Loop Pedal Canons | A Deep Dive Into Andrew Maxfield's Magnificat

When evensong canticles, vocal consort singing, electric guitar, and loop pedal canons combine, you get Andrew Maxfield's setting of the Magnificat, a track being released on SOA's upcoming album Wind, Water, Stone on May 22, 2026 by #novonarecords.

https://www.soundofageschoir.com/wind-water-stone

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:06

Today on the Sound of Ages podcast, we get to go through what is perhaps a one of the most significant pieces that Sound of Ages has done so far in collaboration with Andrew Maxfield that is appearing on our Wind Waterstone album, the Manify Cut setting of the Even Song Canticles. And it's thrilling, so you don't want to miss an inside look, the down low, the deep dive, whatever you choose to call it, into the Minificat. Buckle up, this is the Sound of Mavers podcast. Yo, here we are again. Again. You know who says it like that? There is a post-malone song called Insane. Second verse, second verse, again. And he says it just like that, and it's awesome. You sounded just like him.

SPEAKER_08 1:24

Oh, thank you. Well, if one of the two of us is going to make a post-malone reference, I know it's not me.

SPEAKER_00 1:33

Uh it's okay. One day you will see the light. One day. The uh today on the the show, we are gonna go through a very, I would say, well, I don't know how why I would describe it this way. It feels like a significant piece of music, both for I feel like for our collaboration, maybe for your output, and for Sound of Ages developing our sound and who we are. Like this piece seems kind of integral to that maybe turning point or fork in the road. And so this piece feels really significant. It is a setting of the magnificat and the companion piece that normally goes with it, the nuncdmitis. And I don't know, talk talk to me, talk us through maybe, Drew, how this piece came about and why the where the idea came from and all that.

SPEAKER_08 2:36

Yeah, so I feel like our collaboration generally just kind of happened organically. We however long ago we kind of ran into each other, noticed a shared interest in early music, shared interest in um building fun stuff, and so we started doing that. For the first couple of pieces of mind that you did, they weren't written with Sound of Ages in mind. And in fact, at the time, I think Sound of Ages was more of a flexible roster, kind of a project-based ensemble, where it tended towards kind of a more conventional, what I would call like a chamber choir format. I mean, maybe what, like 16-ish voices, plus or minus.

SPEAKER_00 3:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 3:20

Depending on depending on the on the rep. And over time, by various experiments, we wondered aloud, hmm, what would it be like to um to try out a version of Sound of Ages that's instead of a large ensemble that performs infrequently, what if it was a small ensemble that performed frequently? And that led to this kind of um unexpected emergence of a one per part vocal consort. And the first season that we did that, it was a quartet of singers, terrific singers. The quartet SATB format we decided was a little bit austere because it just benefits from uh it it felt like it would benefit from some additional padding inside the sound. And so the quartet eventually became a sextet, still one per part, um patterned a little bit after some of the the British groups that we like so much. Um but during that year of the quartet, I wrote a piece called Darkness Starts, and I think we talked about that on the podcast before recently. Yeah, we talked about it last episode. Last episode? Yes, a lifetime ago, Cam. Uh anyway, but we feel like that though. Good night. Anyway, so that piece though was the first time where we had just kind of decided to throw electric guitar into the same soup with one per part singers who were who are really singing with like that kind of pure um pure vocal sound, but exposed because it's one per part, and then um guitar as the accompanying instrument. And that was so much fun. I think just organically it was a really good time. And the recording of that piece sounded great, and I think we realized like, oh, this is kind of fresh. I wonder what would happen if we went a little bit deeper. And on the heels of that, you said, Drew, write a you know, write some canticles.

SPEAKER_00 5:31

Yeah, because we had started, and I don't know if we've talked about this on the show or not, I'm sure we have, but one thing that we started doing regularly as we got to the idea of smaller group performing more frequently was we were like, well, what if we did these in smaller venues that are more intimate and did them seasonally, like fall, Christmas, winter, spring, and did our own version of even song. Oh, right, right, right, right, right, right. We had started doing even songs every spring, fall, and advent season that were again in people's living rooms, in smaller churches, in uh whatever unconventional venue we could find that felt like an intimate place between 50 and 100 people, between 20 and 40, some of them, right? Like, yeah. And the point was not to recreate an even song, but to borrow the sentiment from the Church of England and say this is a non-denominational, meditative, generically spiritual experience with sacred and sacred adjacent music, poetry readings, narrations, meditations, gratitude practices. Uh, we've done one, we did one last year that we're actually going to do again. Teaser, I guess, uh, spoiler alert, called Dreamscapes, and we do a non-sleep deep rest meditation with the audience with Sam playing guitar underneath. And so it was like, well, if we're borrowing the name, it would be really cool to have our a mag and a nunk, as they're colloquially called, to to to show for ourselves that are more concert performative versus liturgical and worship. Yeah, that's right. Then it then it came, then we were like, okay, well, there's a mag and a nunk now that are the soa canticles. And and so, because in the in the even song tradition, you know, you have it's typically I don't know how they come up with this stuff, but usually it's in the evening, wild idea to call it then even song. But you know, it's in the evening, and it's a church service part of the Anglican church, and it's largely singing. There's it's it's a lot a higher percentage of music and choral singing in this service than in other services. And the the Manificat, which is, you know, often maybe some people refer to as the Psalm of Mary, um, but that text in the Manificat, which we can go over in just a little bit, is one of them that's always there and then paired with the nunc de mitis. And composers have been setting these texts for this service, but uh you can find settings of these canticles 500 years ago, four, six hundred years ago.

SPEAKER_08 8:30

Right. There, yeah, that's right. So there was actually three things pulling all together at once because we had the guitar as an idea, we had the one prepared ensemble that was emerging as an idea, and then we had this kind of um unconventional programming in unconventional places, and they it all they all belonged to each other because to get uh great music into some of these small venues, guitar's the perfect size instrument for that, and one per part singing fits a lot better than a large right, right.

SPEAKER_00 9:04

Like it just yeah, it just all so many different aggreg aggregation of so many like little details into this cool amalgamated thing. And it's I don't know, I just felt like it was cool to be able to tip our hat to the Anglican tradition in a place where it's not very common. Because if we were in even if we were maybe back east on the east coast, like this this idea wouldn't hold the same, I don't think. And and the the idea of doing these even songs in people's homes and smaller venues, if we were a British choir in England, also it wouldn't make any sense. Like but but in in the western United States, it's just geographically, everybody's way more spread out. And so let you get less people who have heard of it, and in a predominantly in a Christian faith, you know, where there's one predominant faith here in Utah that's not Anglican, you know, it's it's not necessarily the most common thing. And so to be able to think of it from a business side too, it's like all of these different factors just let itself lended itself perfectly to this sort of idea. So the Manifica is really exciting for me because I I mean I could listen to Howells all 12 of them. There's not really 12, but it seems like there are Howls' settings of these texts with organ and choir. That's typically what they're set for, is organ and choir, and they're so good. They're just so glorious, and I just love them. And so I was like, Drew, you've got to do the canticles. And so after I had kind of because you've written a set of canticles before, right?

SPEAKER_08 10:49

Yeah, I I've done a set for organ and choir, uh, which in a lot of ways are more conventional. Um, and that it was good to have in a way, I don't want to say got gotten that out of my system, but it was good to write a kind of conventional setting that um, you know, they're a little bit like on the concert end, but still could totally be done in service. And um so writing those though familiarized my, you know, helped me become more familiar with the texts themselves. And I, you know, man, I've howls and all the rest. I feel like I've done my listening homework. And so when we were striking on this kind of one per part consort with guitar as accompaniment, I thought, well, okay, so this is this is gonna be more of a concert setting to begin with, and that's fine. Uh, and I I remember kind of scratching my head and saying, what would make this cool? i.e., what would make it interesting to me? And you know, that's that's always a dangerous thing to ask because the things that interest me for like whatever reason or no reason at all, um, I can't guarantee that they'll be of interest to other people, but they are those like little question marks are the things that keep me going as a composer, creator, artist. You know, you have to like chase the things that are fascinating to you. And so I grew up playing guitar in tons of rock bands and um was familiar enough with the instrument and also with like pedals and effects and things like this. And I thought to myself, one thing that would make this very interesting to me is what if through using a loop pedal the guitar was playing in long canons with itself and that you could build an accompaniment that was actually sort of like uh thicker and deeper than you could get from a single guitar, only using a single guitar in a performance. And that was just that one question was enough to sort of spark the whole setting. And um, I think I came back to you and said, Well, good news, bad news, good news. I mean, good news, right? We're gonna use uh Sam Handley, our fearless guitarist, is gonna play in canons with himself through a loop pedal. And I don't think it's been done before, certainly with a canticle setting, and also it's gonna come with some like um technical terrors in performance where the loop has to work, otherwise, the whole thing falls apart. And by the way, it's gonna constrain the tempos in a couple spots. Hope you don't mind.

SPEAKER_00 13:46

And I'm just sitting there following the metronome and the scene, yeah, which is great, though. Like it was such a cool, I don't know. The first time we went through it, we were like, can we do this? Can we keep it together? And now it seems like second nature. Sure. And and it would be like second nature to do something like that, but that's how I knew we were on the cusp of something really cool and exciting. Well, I hope so. And and it's it's it really is. It felt like we were we were getting an organ and we were putting it all into this one single handheld instrument. And the and and it was also kind of loot-like at other moments because you know, there's and I'm sure we'll get into the the nuts and bolts here in just a second, but it's like the the moment where he freezes those chords and then we're singing and hath exalted. It feels just like an organ holding, but then he can also be an obligato instrument over the top of his own organ holding, which which you could do on an organ as well, right? But it it just felt so um. It felt reminiscent of those things, but very, very, very fresh at the same time. And it was just so exciting.

SPEAKER_08 15:03

Well, that was okay, that's right, because the second layer was it wasn't just a loop pedal, and we didn't just have some kind of ordinary effects like um a little bit of verb and things like that. Um, our guitar player Sam had also recently acquired a hog, which is a pedal made by Electroharmonics, and that allows you to play play a chord, and then you hit this pedal and it sort of freezes it and sustains it almost like somebody was plopping their hands down on the organ keys and just holding a chord while anything else was going on. He can be playing other lines on top of a frozen chord. Right.

SPEAKER_00 15:44

So instead of the guitar chord decaying instantly, you play and freeze, and it will freeze that infinitely sustained and allow you to double yourself, and it's oh, it's so cool.

SPEAKER_08 15:58

Yeah. Well, and that's another thing that I like about electric guitar as opposed to training. I mean, doing doing a nylon string acoustic guitar, quote unquote classical guitar with voices is not a bad thing. It's great, great thing to do musically, but it wasn't super interesting to me, mostly because um the timbre of the two instruments feels a little bit irritating to combine because you have vocals that sustain themselves with breath and these sort of like long lines with this kind of warm reedy texture in the singing. And then you have this plinkety-plink thing in the nylon string guitar where you know half of what you get from the audience is the snap sound of plucking the string where you hear a sharp attack that's 90% percussion, and then the tone from the instrument decays quite quickly and disappears really in the sound of the voices. But when you're doing the electric guitar, not only can you compress the sound artificially and add some reverb, um you know, these things make the tone ring longer. And it also has like you can create this like warmer, flutier sort of tone that blends with voices just as well as organ timbers blend with voices. And uh so that that was immediately appealing. But then to look at some of these odd extras, like the fact that you can loop things with the pedal or the fact that you can sustain things, which is that's actually kind of amazing, because then he's like, it's like a piano, a jazz pianist who can comp with one hand and solo with the other. And that notion is very uh prevalent in both the mag and the nunk in these settings.

SPEAKER_00 17:53

Yeah. And one quick sign, I mean, I remember doing that, there's a great piece called The Rune of Hospitality. And the The Rune of Hospitality, it's it's um, you know, I'm that there's there's other pieces with acoustic guitar and voices, but that's probably the one that I've heard the most, um, performed by c collegiate ensembles and high school ensembles alike. Um and it's and yeah, we did it at BYU Idaho, and we had to plug the guitar in to an amp, and we had to like check the balance was tricky because he had to like play louder when we were singing louder and then play softer because of the amplification, though, he had to do it in a very different counterintuitive way than if it was just we were all acoustics, because you you do that to kind of be an ensemble to begin with, but it just added this weird layer of complexity that we weren't used to, and we've had to do that a little bit with Sam Hanley, but it it's much more of an artistic choice of like intentionally become the foreground or background for Sam, as opposed to like the audience isn't getting the sense of the tone, and so we got to turn it up, but then you have to play softer because then like it was just this weird back and forth thing, and so yeah, I remember that experience, and this is so much different than that. So it's pretty great. And that leads to the opening, though, of the mag. We get into this idea of well, for do you want to start with the text or with the I mean the text is fairly common and it's been around for a long time and people can look it up? But it again, it's been it's really fascinating to listen to different settings of the mag to see what words composers choose to um kind of bring to the foreground of the texture. And you know, just looking at the text as a whole and this idea, what kind of was the was there a singular narrative, was there a singular idea or a singular thought that you were maybe trying to illustrate over the course of the arc of the Manificat?

SPEAKER_08 20:11

Well, I think the text is beautiful, and it's beautiful to me that in the choral Evensong tradition, people who make a regular practice of going to Evensong hear this text over and over and over and over and over and over again. Like, what is it that is so special about this text? My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God, my savior, for he hath regarded the loneliness of his handmaiden. You know, it's it's interesting because it's um it's equal parts, kind of a story of humility, it's a story of wonder, it's a story of awe, it's a story of hope and looking forward to deliverance. It it's this story that kind of turns the world order on its head because it talks about um God being hard on the mighty and the powerful and generous towards the meek and the merciful. And uh there's some really uh uh profound humane themes in this text, and it also is pretty great musically because there's such strong words in it, you know, like he hath showed strength with his arm, he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.

SPEAKER_00 21:48

I mean it's it's so much fun to sing, too. Like you you you get into it and you just that's those words are so much fun to sing. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_08 21:57

He has put down the mighty for. From their seat and hath exalted the humble and meek. There's it like it's good poetry, in addition to being sort of uh infinitely rich with meaning. And so in this setting and in the other canticles that I did, it felt important to me to sort of honor the personal quality of the text as it starts, because it's my soul. It's a single voice speaking, it's Mary speaking. My soul doth magnify the Lord, right? And so rather than literally having a solo voice, though, it's in the it's in the upper voices, it's meant to have a certain kind of um openness and delicate quality and awe and willingness and wonder and these kinds of things. And then when it um opens into this more kind of um declamatory, therefore um bigger poetry and exposition stuff, then it opens into all these into bigger sounding sonorities, bigger dynamics, more complex things. Um and um and then it it kind of crests and it subsides a little bit um because the you know the mag and the nunk have an interesting structure in that each one finishes with the the glory, the gloria, the doxology section. And so it's they're all they're all they're always a little bit like a two-in-one kind of piece where you have the the text and then you have the doxology, and you have to figure out how to give a sense of closure to the first text without being all the way closed and all the way done so that it doesn't feel like you're ending the thing twice. And so I tried to, you know, mirror that where you have these kind of peaks and valleys and crest, you know like there's this crest and lulling sense of energy, uh, but it doesn't feel all the way done. And in fact, it really takes an interesting tur turn at the doxology because it's this kind of groovier, more complex, um um rhythmically interesting section with these kind of looping ostinados in the in the guitar parts.

SPEAKER_00 24:36

Yeah, and it's so I I love the doxology. It wasn't what I was expecting at all, but it's so glorious. Like literally, it's like glory be to the father, and and the music is glorious and and kind of has a groove to it, and I think that that's really you know, the sacred groove is kind of the uh oh yeah, the the words that I feel about it. So so the so the piece opens, or sorry, go for it.

SPEAKER_08 25:03

Well, on on the sacred groove thing, um earlier when I was younger, I wrote a lot of choral music that I would describe as kind of like good, safe SATB stuff, and it's it's fine and it's good, and I'm grateful for it. But by the time I was writing this piece, I wanted, like I said before, I wanted to explore questions that were interesting to me. Um, because I feel like there's something honest about that as an artist. Um, but also philosophically, when it came time for the doxology, and you're saying, glory be to the father, um, I thought a lot about like, well, what does that feel like? And what's the way to express that from my own vantage point in this one piece? I'll change my mind on the next one, and there's no absolutes here. But when I was doing a uh my master's program in composition, I I spent some time taking um like world percussion classes, and um most of my most of my like most profound listening experiences have been in the context of jazz. And um and also um when I think about the rhythmic world that informs jazz in swing and a lot of the um, you know, you'd like the rhythmic music from Ghana, the fact that it's very drum sec drum-centric. And that um when we think about swing, what we're really doing is we're sort of importing these um bell patterns and the things from um Ghana and other uh surrounding places. Yeah. And these cultures think about drums as a sacred instrument. Like it is the you know, and and and in and in all the cultures where you have talking drums or you have the like the membrane of the drum vibrating, it feels almost like a voice. And yeah. Um I I think that for me, uh just as a listener of music, I really I mean, it's it's funny to say because like I don't I'm not sure a lot of people think about this, or maybe everybody does. I don't know, but I feel like there's something really sacred about percussion and really beautiful and extremely moving, and I never had the guts or the intuition to write for that kind of sensibility until more recently. And I thought, okay, if I'm gonna do a Gloria in a way that feels glorious to me at this point in my life, it's gonna be in 5-4 and it's gonna have an underlying percussion sensibility that makes my spine tingle. And it may not do that for anybody else, but it's the risk I need to take. And so that's where this kind of odd, off-kilter, shouty, exuberant sort of gloria came from.

SPEAKER_00 28:00

Yeah, and then the the Jimi Hendrix guitar thing in it, it just it feels it felt so right, you know. It just I can't imagine it any other way. It's like inevitable, it's inevitable. It's one of those things where you've achieved that paradox of completely innovative and new and in and completely inevitable at the same time. You know, that's what it feels like to me. And so if we look then at the beginning, because that's kind of how the guitar feels, the first time I saw the canon, the first time I heard the canon, I was kind of like, whoa, that is wild. How did he do that? Is was my first was my first thing. And then like it seems so um the the thing that I love about it is that the guitar is not really accompanimental, it 100% is its own contrapuntal line, it has its own character, and so moving from darkness starts, which is again, as we said, really great in our first dip of the toe into the water. The guitar felt fairly accompanimental and safe, but this is a whole new world of independence for the guitar that we hadn't seen before. And so when I first saw it, I really dug that a lot because I was like, yeah, color should be there for perp for on purpose. So then it opens with this with the initials like the the statement of the canon. Yeah, yeah. Do you want me to play it or show it? Yeah, yeah, that'd be awesome.

SPEAKER_08 29:33

Okay, sharing screen and audio. Do you see that? And hear yes. You hear that? Yep. Cool. So um I worked this out on paper first, and um I do that for almost everything I write, but especially for this kind of stuff. Um, and it took a lot of like tinkering. Um, so this is, I think it's a 16-bar canon. And part of the thing that I the thing I wanted to do was actually stretch myself creatively. Um, that's all I always get more out of pieces that stretch me. And in this case, I was like, okay, I want to use a loop pedal to create a canon where the guitar is playing along with itself, and I want to sort of like stretch the listener's attention span in time. So it's quite a while until the guitar comes back on top of itself. But it, but therefore, it needs to have a really distinctive contour at the beginning of this line so that when it does come back, we the listeners are like, oh, I've heard that before. That is recognizable material. I see what he's doing. He's looping back at himself. You know, that kind of thing.

SPEAKER_04 30:49

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_08 30:50

And so out of the gate, I thought, well, I want something that has a really distinctive shape with a couple of punctuation marks in it, so that when it comes back later, it's unambiguously the head of the snake chasing its own tail again, right?

unknown 31:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 31:04

And so it it comes out of the gate like this. And I thought, ooh, that's kind of cool because it dips real low. It has this high arching sort of sensibility. There's a couple of staccato notes, and there's some rests, and there's a triplet. And what what all of that means to the composer brain is that that gives a lot of interesting stuff for the accompanying version of the voice to react to when it finally comes out. And so you get this two-bar bit, which is what I just played, and then the voices come in. My soul doth magnify the Lord. Not particularly um shocking standout material in the voices, but that's actually kind of on purpose. We've talked a lot about this. Um, this has been on my mind ever since I read the um that Ervo Parrot uh biography that Paul Hillier wrote, where um the there's a sort of different attitudes of towards the melodic quality of writing. And I was trying to be sort of linear and inevitable, but not sing-song-y melodic.

unknown 32:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 32:32

And so for that for that reason, I'm hoping that the voices and the guitar in these moments feel like equal players, but it's not like there's just one that's always stealing the show. And so as the voices continue with uh, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my saving, God my save. Your they cross over the top of each other, and uh, you know, and a lot of a lot of times in like a freshman theory class, your the you know, your job, should you choose to accept it, is keep everybody in their own strata, soprano on top, alto and uh you know, tenor and bass, and uh do as little harm as possible with the voice leading and don't cross voices. And I'm not sure where I mean, I mean, I I do know where all that comes from, but I'm not sure it's really exciting advice if you're trying to make music. And uh so here though, the the alto and the soprano are crisscrossing, it's not the soprano show the way that it is in a lot of choral music. And instead, what you get is this thing where you have uh what I see is kind of like characters dancing around a central image, right? You have this like image of the Magnificat, and it's being unveiled by these characters. There's the guitar character, the soprano character, the alto character, but that none of them is the star of the show just yet. We're not we're we we see them moving and we feel them moving together. And the guitar layer though keeps we we don't know, the listener doesn't know yet that there's anything up with this guitar because so far, right? Yeah, it's just a line.

SPEAKER_07 34:30

And so when it started, we had that big thing, and it just kind of tucks in with the soprano altos, and if you know, for those who are sort of paying attention, you're like, well, that is a little bit of a weird sort of spacious, disjointed uh kind of line.

SPEAKER_08 35:02

It doesn't feel either strictly complemental or coherently lyrical, and you get these weird kind of things comes back and forth and plays in and out, interwoven. And you get this weird stuff that would that's kind of like me trying to be like Andy Summers and the police or something. And then it gets really haywired. And by that point, like somebody, I hope, I hope somebody listening is like, what on earth is going on? This is kind of wacky. Uh um, and yeah, what's going on, what's going on is that, you know, long before the guitarist is ever playing this on paper, I had sort of worked out how the one voice added to the canonic version of itself in the leader and follower format, when they combine, you get a different image altogether. And so, in the same way that it started with this like extremely recognizable contour, it finishes with an extremely recognizable contour where you have this descending, like high chroma thing, like da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. It's like, what is going on? Well, what's going on is that by the time that comes back in, we're gonna have an unambiguous recognition of the way that the world is fitting together. Because right on the heels of that thing, then you get the loop pebble starting to play back. Then it comes back. And that's I think when the piece starts getting compositionally, contrapuntally, subtly interesting, where it's like, okay, we have the text, it is it's telling the story, it's reflecting the gravitas and the wonder of the text. But it turns out that the throughgoing instrumental layer has its own kind of intrigue. And right off the bat, um you start hearing me do these things like this, which I think is kind of a Drew move, if I were to identify it, where you have a the major third of a chord and the minor third right either one after the other or right on top of each other.

SPEAKER_00 38:05

That's so good though. That, like, seriously, that that cross-relation that so uh one of the themes we talked about last time, on last episode and several episodes ago, is this constant marrying of ancient and modern. And to me, like that guitar line feels so ancient or so modern, like super fresh. But the opening lines in the soprano and alto, I mean, that almost feels like it could be something out of Johann Fuchs's counterpoint examples, just just very unassuming, not drawing attention to itself, like you talked about with that kind of Pertean philosophy. But it it's so cool to have both of those married together because it's it is seamless, you know, it's not like square peg round hole, it's these two different colored fibers blending together to make this cool new color, and it's just so awesome.

SPEAKER_08 39:07

Well, I hope that people hear it that way because the you know, the the the notion of cross relations or false relations or split thirds. We talk about this. I mean, I think we talked about that on the episode about stations of the cross because this comes up all the time. But you know, this is a super old, old news kind of device. Uh, you need only look at uh purcil or bird or something like that to see these like really rich, tangy, jarring talent, too. Yeah, yeah. It's like nothing sounds as modern as pretonal composers using these like split thirds. Oh man, it's so true. It's so juicy, but then you you think like, well, that you know, the when we're thinking about jazz harmony, um the notion of a seventh chord, that is now a that's a basic unit of consonants starting in the early 20th century, right? Like downbeat seventh chords, the the they're they're not just a dominant sort of slave to the tomic tonic. This is a unit of consonants. But then having a split third in a chord, you know, is that the beginning of uh you know Jimi Hendrix Crosstown Traffic? Uh sure. Is it the nuts and bolts of uh ave verum corpus? Sure. Uh it's like you know, bird, it it's all it's all of that. It there's this basic like philosophical rub about the complexity of the third as a as a whole idea. And it to me it's never it never stops being interesting. But like you were saying, it's not it, it's sort of unassuming counterpoint. I'm not trying to distract people from the text with my cleverness. I feel like I'd be I'd be doing a doing a disservice to the text. What I am trying to do is weave an interesting and beautiful fabric underneath and through the text as I present the text to the listener.

SPEAKER_00 41:16

Yeah. And it's um, and then yeah, we get to this mesh bit at measure, you know, for those following at home. 23. And holy is his name. It's just like the best, the best part of the that's one of my favorite moments, those like parallel sevenths in the tenor and bass line. And it's like these open dissonances almost, right? Like that open dissonance idea that just feels constantly open, it is filled by those the the guitar pedal or the guitar canon in the above it. That it's it's just that that moment is you know, that you can take these there's there's moments in Poolank's music, and there's moments in Tavener's music and Parrott's music, and where it's like you zoom into this tiny little moment, this little three, four bar phrase, and you're like, that's a masterclass alone. And to me, that's measure 22, 23, 24 is like here's this little master class of spacing, of harmonic um, you know, progression, for lack of a better word, I guess. And for canon and for line, all all at once, I think. So well, I should quit when I'm ahead.

SPEAKER_08 42:56

Um but I mean, for those following along, you know, while we're riffing on this, um the the D, the entering pitches for the tenor and the bass is right there. I feed it to them in the guitar part just before they sing it. So they can find it. And then they come in, not out of it's not random, they come in in unison.

SPEAKER_00 43:22

Well, and the soprano's been holding it for three nights, right?

SPEAKER_08 43:24

Yeah, so so it's not difficult to find. They come in unison, and then we've got a stepwise motion for dec decoration in the bass. They move stepwise together, and you could say, like, wow, parallel sevenths is hard. And I'm like, I don't actually think that's true when you give it to them in the right kind of counterpoint. And the I think that what the result is is that you hear and you feel sevenths and seconds about with the With the same kind of like internal consonant sensibility that you hear fifths. Because fifths are so they're so related, right? To a second.

SPEAKER_00 44:09

It's they're so open. Right. Because two is in is a second displaced by an octave. So it's like and and it makes me think of uh the the bridal chamber piece by John Tavener, the bridal chamber, and it has parallel sevenths between tenor and bass 80% of the whole piece. Yeah. And it just gives it this shimmer that's just thrilling. You know, again, it's like the the to quote my brother-in-law, it's like an ear tickle.

SPEAKER_08 44:47

Well, I think sevenths are super interesting. Like they're a major seventh. If I were to pick a favorite interval, it probably would be a major seventh. I mean, that's kind of a dorky thing to admit, but I think that sevenths are really interesting be because when you sing them, I feel like what you're doing is you're you're causing your the listener's ear to work. And I think that we have a strong internal autocorrect function or something like that, where if you hear this, your ears are making a your ears inside your head are gonna go, uh I think what that's supposed to do is this. Like you correct it in your ears, but it's causing you to wonder and to think and to participate because you're trying to like tune the thing that you're hearing.

SPEAKER_00 45:38

Like at a subconscious level, it's like you're kind of like willing it to willing that pitch to go to the octave.

SPEAKER_08 45:45

Yeah, and like why does jazz harmony sparkle and why does it give you so much to to chew on? Because when you when you have a sonority that's I don't know, like this, there's all of these like autocorrect problems where your ears are like, ah, uh, let's see, uh, is it this or is it like this? Is it like this or is it like this? Like you're trying to like it gives you all of these problems to solve, and as a result, you stay interested. It can be moving a thousand miles an hour, and it's just like lobbing cool problems at you all the time and making you wonder. And there's nothing wrong with a nice triad, you know. It just doesn't make you wonder quite as much. And so, some percentage of a piece, I get you know, now that I think about it, I'd like the audience to be curious for a certain percentage of the piece to be like to have a problem to solve. It's not a hundred percent of the time, because that that just that never lets people be at ease and it never lets people sort of find their way, but some percentage of the time that'd be actively involved in problem solving.

SPEAKER_02 47:08

So uh you can look oh yeah, yeah, yeah, dude.

SPEAKER_08 47:13

Go ahead.

SPEAKER_00 47:14

The um yeah, so then we get into this next bit of he has showed strength with his arm. And now all of a sudden, you know, it's it's like we get to this place where the canon ends. So the intro section is kind of closed off, and now it's homorrhythmic-ish, homorrhythmic-ish, and the guitar is kind of just doing texture filler, and it just totally opens up and kind of explodes into these huge chords. Um, you know, very, very tasteful but distinct text painting there. And well, in contrast to the crowd, and yeah.

SPEAKER_08 48:04

Because up until this point, we've had this very kind of like weaving, polyphonic, multiple lines of equal importance, um, everybody doing their own thing kind of in this um shared choreography. And so then when everybody starts shouting at a forte with accented staccato marks in unison, he hath showed strength with his arm right into double forte. At a minimum, people are like, Oh, that's different.

SPEAKER_00 48:48

Way way different, way different, way different. You should like, I mean, you should just like play just the even the last chord of arm, you know, this yeah, well, it's not super complex, and it's this just minor seven, but it the way it gets there, how we arrive, and sure is just brilliant.

SPEAKER_08 49:12

Well, part of this is um another way to achieve contrast compositionally is varying what um what the definition of consonants is and what the basic building blocks are. And I my my kids are of the Lego age, and I so I actually I invoke Lego metaphors all the time because I actually think they're better than a lot of like music school jargon. Um because you know, you the first part of the piece up until here is built with like little tiny bricks, all in like shades of blue, yeah, and then here we get big bricks all lined up all at the same time, and they're like bright red. That's why they sound different, right? Like we're just changing the units that we're building with, and so when we get he hath showed strength with his arm, so that moment right there, I'm introducing these things that you'd you could call them bicords if you want to. We could stress out about the naming of things or not, but you basically have a these kind of complex sonorities that then split in opposing directions between the upper and lower voices. And point number one is well, it's different when then what we've heard before. So, at a minimum, in terms of a contrast payoff, we're gonna feel it. And then point number two is that the units of construction have changed. So we're we're trafficking in these like wackier, taller, tenser, chewier kind of sonorities at a double forte dynamic. And they're also um harmonies that will just explode when you give them to singers. Uh, and that I think that's another important thing is like sometimes in when we put on our music school hats, we look at a chord and say, well, it's a D major chord, or it's a whatever chord, and we give it a name. What really matters though is what is it like? What does it sound like in the voices that are going to sing it? And you know, I know for sure that if you have a tenor D in octaves with a soprano D with an alto and a soprano in between them, that sonority is going to resonate and fill an entire hall. And then if you tuck in underneath that perfect resonance sonority, this stuff, it just colors the resonance, and so you get this really big, warm, shimmering thing.

SPEAKER_00 52:01

And and and and it's gonna be especially noticeable that there's two subtle things that you know in the alto line you have that G at the very end of it that moves down to the F sharp, and it's such a distinct that is such a distinct color difference because it's this inverted G-bass sonority moving by half step now, all of a sudden, to this more open B seven sonority, and it it's it is one tiny half step that is uh it's like that motion. If I just tilt my head, that's like what it feels like. And then the fact that it's on a nice uh vowel. Um, but it's not uh it's not a dark uh, it's this bright uh, so that you know, um, and you don't go to the art of like the very last second, if at all, um you know, you you you don't even really say it. And so it keeps that shimmer in the vowel color as well going through. It's really, really a thrilling moment. And it kind of makes, you know, it's almost like the if the audience had been kind of like, oh, I don't, I don't get it, they totally perk up at that moment and they're like, whoa.

SPEAKER_08 53:14

Yeah, if for no other reason it's like, oh, that's rock and roll. Like that's loud. It's loud, it's exciting, it's it makes the air shake. I mean, it's funny because right, you know, like compositionally, like if you want to get forte, you just literally have to make the air vibrate. Your job is move a lot of air. And we don't talk about it like that in a harmony class. We think that the answer is like, oh, well, chord. And that's sort of true, but it's not really what's going on. You want you want to shake people. And so you think about ways to do that. And I also think, jet in generally, throughout kind of everything that I write, I feel like ambiguity is a huge asset. Um, in the same way that I want to keep people actively trying to solve problems that I'm lobbing at them, where I give, you know, where I do a sonority that has tension in it that is that your brain is trying to fix, you're trying to like, oh, what you know, what is that? I'm gonna I I need to understand that same thing. Um, and I guess that's a form of ambiguity, but when in a passage like this, I'm looking at it thinking, you know, up here, I mean, that's that's not so strange. That's a very ordinary suspension resolution if we were hearing this as a D major D major phenomenon, but we're gonna change all of the context underneath you. Right. And so ambiguity, then, you know, it's like the same route as amphibian or ambidextrous, whatever. It's like two, it's being two things at once, acting in two ways simultaneously. And anytime I can do something that feels like it could be A or it could be B, I feel like I'm winning because then the listener is like, well, which one is it? Is it A or B? And they're leaning forward and wondering.

SPEAKER_00 55:18

Which is exactly the point because it's like it's both. It's neither.

SPEAKER_08 55:23

Yeah, it's whatever. Right? It's music. We don't have to have a right answer. Like, that's the best. You can have two things be true in music, and it has like no ramifications in physics or theology or politics or anything. You just have this like fabulous, confusing stuff, but it keeps you on the edge of your chairs. And that's that's what makes me happy. The other thing is that it leads forward in these passages, we start um we we go into what I think of as guitar voicings. And so when it comes out of he has shaped strength with his arm, he has scattered the proud in this big kind of like uh sort of super quasi-unison where they're gathering some uh like choral intensity in the imagination of their hearts, then we split into these voicings that for me feel like guitar idiomatic voicings rather than piano slash chorale idiomatic voicings. Yeah, for some reason that's exciting to me.

SPEAKER_00 56:37

Yeah, that's that's really good you brought that up. So, how would you um how would you define or describe like just generally for non-guitar or piano or whatever people, like how how do you navigate the difference? What is the difference in your brain?

SPEAKER_08 56:51

Well, okay, so for people that submit themselves to music school, you spend a lot of time doing um harmony exercises, counterpoint to, but especially harmony, where you have to figure out how to move from one chord to the next chord to the next chord. And you typically work in like a treble clef and a bass clef, and you have a soprano, alto, tenor, bass sort of phenomenon where you have four voices. But two things are true. One is that you we get a lot of this from vocal music writing, and especially from the kind of the chorale writing of Bach. And the second thing that's true is that it maps right onto a piano. And so many of us come to music through piano, and so we sit there and we're like, oh yeah, well, the bass clef is like my left hand, and the treble clef is like my right hand. And you look at your hands, you hold your hands in front of you, and you're like, I have a thumb on my left hand that's close to middle C, and I have a thumb on my right hand that's close to middle C. And so when you're doing these harmony exercises, you basically end up writing thumb parts for your tenors and your thumb parts for your altos. And so that creates kind of thummy writing, if you will. Um be and beyond the thumminess of it, you tend towards best practices. Well, you tend towards best practices, just like your teachers tell you, to favor octaves and fifths between tenors and basses, because they're the they're the resonant intervals, they're the the lower partials on the harmonic series, the you know, it coheres with the circle of fifths, yada, yada, yada. It's all correct stuff, it's all good stuff. But then you grab a guitar and you hold it and you say, wait a minute, this thing is tuned in fourths. Uh oh yeah, and what and one third.

SPEAKER_00 58:49

Yeah, because that obviously. Right. Like obviously. That's what I would have done if I was inventing the guitar and said, you know what, but this one here. Or he took a break in the middle of the day and forgot and then remembered, and he's like, Well, I'm not going back. So this is just what it is.

SPEAKER_08 59:09

Just leave it. And so there's all of these voicings that are that are idiomatic if you're sitting at a piano doing your keyboard harmony work, and then there's all these voices that are idiomatic if you've spent all your teenage years playing Hendrix and learning jazz voicings and playing classic rock on your guitar. And you start noticing, well, that of course they sound different because depending on the intervals that you favor or which notes you double, um, you just get different sonorities and you find different pathways for the voices on a contrapuntal basis, too. If you start varying the spacing and doubling, one of my mentors, a dear friend, Philip Lasser, he talks about harmony simply as is the art of spacing and doubling. Like that's what harmony is. It's not, you know, we we come up with wonkier definitions, particularly when we over-ground ourselves in common practice harmony, but he just said, you know, it's doubling and spacing. And so working backwards into vocal textures from guitar idioms is really interesting. And so you see shapes that move around. And when I say shapes, like uh um he hath put down the mighty the the the content of those chords. It's not none of this is earth-shattering. I'm not like an earth-shattering kind of composer, just to be clear. I don't think of myself as like all that clever. But those those would get you bad grades in harmony class, but they feel so juicy and so right on the guitar, yeah, and they feel awfully cool when you build guitar, uh, when you build the vocal voice leading and counterpoint into a guitar-centric sensibility. And then that just gets um a little bit more true as we go into he hath exalted, and you're holding these kind of juicy guitarish, kind of guitarish chords while the guitar player is freely decorating, in other words, soloing over the top of these um vocal chords with these little harmonics that have been subtly frozen in the guitar timbre.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:42

Yeah, and this is it and it's this is I mean, this is the moment, this is one of the other moments I wanted to highlight is is now all of a sudden we we we now have another big um textural, harmonic meaning, like textual uh shift. And the the freeze pedal really does kind of freeze you in time a little bit too, and it's and the and then this is the I mean I I guess I haven't I haven't looked at this extremely closely, but I don't see I i I think this is the only time where you like repeat the text several times.

SPEAKER_08 1:02:34

Well there's a lot of yeah, there's a lot of text in the Magnificat, and I feel like if you you know it's already a long it tends to it can be a long piece for service, and even for a concert setting, if you repeat it a lot, you can wind up with an sort of an overstuffed right.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:55

You get like box B minor mass where there's a movement for each line of the text, right? Where it's like which is you know great. I love I love that work, but it is just different time. But then but so then this this stands out because of that. And you know, we had even moved some of those removed all the stems, I think, in the final version that we did. We removed all those stems, so it's this kind of even more hearkening to that Anglican chant sensibility where we're just kind of speaking out of rhythm, out of time. The freeze happens, the decoration ornaments between iterations while we're holding exalted. And it really is this now. We're floating. We you know, we've been we've been seeing all this work that God does, this work, this work, and now we're frozen in time of the humble, the paradox. It's like because we're observing the mystery and the paradox of the humble and meek are the ones that get exalted.

SPEAKER_08 1:03:55

Um yeah, well, and compositionally, like you know, you think about we started with this kind of like equal polyphony where you have a lot of linear action, then we go into this section where we're getting a lot of like tooty homer rhythm, yeah, also at a pretty aggressive dynamic with a lot of like dramatic energy, and you know, knowing that we've got the Gloria coming up, and knowing that we're talking about it the humble and the meek. Yeah, it feels like we're gonna pull back a little bit for narrative purposes, right? And so that's what this is doing just before the opening riff of the piece comes back in to give us a little t flavor of that um contrapuntal linear world, just briefly before it tees up the entrance of the uh doxology.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:57

Yeah, and then we get into the doxology, and it is like a party. And we have that gank dunk with that loop bling ling bling. Yeah, just like that keeps going, man. It just keeps going. And it it was so hard to hear those that loop. This is just a performance note, but at times it was are all on harmonics, and so then it's like Sam's playing non-harmonic notes after he sets that up in the loop and they're singing, and all I was listening for is anytime there's a ling dling, am I on a beat? Yeah, we don't see which beat it is, but we're just gonna stick with it, and it it we ended up being able to hold it together really nicely, and it's it's how man. I just love the the the polytexture. Well, I guess it's three, you know, where you have. The the guitar doing the guitar loop pedal doing one thing, you have the inner voices, alto and tenor, doing their own accompanimental texture thing, and then you have the line that's in the soprano and bass that's doubled in the guitar, and so you really have this one, two, three, four textures going on all at once that just is thrilling, and again, it keeps the in the listening interested. There's always things going on to to draw your ear.

SPEAKER_05 1:06:35

So at the end of the glory be to the father.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:42

And then there's this silence, right? But then it's filled by that glow re glory be glory be glori. Like all at once, that that then comes back to the foreground, right? And then will grab your attention. So it's like never dull, even at the end of a line or end of a phrase.

SPEAKER_08 1:07:01

Well, I hope so.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:03

Yeah. That's why the doxology is great.

SPEAKER_08 1:07:06

Yeah. Yeah. So that's kind of uh that's kind of the magnificat in a mag nutshell right there.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:16

Well, and uh and maybe just this last little bit before we play the recording is thinking through measure the the ending. You know, you you're looking, you look at the amends, the very end, and it ends on this big in the voices, it's just an open sonority, and then you have you know, the guitar comes in on that G major, and you had mentioned before that this isn't it's gotta feel kind of final, but not final final. And so how did you approach the doxology? Because the doxology traditionally, in a lot of in some settings, it's note for note, the exact same. In other settings, composers make it completely different, and in some settings, composers hearken to the mag doxology in the noonk doxology. And so, you know, how did you end this one final without being final? Like what what about this ending in your mind as from the composer standpoint gives it that character?

SPEAKER_08 1:08:25

Well, here I'm gonna share again so that I can play a little sound. Um so when we're getting close to the end, uh, you know, as it was in the beginning, and ever shall be, and ever shall be world without end, that feels kind of like an important um penultimate moment, right? I mean, literally, because the next word that comes is amen. So we've got to tee it up, and uh so I wanted to dial up the crunch. So world with uh and then out and without and I love the descentness of the A flat. Well, I have this kind of theory, which is uh I mean it's not my theory, but uh you know if you're in G do do do uh the five chords or wait, we lost you.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:37

You try it try that again when you're in G.

SPEAKER_08 1:09:39

Okay. Okay, so when you're if you're in G and you're being a good little music student and and the right answer sounds like this Yeah, those are all the right doublings and spacings. Your dominant chord, the five that goes to the one, has a certain kind type of gravity, a certain kind of magnetism. It it it wants to take you where you're supposed to go, so the story goes, right?

SPEAKER_04 1:10:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:10:11

Well, in jazz harmony, we know that um the five chord, expressed as a seventh, is interchangeable with the the same chord but with a root that's a tritone apart. So a D seven is effectively the same as an A flat seven. Which to me says that they have similar gravity. So this not really all that shocking, but when when I'm loading a chord with dissonance that makes you feel like this thing needs to resolve, yeah, I'm gonna load it with notes that I'm not gonna land you on a big D major chord world without and because that just feels like it's a you know it's an aerosol can of easy cheese to me. Um instead, I'm gonna think about everything that has an intense kind of gravity, and I'm gonna leave it hanging there for a little bit. Ah men. Yeah. There's the there's those cross relations. Yeah, there's cross relations, and then you get the seconds as a fundamental unit of consonants, right?

SPEAKER_04 1:11:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:11:46

And then here we're down into A naturals and D naturals instead of the A flat stuff. And I love the pure consonants in the vocals because it doesn't feel like a doesn't give you that sweetness, it doesn't bur burden you with the sourness, it just is. Yeah. And then in in the background, you hear a harmonic from the guitar that just does this. And it gives you a tiny little tiny little bit just to sweeten the air in the room without sort of bludgeoning you with the moral of the story or something like that. But to get back to your point. Tonal diabetes. Yes. Yes, none of that. But to get to your point earlier, writing this Gloria, I knew this wouldn't be the last time that you hear it if you hear the Magnifica and the Nook Domitis back to back. Uh so I intentionally withheld a couple of things from this one that do appear when we hear it the second time. Uh doxology in the mag and the doxology in the nook, I would say, are uh maybe 65% the same or something like that. We arrive into it through a different means in the uh Nook uh I ideally I think we have the the uh the sense of listeners that we're surprised to find ourselves in a familiar place, uh but you have to like show up there and look around before you realize like, oh wait a minute, I've been here before. That's like that that's supposed to be the sensation of showing up in the doxology, you're like your four bars into it, you're like, wait a minute, oh we've been here. But when you get to the very end of that doxology, we can which we can talk about another time, uh, I save a couple um signature harmonies from the dunk from the nunctometist that show up woven in like that kind of slidey slidey guitar jam that we were talking about. And the sonority peaks just a little bit higher and lands um instead of here lands here.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:10

Uh with that like unresolved like screaming it, and it's the coolest thing.

SPEAKER_08 1:14:20

Oh, it's like laser beams from heaven or something like that. Um but I didn't want to let any of that out of the gate here yet, because we're not we're not to the end of the canticles yet. It needs to be something that hasn't quite been said.

SPEAKER_03 1:14:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:37

Well, now that we've gone through it, I think it's time to have a listen.

SPEAKER_04 1:14:43

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:44

So this is now from Windwater Stone, Sound of Ages, performing Andrew Maxfield's Magnificat. From the Sound of Ages service. Yes. Yes. Not liturgical.

SPEAKER_08 1:15:03

Although somebody should totally do this in church, I would love that.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:06

Yeah, and I still remember when the King singers came and we workshopped with them and they were like, this is really cool, actually. And I was like, Yes, it is. You guys should do it. Give it to all the church musicians.

SPEAKER_08 1:15:20

Yeah, I know. It's like not for your ordinary Thursday even, you know, it's Thursday night even song. I was like, nope, that's probably true.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:28

But uh that's that's right. I forgot. I can't remember which one of them said that, but I remember that was so funny. But it is for us.

SPEAKER_08 1:15:38

But you know, hopefully uplifting all the same and of interest to people who uh like vocal music. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:18

Where I believe we will talk about the Nunk Dimitis, the next piece in the album, and the second set of the Sound of Ages Tanticles, where you'll hear a lot of similar things, you'll hear some very different things, and again, much more forward-looking and forward placement of the guitar and the texture, and it's really exciting. So be on the lookout for all things Sound of Ages. Check out our website and don't miss an event, and we'll catch you next time.