can you what what are the what are the intersections and how do you explore them? And that's so that that's where this the stuff comes from.

SPEAKER_05 25:04

Yeah, so we open with just a um a straight quote from the chant itself. Yep.

SPEAKER_02 25:12

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_05 25:17

And then it melts from there, and we hear it then kind of cascade, have this little echo, and then we hear Anthony or counter tenor sing it in a free verse kind of chant, free rhythm, free rhythm type rhythm. Um then it moves on, we have another little echo, and then I love whenever you start to explore the idea of Fauberdone and all things therefore adjacent to it, is some of my favorite stuff. Anytime we get to those moments that you write in any of your pieces, they're always some of my favorite moments because I love that ancient Fauberdone sound. And I love that sound when it appears in contemporary choral music. I love what when you hear it in gospel. Again, this is not that's not Faubardone. I should say three-part parallel planing harmonies. I love it in debut impressionism, I love it in gospel music, I love it in Appalachian bluegrass, I love it in true Faubardon from Renaissance, and I love it in jazz, right? You think about the horn section. Yeah, there's something about it that is just so captivating to me, especially when you have solitary tones underneath it, uh pedal tones, whatever. And so we get to, you know, part way through the score, and we have that this three-part little moment of the chant now in a in a faux faux bardone kind of way. Um and it's just thrilling.

SPEAKER_01 26:59

Well, I think what that's an interesting thing to point out because um when you know, in music school, when people slog their way through harmony, um, or you know, really theory, they there's there's this um priority given to teaching four-part chorale style voicing and this constant vertical reduction into knowable Roman numeral chords. And and you get these like weird things cemented in your brain, like, well, all things being equal, contrary emotion is good, and limited, you know, uh, you know, close connection between uh neighboring tones and a single voice is good because that creates a sense of connection, yeah. All this kind of stuff, right? And we very rarely ask ourselves questions like what is thrilling, what is beautiful?

SPEAKER_05 28:02

Right, right, because because literally and at that time contrary motion, whatever the things you just said, is was beautiful at that time. Yeah, and it and we can appreciate it, and it has its own beauty today, but it doesn't, it's not the only it's not the only beautiful.

SPEAKER_01 28:26

Right. And I I feel like the in you know, in music school, we uh do this funny thing where we basically drop in at the beginning of the common practice period, sort of like it's a done deal and a feta compli, and we're like, well, there are four voices, they are soprano, alto, tenor, bass, and uh here are the rules of voice leading. Go forth and don't do anything wrong. And it's and it's just not very I'm not even sure it's analytically all that useful. I mean, maybe it is, right? And I listen, I mean, I'm grateful that I can I can you know analyze a hymnal and reduce things to the underlying you know tonal syntax that that is useful, but it very but very rarely, like in all of the theory classes that I had in harmony classes, nobody said what would make this sparkle and shimmer, and why would people cause that notice themselves leaning forward on their chairs and catching their breath? And I feel like the what I really want is I want a theory of beauty, and I don't maybe that's just not classroom stuff to begin with. Maybe that's college isn't made for that. What do I know? But the the when you bring up the horn section or the sack section in a jazz band, or the tart tight three-part harmony in Appalachian music or in bluegrass, um, there's something uh thrilling. There's something groovy. Yeah. And part of what that is, is that what we're what we're getting is parallel motion and we're getting a sense of a thick line. And you know, in psychology, we there's this notion of boundary salience where we notice the edges of things more than we notice the the middle of things. And so in harmony, I mean, we know this already, you know, even in college harmony classes, because we know that the soprano is gonna stick out, it has this kind of melodic predominance, and we know the bass is gonna stick out, and you can kind of spot a good bass line when you see one on the page, because of how it grounds the harmony, it's doing a good job being a boundary player, right? Yeah, and so you notice the you notice the top and the bottom, and then the conventional wisdom is sort of like do no harm to your tenors and altos and just let them kind of float somewhere useful. And but but and if if each of those four voices, SATB, are lines, what we lose then very frequently is the notion of the relative thinness or thickness of a line. Because if you take four voices and they're each doing their own thing totally independently, great counterpoint, yada yada yada, you know, perfect polyphony or whatever, you might say that that's kind of like four thin ballpoint pen lines being dragged across a page simultaneously. And that's especially true if you have one voice per part, you're very aware of each one of those lines doing its thing.

SPEAKER_04 31:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 31:57

But uh but in a way they're all very similar to each other because each one has that same tip of the pen.

SPEAKER_04 32:07

Right.

SPEAKER_01 32:08

Whereas if you have some ballpoint pens and then you take a paintbrush loaded with magenta paint right through the middle of those same lines, and it has this like big, fat, splashy, squishy kind of quality to it, and you're like, wait a minute, that stands out.

SPEAKER_05 32:29

That one of these things is not the same as the others. Right. To put a variance on the on a uh famous phrase there.

SPEAKER_01 32:40

From the the wisdom of the Sesame Street.

SPEAKER_05 32:43

Uh living on the street. The street, I call it the street. Going back to the street, you know.

SPEAKER_01 32:48

Going back to the street. But then you say, oh, why is that line different from the other lines? Well, I think it's color, it's thickness, right? And so if you have three voices that are moving in parallel, they aren't really like three independent contrapuntal actors. It's like a thick paintbrush. It's a thick line. And there's a uh there's a uh, let's see, one of my jazz arranging books, I think Bill Russo talks about the thickened line. And I love that idea because um we can hear it. We notice it because it it does a different job in a texture in terms of foreground and background. We notice the upper limits of that line, the kind of melodic edge, but then there's all of this color that gets dragged along with it. And so, you know, whether you want to call it faux Bourdon or a thick line, whether you're looking at it in the Renaissance or in the center of a jazz band, there's this sense of um heft that comes in the center of a texture that glues things together and that that plays a different role than the surrounding texture. And so is there contrap is there contrary motion in a passage like that? Well, yeah, because you know, I, you know, in O'Oriens, I'll tip and and typically what I'll do is like if I'm using a faux bourdon kind of device, and for those of you who are not familiar with this, it's really just a third stacked below a fourth, and what looks like a first inversion triad chord. So like from the bottom up, that would be E, G, and C in a C major chord and first inversion, although our Renaissance ancestors wouldn't have had any idea what that meant. Um, but you have that pattern where you have the those intervals moving in parallel effectively with each other, sometimes dancing around tritones and other weirdnesses. But I'll have that like a thick line in the center of the texture, and then the contrary motion will be happening in other voices relative to the cluster that are moving in Faux Bourdon. And I I think it's just like you said, can't you?

SPEAKER_05 35:09

Well, it's cool. Because you just what you just said too is it's almost like you have a fountain pen and you just turn it a little bit. So now that line you're going really thin, and now all of a sudden the line you're drawing becomes really thick in the middle, and it's what gives this like musical calligraphy to the to the texture. And it's and then um again, I I what you had said makes me think of a conversation we had eons ago on the podcast about becoming obsessive about nomenclature versus trying to figure out what the thing really is, you know, and it's like flubberdone, three-part planing, whatever you want to call it, doesn't really matter. It's this idea then of the line thickening up. And now this part in Oriens directly, I mean, you got essentially B, I mean, a B and an A. Or and a D. So you got a low D below, whatever that is, the baritone D, B above that, and then an A above middle C, kind of like holding as bookends above and below, almost on just pedal tones, with this plane going in and in and through it in the middle three voices, and it's just and then that sort of melts and you melt that away into just a two-voice duet texture that is more of um independent line duet between tenor and baritone. And then we have this little reiteration of the oh ho ho ho ho that kind of cool articulation there in the O's, and then we hear this beautiful um kind of swelling, cascading upwards into these really beautiful harmonies that feels much more modern than things that we've heard before, but it has that contemporary choral feel with beautiful suspensions and cascading harmonies. It's really, really thrilling moment there.

SPEAKER_01 37:12

Well, it's an interesting text, right? Because it's um O day spring, splendor of light, eternal, and sun of righteous righteousness come and enlighten those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death. And so you in in very short order, in a short text, you go all the way up from this like celestial, radiant, infinite brightness kind of image down into the shadow of death, and it it's all framed by O, which is this kind of like um pleading.

SPEAKER_04 37:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 37:53

And so the text, you know, I don't talk about word painting where that came up, I think, in the last episode. But the the this shape of the lines have a rising and then a falling quality overall, the shape of the harmonies have kind of like a gr uh a gaining of brightness and intensity, and then a sinking into some sort of like ruminating darkness. And again, that's nothing particularly clever on my part because word painting is you know as old as all the Renaissance source material. But um, there you go.

SPEAKER_05 38:32

But there is a difference too between being simplistic and uh maybe maybe trite about it and and being subtle, um subtle about it and and a little bit more abstracted, I think. You know, we're talking about if we're talking about visual art, it's like this hyper-realism versus a slight abstraction invites you in. And I think your word painting lives in that slightly abstracted realm. Um the the the next little moment that I that I really like that we that we hear that's a direct kind of call back in time is when we get over to measure 32, 33, which you will hear, those of you listening. Um, we have these solid chords underneath, and the upper three voices have this cascading upwards, this upwards little motif, I guess. And then they sing it in imitation with each other. So you hear the upper three voices hitting that C5 beats apart from each other, and it has this really cool dazzling light rising, kind of imitative one after the other texture, and that imitation is very much a direct call back as well. Yeah, illumina.

SPEAKER_01 39:55

It's it's such an exciting word.

SPEAKER_05 39:58

Yeah. So many like the liquid consonants and the the jumping back and forth between e, which is a bright forward vowel, and lu, which is the darkest vowel. It's literally the brightest to the darkest vowel. And then we kind of settle in the center on ah, so illumina. Every consonant is a liquid consonant, so it has pitch and it has time, and you can really do a lot. And so I think these little bouncing lights that we hear, and then it kind of there's one last moment of this quasi-phoberdone, and then it kind of falls down into this mortis, and you hear this darker, richer chord on which is you know, death mortis, and it lands in this open, really open sonority. So, which is not where you're expecting it to go, to thinking uh talking about expecting to turn right and you turn left is exactly this this ending a little bit, you know.

SPEAKER_01 40:53

Well, okay, so to maybe comment on that as we're wrapping up, the um one of the things that I think is great about common practice harmony is that it kind of establishes this rapport with the listener where um somehow we all are in on the joke, right? Because if I go dot dot dot, everybody in the audience knows that it should go dot dot next, right? That's that's like the genius of common practice harmony is that we can take something that's totally abstract, just little vibrations in the air, and the composer can say something and the audience gets it. And it's because we have some shared expectations about one to the five to the one to the five and the one five one five five five. What right? We just we we kind of know how the language works, and that's the genius of it. And some of the music I like best, I like it because you can be clever inside of a shared language. If the audience has no idea what language you're speaking, it's actually very hard to be clever because your punchline doesn't land at all. Because if I if I come at you and I go peep up, you're like shrug, right? And so what interests me in this context is saying without leaning really hard onto the template of the 1451 common practice playbook, can I still be clever and can I communicate something to the listener so that they form expectations and so that their memory of the piece as it's passing causes them to wonder and causes them to guess and causes them to say, ooh, I think this is going to turn right. Because if I can if I can do that with them, then when I turn left, it's an interesting for everybody.

SPEAKER_05 43:00

Yeah. Yeah. Because you almost expect speaking of this passage in particular, it's almost like you kind of expect it to get to to some sort of F or B flat or C sonority that's kind of maybe slightly more open or have um, I think it's uh I can't remember who wrote the treatise on harmony about the turn of the 20th century. Uh anyway, it talks about open dissonances versus closed dissonances. You know, may maybe maybe an open shimmery dissonance in some sort of quasi-major-ish sonority. But it's totally not. It's this, it sounds like it's going to be this dominant chord to major and it's dominant, and then it it's like F A C E flat to G D G open.

SPEAKER_01 43:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 43:54

And it is wild and amazing. But that E flat that pulls you down to the D natural. And the F just stepping up to a G you know. And then having no third or anything.

SPEAKER_01 44:08

Well, there's two things going on with this one. One is that, you know, by by the time you get to the end end of this, you will have spent just over two minutes with this piece. Right. Yeah. And the opening parts of it, depending on how you're hearing them, you might hear them kind of as in a demodal minor context. There's there's a lot of that, and that kind of tips back to the source material. And so hearing uh B flats in that context isn't very surprising because it just fa sounds kind of D minor-ish or whatever. But then when it turns the corner at the end, well, so first we we get up into that illumina, that this like bright righteousness kind of shimmery stuff. But then when we get when it starts going back down and you feel the kind of the gravity shifting, what I hope is happening is that you start realizing that that whole long protracted opening sequence of D minor-ish stuff is actually more like uh a long uh minor five chord in a way to what what turns out to be the place where we land. Uh what it does is if you're listening actively, and if I'm doing if I'm doing the uh uh the job of speaking a language that we share a little bit, what we're gonna discover is that um what we thought was X was actually Y.

SPEAKER_04 45:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 45:41

And that's I feel like that's an exciting payoff for a composer because um I'm not I'm not dwelling in ambiguity or randomness because I'm not sure what I'm up to. What I'm trying to do is uh set the stage so that when you start watching the play, you think you get it, but then at the very last minute, everything rotates 90 degrees and you're like, oh no way, that was cool.

SPEAKER_05 46:12

It's like Inception.

SPEAKER_01 46:14

Okay, there we go.

SPEAKER_05 46:14

Like a music inception.

unknown 46:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 46:18

Should we start calling you Christopher Nolan Maxfield? And you're Christopher Nolan Maxfield.

SPEAKER_01 46:23

Well, I I got I mean, I I I prefer practical effects, so maybe that was so that's right. Yeah, that's true. So there's a little a little, you know, in um like in a sonnet, they um they they talk about the volta. That in in Italian that means the the change, right? The turn. And there's a volta in a sonnet right before the final couplet, because the the the utility of the couplet is not to tell you more of what you've already heard, it's to give you something that causes you to totally re-evaluate everything that you've heard in a new light. And when you when when that moment happens and it works, you can feel it because it's just like this little electrical spark. Like, oh no way. Like he got me. She got me.

SPEAKER_06 47:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 47:13

The poet, the playwright, the painter, whoever, they got me. And it's like this it's this thrilling uh experience because it feels great to be surprised and delighted. And so I really believe in a Volta that recasts what you th what you've just heard and what you thought you understood in some new light. And in this case, there's a little tur there's a little twist, you re-hear, you kind of recontextualize everything that you just heard, and it's also designed to tee up the magnificat that follows it immediately.

SPEAKER_05 47:49

Yeah. Well, let's not spend any more time talking about it. Let's listen to it. So here is Orion's track number two on Windwater Stone, performed by Sound of Ages. Next week we'll take a deep dive into the next track, which is a surprise on our Wind Water Stone album. A reminder that that album drops May 22nd, 2026. So be on the lookout on all streaming platforms, and we will be pressing it to vinyl as well. So we'll have three vinyl all available for purchase, soundofages choir.com. We'll catch you next time. Thanks.