Jazz in Utah Better Than Our Basketball... | Nunc dimittis

In this episode, we dig into Drew's matrix of analysis that provides a framework for to categorizing and analyzing music in unconventional, but extremely useful ways. We use this framework to dissect his setting of the Nunc dimittis, a supremely jazzy composition that explores the boundaries between "song" and "composition," (however you define those terms). Watch the video version here. 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:06

Today on the Sound of Ages podcast, we're talking about jazz. Utah jazz. Utah composer writing jazz. Not the basketball team. Those are easily confused, but the jazz from Andrew Maxfield is doing a little bit better, aka a lot of bit better than the jazz basketball team, who are currently playing golf, which is not the sport they're paid to play because it's the playoffs. Do the math. Utah Mammoth is superior. Hockey is superior. It's fine. Anyway, I'm sidetracked and it's not even the real interview yet. We're just on the intro. Today we're talking about the Nunk Dimitis, which has a lot of jazz harmonies and jazz influence that we'll talk about in the interview. It's super fascinating. We talk about reducing things to a lead sheet. So don't want to miss the best jazz in Utah.

SPEAKER_03 1:23

No, no. I'm in the San Francisco airport. I was at Salt Lake City. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is this is the San Taku sushi and noodle in uh terminal three or something. I was in Salt Lake at 5 a.m. Wow.

SPEAKER_00 1:43

Well that's how dedicated Drew is, is that he's willing to do podcast interviews from the airport.

SPEAKER_03 1:51

Oh, like from the shower. Wherever I am, can that would sell a completely different platform? Let me take that back. Let me take that back entirely. Uh from the car, you know? From other places. My my enthusiasm knows no bounds. That is awesome. I'm bound to day.

SPEAKER_00 2:16

Boundary in in all the ways. You know, that reminds me of maybe we could intro today just by hearing a two-second, no, no, like the elevator pitch of your cool music analysis for your doctoral portfolio dissertation, where you have the XY access thing. Speaking of boundaries, changing boundaries between pop and classical, I think would set up the this discussion about the Nunke Dimitis, the second of the Sound of Ages canticles, very nicely because it wanders around boundaries like none other.

SPEAKER_03 3:00

Sure. Okay, so and maybe we could do an episode on this at some point, but I think in a nutshell, in a nutshell, from the time I was a little kid, I feel like I've always been a songwriter and a composer. And over time, I it it has become funnier and funnier to me how we talk about those as being so different.

SPEAKER_00 3:24

Yeah, like how would you describe really quickly what you observe as other people's perception of those two things?

SPEAKER_03 3:34

Yeah, well, you need only spend a few minutes in a music school to start hearing things like, well, you know, there's high art, and then there's that kind of other stuff. And there's a lot of um, I think classical music, whatever, whatever that actually means, classical music. Um in that domain, there's a lot of evaluative language that gets thrown around where we're um trying to classify some art form as high and other art form as low, something that's refined and good or worth preserving in the annals of history or something, and other stuff that's cotton candy for the dumb, dumb audience that listens to the radio or that buys tickets to stadium shows or something like that.

SPEAKER_00 4:15

And that's always entertainment and popular and populous or wide appeal, et cetera, et cetera. Right.

SPEAKER_03 4:25

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so I think that evaluative frameworks like that, where we try to judge the relative goodness or or the relative value of something is pretty pointless and actually like actively unhelpful. Um, but there's two ways of looking at things that I think are more interesting. The first way, which you did not ask about, but I'm just gonna throw this in here, is if you look at who pays for something. Uh the first possible thing is that somebody pays to experience something themselves. That's that's the definition of popular music uh or entertainment, so to speak. We can talk about that someday. Second is that there's a third-party payer where something is complex to produce and you have a third-party philanthropic kind of approach that pays for the creation of the thing so that people besides the payer might include the payer, but many people besides it uh can experience the thing. Opera wouldn't exist without a third-party payment model, and it's not any less good because it depends on it. That's just the way of things. And then the third is there's no no payment, and that's folk music. People make the music for the thing itself. It it's uh true folk music, not stylistically folk music that is um for sale, but like the activity of making music with outside of the parameters of who pays for stuff, that's that's actually folk music. So who pays for things is one thing that actually reveals a lot of it, a lot about the content. But then the other thing that the other way that I think is useful is what I would call a descriptive framework rather than an evaluative framework, where we try to look at the qualities of the the compositions or the made things, the artworks, and uh understand how they're similar and how they're different. So um I like to think of a matrix, it's a two by two matrix, which you get by superimposing an x-axis and a y-axis, so to speak. This isn't we don't talk a lot this way in music school, but here you go.

SPEAKER_00 6:36

Yeah, so uh I'm going back to my math uh graph days, and the anxiety is instantly higher, but I'm I'm going with you, I'm trusting you. I know it's it's this is good. Anything I can do to dial up your anxiety, can you know that's it goes from zero to one, and that's about as high as it gets, but you know.

SPEAKER_03 6:55

Wow. I we we'll do a another episode someday on how to manage Drew's anxiety, which never gets below 10. So um if you imagine though on the x-axis, this is what I would call like a uh a type of malleability. So, and we're talking about the the the stuff that the the musical composition is made of. So on one end of the axis, you have something that is entirely completely melodic in the sense that it derives its unique identity from being melodic. Great example of this would be a song like unforgettable. Uh unforgettable. Like it it cannot be changed without being less than itself. It is melodically derived, its identity is melodically derived. On the other end of the spectrum, um, I mean this is this is art, not science, but on the other end of the spectrum, you'd have something that derives its identity primarily from um having motivic qualities rather than melodic qualities. Motivic would be smaller units, uh, and it might dissipate on the very end of the spectrum into pure timbre, just sound. But somewhere over here you have um motives where you know, if you think about Beethoven V, for example, like it turns out he can spin an entire symphony out of like this much Morse code, right? It's it's astonishing. But the thing that's different between those two ends of the spectrum, actually, is the degree to which they resist development. So uh a motive, a small unit of musical material, uh embraces development because you can do a billion things with it. It it's like this flexible uh material, or it's like a tiny Lego piece that you can use in a thousand ways, or something like that. Meanwhile, a melody that is complete and distinct, and it has its high points and its low points and its arc and its phrasing and all this other stuff, it actually resists development for being so distinct, so intact, if you want to think about it that way. And if you want to develop that melody, what you end up doing is breaking it into little bits. And so there's this kind of degree of malleability that a composition can have.

SPEAKER_00 9:29

And in your thesis, in your your your you posit that that by analyzing music, maybe this is a step before even malleability, but it's this breaks down all of the previous boundaries of popular versus high art music, because you can map quote unquote popular pieces of music, songs, and classical pieces of music, all of those words being in air quotes, somewhere along that malleability, malleable, motivic or melodically contrived or conceived things, right? Like theoretically, genre doesn't matter now.

SPEAKER_03 10:14

Yeah, and you have to be careful because like you can't just say, like, well, Beethoven's fifth symphony lives at this one spot because a giant work can include a thousand things, right? Right, what you mean?

SPEAKER_00 10:26

Like, I would I even think of uh, sorry to cut you off, I even think of uh barely a or um barely us, Wagner and Flight of the Valkyries, because you have the dum ba-dun ding ba dum bum ba dum bum, which is very motivic, but then the full version of the melody is dumb dum dumb dum bum bum bum, which is made up of tiny cells of that motif. Right. And so most people think Wagner made the light motif. That's true, but there are also then very distinct moments of melodically conceived material, too, when he puts those together, and that melody exists intact with the motifs kind of underneath it, right? So that one would be hard to plot in certain ways because right. Am I making sense of that?

SPEAKER_03 11:12

That kind of no, you know, you're you're totally right. So, for example, if you take the melody of Unforgettable, it would be probably closer to the pure melodic end of the spectrum, and you take that section of Valkyrie's, and it would be to farther towards a motivic end of the spectrum because the because of the way that it's made. So the the the key here is you look at the you look at the made thing at the composition and you say, how is it made? What is it made of? And that's the that's the interesting question to me. But I think what it what when it becomes uh even more interesting, potentially useful, I'm not telling anybody this is the best thing ever, I'm just saying this is one way to look at things, is when you superimpose the y-axis, which is uh the which I call reducibility. So you have malleability is the x-axis, reducibility is the y-axis, and reducibility is the degree to which something can be completely represented as a lead sheet, which is a um an abstraction, if you will, or a simplification, but you know, a classic lead sheet from a uh fake book or something like that would be melody, chord changes words. And if you look at uh uh a song, you know, from a fake book, the fact that it can be represented by a melody with chord changes in words, but you know, without without words, because sometimes they're just instant, um doesn't mean that it's any less of a composition than a symphony that cannot really be reduced, or some gigantic orchestral work or some nuanced scroll work that can't be reduced to the lead sheet. Right. It just it points to the fact that they're made differently. A lead sheet yields a lot of the decision making to the performer in the moment of the in the moment of the performance. It's not just interpretation, you know. Right. Like how how did you sing that phrase? It's like, no, literally, how did you voice that? And did you substitute your own reharmonizations? And you know, there's a there's a a degree of autonomy that is handed on purpose to the performer. Yeah. Uh and so so so I don't know why unforgettable is on my mind, but if you look at that, that's in the top kind of corner of this matrix where it's completely melodically, it derives its identity identity from a melody, and it is totally intact as a lead sheet, which is highly reducible. Yeah. Yeah. Being reduced is not a negative thing, that's not a judgment, it's a description of how it can how it's presented. But then if you take something that is um, you know, take beta over five or something like that, and you say, well, it's primarily derived derives its identity from small units of flexible stuff. Uh and you can't really represent it, represent it as a lead sheet without it losing its essential identity. It has to be it, it it isn't uh it isn't itself if it isn't exactly the way that Beethoven wrote it, with the prescriptions for the players as he determined, right? And so the the short summary of this long raamble is that uh when what the what this is is it's a descriptive model, not an evaluative model. And so if you look at the things made by various makers, you start noticing kind of a footprint. And the footprint can be really tiny and focused, right? Like Taylor Swift would have a very tight focused footprint writing things that are highly melodic and essentially reducible, right? And that and and they kick buttons.

SPEAKER_00 15:27

Right, right. Because it's and and it's just like I was listening this morning actually to the Foo Fighters uh from the vault, uh times like these from their one by one album acoustic version. And it's like, ah, those are the same chords, and it's they're missing other guitar parts, and but it's just the chords and his melody. It's and it still feels like it has a different feel and vibe, but it is essentially true to its original identity with all the drums and the the lead guitar versus rhythm guitar and the bass and the other riffs and the overdubbed guitar parts and all that stuff. They add great color without adding elements that are integral to the identity of the song because it's reducible. And I love I love both. That's the great thing, is you can love both. And I listened to that just the same way. And then I got into class today, and excuse me, we were listening to uh in uh my with my students here at Waterford School, we're singing Herbert Howell's Requiem, and we listened to Take Him, Take Him Earth for Cherishing. Just the opening, just the opening section where it's all unison but but still because it's chant-like, it's very much motivically derived, not melodically. And you can't reduce it though when it goes into two parts because it's this great free two-part counterpoint doubled at the octave. So it's like, you know, it it the the if I think about Jan LaRue's guidelines for style analysis, I also think that's very much a descriptive way of looking at music because you can plot quote unquote pop pieces and classical pieces using the same language and the same model and framework. And so I looked at both of those and be like, those are opposite ends of that graph of your chart, and they're both fantastic and they both have their place, you know. Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 17:36

I mean, because I feel like the the banner message is music is music. And I love quotes, I mean that it's attributed to different people. Um, but you know, there's only two types of music, the good kind and the other kind.

SPEAKER_00 17:50

And yeah, dude, it's so good.

SPEAKER_03 17:52

And I and I think that's actually the deeper insight, uh, because you know, if I think about Joni Mitchell, one of my songwriting heroes, all-time heroes, she has a uh she has a footprint that's primarily melodic, primarily reducible. But actually, like if you listen to some of her songs, from a construction standpoint, you might as well just call them art songs. You might, I mean, you may as well. Like they they have a they have a formal construction and uh you know an emotional content and the music follows the intensity of the text and and blah blah blah blah blah blah all this stuff. But they actually live kind of in the same zone as art songs that I love. Um and I just think that's interesting because the at the end kind of circling back to where we started, when I was uh you know a good little piano student, starting to internalize um the mechanics and material of classical music, whatever that means. And when I was a bad little piano student, transcribing Billy Joel and Elton John, and then um Ben Folds, and then uh learning how to play the guitar and writing songs, but also writing choral pieces, and also writing uh, you know, like trying to write for an orchestra for the first time, all this kind of stuff. I never felt like there was high and low. There was just music is music. And I knew back then, like when I was what, like a 15-year-old hack guitar player, I don't think I would have guessed that 30 years later I would still be interested in the kind of that intersection tension between definitions of songwriting versus composing, high versus low, pop versus art, whatever. And yet that winds up being kind of a a through line.

SPEAKER_00 19:48

Oh, yeah, and it's really clear. We've talked we talked about this when we talked about the title track Wind, Water Stone, because there's moments where it feels like a song, moments when it feels like a piece. And I think the Nunc Dimitis to me feels that there are moments where I feel that the reason why I bring that up is because uh the the idea of your matrix and your dissertation and portfolios, because there are moments in this piece where I feel like it's highly reducible and highly it feels like we're all just kind of singing together. And if you looked at the score, it's like, oh, those could just be chords, the opening. We could literally just say that those are the chords on a lead sheet with the text above it. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 20:41

And then those are very and those are very, they're kind of jazz-derived harmonies. I mean, so you're right, you're right. And if I if I was imagining this as a jazz piece, uh, you know, and I wrote it as a lead sheet, I probably would write just the top line melody, and I would reduce the harmonies to symbols. And if a pianist wanted to play it as a solo piece, for example, and voice those chords in whichever ways were sort of idiomatic for the instrument or inspiring in the moment, I'd I'd be down. Like that's cool. Um, and I don't I don't think that makes it less composerly, but I do think that I internally have sort of this flexibility and curiosity about um I don't I don't always feel like I need so much autonomy and I'm happy to share it with other people. And so there are, I mean, there are you know, I've written jazz lead sheets where I put the autonomy totally on the performers, just the way that you're supposed to in that tradition. And in this case, since it's for a vocal consort that are, you know, whatever, I put the dots on the page, but that you can you can see where it's uh kind of overlapping with that other world.

SPEAKER_00 21:54

Right. And then in the guitar line, when we show the score video a little bit later. People will be able to see there's a loop guitar and an electric guitar. So you got two lines again. One part's freezing, and the other part just has like solo intro melt into vocal texture with a bunch of splashes. And that's that's that autonomy for the performer, which it's so cool because of how completely opposite then on your own, in your own, I don't know if I'd call it like, but your own analysis framework, descriptive analysis framework of malleable and reducible. It's the complete opposite of the mag, which is a two, you know, guitar canon in loop with itself. The dots on the page, you can't reduce that very, very prescriptive counter contrapuntal lines interacting. And it's almost like to me, I like the I like what you said earlier, where it's kind of like when you reduce it a lot, it becomes an abstraction. But abstract art is just as valuable as the more you get towards realism.

SPEAKER_03 23:04

Well, right, because abstraction. Yeah, because abstraction, you know, from Latin abstract, it literally just means to take out of. And so when we're when we're talking about abstract art, it's helpful to remember that what you're doing is you're taking some element out of what its original context. You might just be studying shape or form or color or texture or or or whatever. Um and you can learn something by taking something out of its familiar context. And I like how you were talking about this mapped onto the matrix. When I initially presented the framework, I did I called it a descriptive and creative framework. And the the reason that I did that is that for me, uh, you know, an audio, an N sample N of one is um it's creatively inspiring. It's it's useful to me to say, hmm, I wonder if I could push against these constraints and write something that feels weirdly like it is a lead sheet. Like is the degree of reducibility uh a lever that I want to play with in this composition? So it has it has some generative or creative utility also.

SPEAKER_00 24:27

Yeah. Oh yeah. I and I it's so useful for me as a conductor too, because I also can give give the singers some sort of and Sam Handley, like in the performance. It's like, ah, this is where Drew's giving us us the he's he's putting the the impetus for decision making on us now. Who now here he's being really prescriptive. Let's make sure we do exactly what's on the page because of X, and we find our way through the arc, the narrative arc by being able to tell what that is and not being afraid to lean into even things as such as vowel and sound production that also play with the boundaries between classical, like high art choral singing and maybe like a pop arrangement. And we live we live we live anywhere along that spectrum at any time, similar to the way that uh the compositional framework kind of lies within song, between song and composition alike. Yeah, yeah. I mean, we've talked about it. Oh, go ahead, sorry. Oh no, you go ahead.

SPEAKER_03 25:38

Well, I mean, we've talked about before how I mean there the the world's a big place, there are a lot of lanes to swim in, and some groups have a specialty sound that kind of stays in a single lane and they do it beautifully. Like I think of talus scholars or something like that. It's like I could I could I could feast on that forever and die a happy man. Um and then we talk there's other groups where spanning styles and exploring boundaries becomes a really key ingredient to their sound. Room full of teeth, for example.

SPEAKER_00 26:15

Room full of teeth was yeah, the first that came to my mind, right? And they're I mean, holy cow, I could feast on nothing but that and die a happy man.

SPEAKER_03 26:22

I just I mean like it's a lot of things.

SPEAKER_00 26:24

And then there's something in between, right?

SPEAKER_03 26:25

Yeah, I mean it it's a huge playing field, and there's like so much like exciting stuff to explore. But like you're saying, um there are sort of levers to pull creatively that come from that matrix and and appear in this piece and other pieces of mine. Um, but it starts just with a a framework for trying to describe things on uh purely in description in descriptive language rather than evaluative.

SPEAKER_00 26:55

Yeah, and I think so. If we if we keep going through the Mac the through the nunk, sorry. Yeah, I feel I feel like it it kind of lives in this reducible floating sensation, meditative flotation, timelessness, um, at the beginning, in peace. There's some moments of counterpoint that we get into when we get into page 19, and we're we're in peace, in peace, in peace, according to thy word, according to the word. And then to me, that kind of feels like the end of the first section. For mine eyes starts the next one. And then all of a sudden, as it grows for my uh for mine have seen, and that first chord on scene, I feel like that's when we really let the the floodgates open a little bit, and it is such a sound way. It's like I'm sitting. This is what I imagine. I'm sitting on in the in the ocean in the morning, and the sunrise is just coming up. And I'm I've never done this, but this is the image that comes to my brain. And I'm sitting on the surfboard, just like lulling with the waves, becoming one with the earth. And then mine honeys have seen, and a wave comes and just hits me right in the face and like wakes me up. But it like feels so awesome to my nervous system, is like alive, and that's what it is.

SPEAKER_03 28:24

Big old bucket of salt water. That's what that is.

SPEAKER_00 28:28

It's so tasty, though. It's so good. Man, it's because it's not what you expect that chord to open up to, you know. Well, I think that that harmony is so colorful, and true to the stuff, the jazz-influenced harmony from the beginning, too, where it's like, yeah, that those are lead sheet chords, too, really.

SPEAKER_03 28:49

So the beginning of the note lays out a chord, and it's marked as an F7 sharp 11 in the guitar chart. And if you remember from the end of the gloria in the Magnificat, it it's ending on a Jones G, an open G sonority with just a hint of a major third, just enough to barely. In the harmonic, right? Yeah, yeah. It it's it's a tiny bit of sweetness, but not a lot. And so an F7 in my mind, and in sort of the language of jazz reharmonization, is kind of an equivalent harmony to a D7, which is to say a dominant chord related to the tonic. So if you if G was sort of our home base for the mag, and certainly where we ended up after all of the journeying, then this pulls us down into sort of an opposite magnetic pole, P O L E, and it establishes kind of right off the bat, it establishes a new sound. And it's not totally obvious immediately because when the guitar player starts the harmony, what you hear is an F, a D, a G, a D, and an A. So that feels ambiguous, and I love ambiguity, and so that feels kind of like a D minor chord, D minor with a sus four or an 11, depending how you hear that. Um and that would be the minor five of literally the modal five of where we just ended the mag, but it's marked as an F7, and that's because we haven't yet heard the E flat that will kind of help us make sense of what this weird chord is, the way that it's yeah spelled out in this open layer. Yeah. But what happens is that as the word lord is unfolded, we start getting a sense that we're on our way someplace that's gonna be a little bit different than where we were with uh Magnificat or with the Gloria at the end of the Magnifica. It's gonna be a little different. And so by the time actually that we it opens up, as you pointed out, into for my ahc, then you get a full wacky expression of a 7 sharp 11 sonority where you've got the tritone between the bass baritone. Um that would be the I mean that's the tritone of an E7 chord, and then you have a an F sharp, A sharp, C sharp stacked triadic harmony, which is typical of what you call upper structure triads in the upper voices. And one of the reasons why I think it hits like a um an exciting splash of water in that moment is that before that moment, we've been dealing primarily in quartal harmony, these stacks of fourths. And quartal harmony tends to sound very pleasant, it's a little bit slippery in the sense that it can go, it can go different places. I have a friend who calls it Teflon, you know, you can kind of slide, slide on fourths.

SPEAKER_00 32:24

And it has kind of a such a great image. Isn't that funny?

SPEAKER_03 32:28

That I've never would have that is not what I has I would have expected so many other things before that, but that's so but it it has a strength to it too, so it's like yeah, but it is kind of and when you look when you hear like hindemists and music from the kind of like the middle century where they're trying to like build strong sonorities but resisting the tyranny of thirds or whatever that is, uh you get a lot of this kind of like slippery omnidirectional stuff. And the thing I love about Forts is that you the couple things are true. One is that they can feel they they do feel omnidirectional, it's like they can go anywhere, they're quite modal in that sense. Um they also feel vaguely consonant in almost any way that you twist them, except that they feel consonant without feeling uh extremely resonant, and so they have sort of a weird subdued quality because they're always tugging against the harmonic series. They don't they don't behave very politely in a world that builds itself on octaves and fifths and thirds. They they're they're it's like they're they're uh they're dressed in pastels, but they can't quite get through the door frame or something like that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 33:46

It's like and that's why you can see why why those renaissance theorists and who wrote these treatises, you know, fourths were a dissonance, because it you know, so it's it's like you got this old school way of thinking that they're dissonant, but but they really are consonant, and it that's the ambiguity, I think, is that it feels both simultaneously to me.

SPEAKER_03 34:09

Well, and that's exactly right because yeah, because early, early on, they were described as consonances, sort of of like the shadow shadowy twin of the perfect fifth or something like that. Right, right, right.

SPEAKER_00 34:19

Way back like medieval era, yeah, totally.

SPEAKER_03 34:22

Yeah, and then eventually they get kicked over into the bucket of dissonances with some kind of like asterisks, right? Because if you're planning in faux Bourdon where you have a third and a fourth on top of it, then you then you get you kind of get your uh you know, get out of jail free card and you can do it, do what you want. But they have this like weird, funny quality where they're consonant but not resonant. And so they to me it's a little bit like when you hear a string orchestra and they all put mutes on, it has like a thinner timbre, they can play something very beautiful, but you're not gonna get the you're not gonna get all of the wood on the instrument resonating and shimmering on purpose, right? So like this opening, trafficking in forests helps maintain a subdued, muted image purely because of the way that the harmonic series is not working in its favor. But then when it's time for that bucket of salt water for mine, I have seen, you get this F sharp major triad with the F sharp doubled in octaves in a very bright position for the tenor and the soprano. This isn't an unambiguous kind of moment, but you get triad, and it's going to sh make you shimmer. It'll just like you'll be like, wow, where was this triad after all of that central fourth stuff?

SPEAKER_00 35:55

Yeah, with the with the fundamental being in on the lowest string of the guitar open, right? That low E. Like it's it just opens up the whole thing, you know, in such a cool way, within the bass voice being a tenth above that with the octave in the guitar. So you've built the harmonic series in the instrumental, and then it carries up through the voices. So to and to not put the fundamental in the bass voice, I think is a strong because of the guitar, adds to it, I think, that strength. Because you could just put it in the in the voices and it'd be like, ah, but there's still a very small tinge of that ambiguity because the voices alone don't have it. The guitar carries that low, that low uh fundamental.

SPEAKER_03 36:47

And that's one of the fun things about discovering this collaboration with guitar is that if I'm writing uh if I was writing a regular piece of vocal music, I probably wouldn't reach for E major. Right. That doesn't come 100% intuitively. When you think about like fabulous keys for voice, I mean you're gonna have you're gonna have voices hovering around on B's all day long.

SPEAKER_00 37:15

Yeah, those passaggio notes are just it'll be so wonky.

SPEAKER_03 37:19

And it and it doesn't strike me, it's not like a vocal warm key, like a D flat or an A flat or G flat or something like that. And it's not a vocal bright key. It's just like uh, wait, what? And yet, E major is like the guitar key, right? Like uh if you're gonna play crosstown traffic or uh purple haze or whatever, you're gonna you're you're just you want that like that shreddy lowest string, and you want to double it with your finger on the seventh row of the A string to get in the octave, and you just want all of the E major juice you possibly can dish out. And so giving the low notes to the guitar and then tucking the vocals, not rooting them in that way, I think makes the vocals feel like aggressive and interesting and bright, but it also tethers them to a sonority that sort of has a uh a totality to it because it has their the root, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 38:24

And then coming down into man, I haven't looked at this in for a long time. In for I haven't listened looked at this piece this closely in a long time, but as you get then to thighs have seen thy salvation, and thy salvation then melts into a sip the almost the same sonority, it's like not quite, because you have the you have the tritone and the bass baritone again, yeah. But and then you have that upper triad out as well, but now instead of being doubled in the tenor and soprano and an octave, or I mean I guess it's still a seventh in some way between the bass and the tenor, but it's uh now you all of a sudden you got F sharps and F naturals cross-relating against each other at the same time, right?

SPEAKER_03 39:17

And that it it takes on a little bit of an octetonic quality in a moment like that. But when we think about what makes chords feel like they belong to each other, like when we when we write diatonic music with common practice, voice leading and uh uh dance moves, you know we're looking at a language where the harmonies belong to each other and they feel really inevitable and natural with each other. And I think that's great, right? You know, because the one showed through the four people beat for the five to the one, and it just like works. And I like finding other ways to make things feel related and inevitable. And in this case, um I think you put your finger on it where uh there's a tritone in lower voices and a triad in upper voices, and they don't produce the same kind of similarity exactly. But I think that by hearing those consistencies, we can feel like they belong to each other and not feel like they're just rando.

SPEAKER_00 40:22

Right, right. And I think that's a really difficult thing for someone like myself who would say is an amateur composer who composed at one point more than he composes now and hadn't studied it. Um those are the kinds of things that make me scratch my head and be like, man, I don't know how they think of it. But that that because it really does feel so related, just a very subtle color shift. We're down now, thy salvation. Interesting on that choice of words where it's this cross relation, the the F natural, F sharp happening and salvation, hearkening, maybe. I don't even know if you did it intentionally, but to the idea of a cross. Christ on the cross coming brings salvation. I don't know. I think there's all kinds of textual and harmonic depths of that little moment that make this setting really exciting. Because and then we get another freeze back on that initial F7 sharp 11 chord in the same voicing as the very beginning. And then we have this which thou hast prepared before the face, before the face of all people. And then it's the moment. So it's like we had this suspension and this splash of salt water. This wave hits us in the face on half scene, then we come back, the waves are just lulling us back, and now all of a sudden it's like it's like the kraken comes and the the waves just like or we're on the top of a whale's blowhole now, and it like shoots. Is this uh a good a good kraken or a bad kraken? No, it's dude, it is crack a lacking, as they would have said 30 years ago. But like to be a light, to be a light, and then it's so fascinating to me that this is simply an F sharp minor triad.

SPEAKER_03 42:26

Yeah, but in that moment, it doesn't feel very minor.

SPEAKER_00 42:30

No, it doesn't, and it doesn't feel but and it's it's not extended, it's not chordal, it's not jazz, it's not it really, it's so pure that you get that hearkening to old things. And I still never forget, and we've probably mentioned this several times on the show when you went to a Vocha State concert back east and we were singing what what what cathedral uh what church or cathedral were I think it was an Episcopal church in Connecticut, is what is what I remember. Yeah. Yeah, and my recollection is that you said that they had sung these early pieces, Renaissance pieces that just exploded in that space.

SPEAKER_03 43:12

Yeah, I think they were I think they were doing yeah, yeah, yeah. I think they were doing Persal and things like that in the first half, right? And then the second half they whipped out the the fun stuff for the younger people or whatever it is. Yeah, but it's astonishing that I mean every every note of it was perfect, right? But the first half of the concert was twice as loud, just because the physics, the physics at play are so different. Because if you if you do a well-tuned triad and you have the doubling situated just right, and and frankly, if you have it in a bright register in the voices, uh you get the additive interference, if I'm remembering the word. Right, but it literally amplifies the sound. It is a loud resonant sound.

SPEAKER_00 44:06

And when it's justly tuned versus equally tuned, it's it's this natural amplifier. And then in those jazz harmonies, you need them to be equally tempered because you have to deal with enharmonics and and they don't the the natural physics and natural acoustics are not necessarily on your side, which doesn't make it worse, like you said. It just makes it different. And and so I think that decision to have that pure triad on light, there's a natural amplification and uh literal decibel that gets added into that chord, and it's on a nice pure ah like masterclass again in text setting, because you could have you would you wouldn't want to put that on to be a light because we everyone would hate you.

SPEAKER_03 45:08

Yeah, all the same. Yeah, you know. My goal is just not to be hated. So I think that's that is my highest aspiration.

SPEAKER_00 45:18

But in mine too.

SPEAKER_03 45:20

Yeah. But that the bunch of psychology, the other thing that I'm thinking about now that we're bringing this up is that you know, obviously in the the early pieces, you got a slower harmonic rhythm where you know you dwell in harmonies longer, and that adds to this sort of like humility effect. Um and then jazz harmonies typically, especially if you're doing kind of clever reharmonizations, they're snappy. There's this kind of like quick moving, and it's so exciting, um, but so different. And uh, you know, you can a lot of the harmonies that I'm actually using this piece of are jazz derived, and you can get a great harmony that shakes and zings, but it oftentimes those speak better in smaller um acoustical services. So this is a it I think it is interesting because when I was writing this passage, I remember having learned that lesson, and I thought, ooh, what I really want here is a shocking, thrilling, um glooming sensation. That doesn't tell me that doesn't tell me anything at all about the signature, about a chord name, about you know the we don't invoke music theory words to say a shocking, thrilling, booming sensation. That's what I wanted, and I think that those are the kinds of things that people feel when they're in the hall, right? Like you when you have those moments where the hair is kind of like lifted up on your arms, and you're like, what was that? Yeah, that is the thing that that I'm that I want to someday be good at doing. And so in this in this moment I thought, oh, we're gonna be singing into a space, and I want the air in that space to do the thing that it did when I was in that church in uh Connecticut. And so I tried, sort of in my own way, to just land a harmony that I knew would resonate and shake. And you know, and it's it's stuff like we know our tenor Dallin from Santa Vegas, right? Um I know what his A, his high A sounds like. I wasn't writing this just like for category tenor, I was writing this knowing that Dallin was gonna sing that note. And it's that it's that heroic tenor, it's just like loaded with like crazy overtone excitement.

SPEAKER_04 48:14

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 48:16

Like I can feel it from here when I'm thinking about it right now.

SPEAKER_00 48:19

I'm like right, I mean this like residual, sympathetic uh experience with it, even though it's not happening in real time yet. And I think the audience has felt that for sure. You don't just literally feel like a gasp of silence at the end of that note when we let off of it. And it's it's like you said too, even though it's still a pure third or pure triad, it still feels related to what mine eyes have seen because the F sharp like the F sharp makes it to me, it makes it feel related. Oh yeah, like ah instead of an F sharp, now it's up a third, and it's like ah, cool, it's related, but it's like someone clicked the gain knob up right to its max without crossing the beauty line, and it's shaking, and then we then we come back down to like the Gen Time.

SPEAKER_03 49:08

Totally, totally we're in the same zip code as we were before, but we take out a little bit of the um the kind of tension that's impeding that sort of shimmer and then move the sonority up an inversion to them, so to speak, and the dynamic, but it all follows into the word light, and um they all arrive at the word light at different times, but they finish that vowel and then close it to the T together, and I think that's what um helps that moment land.

SPEAKER_00 49:47

Yeah, and then we're instantly back down to Lytan, big formata, little guitar thing, back to reminiscing to the beginning, the Gentiles, and then we have this really cool line and to be he the glory, a little bit of uh subdued tension, where we have that the glory of what? Of thy people, Israel, and now we're back to doxology too, which feels very similar but awesomely distinct. If I had to choose, if I had to say Cam, which doxology between the mag and the nunk is your favorite? Which is such a silly question that I ask other people all the time. I would have to say I think I like two better. There's something about that guitar, it feels so Jimi Hendrix all the way. Yeah, you know. I mean, it really it really is.

SPEAKER_03 50:50

I mean, it's a little bit like uh Castles Made of Sand. Um that's not untrue. Yeah, for sure. Well, I mean, the composition, yes.

SPEAKER_00 51:02

I love the composition Castle's Made of Sand by one Jimi Hendrix.

SPEAKER_03 51:07

But you'll I mean you'll notice that um the voicings in those chords harken back to the Lord stuff at the beginning, building in chorals, which maps onto guitar very well because it's tuned mostly in fourths. And uh my goal with this doxology was to be the same but different. Yeah. So that when we hear the mag and the moon as a set, and when we compare uh the doxology of the memories to the template that we sort of stamped into our memories from the first time around, uh that it's uh satisfying because it's familiar but uh new at the same time. And this is like this is why it's kind of a concert setting rather than a liturgy setting, right? Because this is the kind of thing that would make every that should make every music director really angry if they were actually trying to do this in service. You're saying it's it's the same, but it's not the same. Why? Why do you think that's what I'm saying?

SPEAKER_00 52:12

What happened to economy of rehearsal time, Drew?

SPEAKER_03 52:15

Yeah, I know, I know. Sorry, it's striving for different goals here. But you get the this similar framework that starts emerging with different kind of decor in this new element that's sort of rocketing through the middle that starts amping up really the energy so that by the time we get to the end, we've we've arrived we've arrived at the on end by different means. We've arrived at our destination without feeling like we've sort of already been overbounded up, hopefully.

SPEAKER_00 53:13

Yeah, and that that uh going up to the A with Anthony's voice on the last amen, amen, amen, amen, ah man.

SPEAKER_03 53:23

It's like well that's and that's kind of like the money note from the big light cord. And you wouldn't think that money note you wouldn't think that F sharp minor and G major have much in common, but if you take for granted sort of an equal temperament idea, which we have to wrestle with when we're singing with a guitar anyway, um then an A natural can be a common tongue between those two universes, and you sort of tie the light a light motif, if we will. Uh you tie the the light through this roundabout that's kind of rock rock and roll doxology into the the a into that letter A in Amen. Whoa.

SPEAKER_00 54:09

Dude, there's nothing else that could possibly be said that would be better than what you just said. That is incredible. So I think it's time for us to listen now to the Nunk Dimitis, the second canticle for the Sound of Ages service, uh, to appear on Windwater Stone. As we looked at the Nunc Demitis, some really exciting colors. Really excited to let this out to the world on streaming platforms. Again, Wind Water Stone comes out May 22nd. We also want to let you know of our season ending concert on May 29th at St. Ambrose Church, our season retrospective, so you don't want to miss that final concert. For more details, you can check out our website, soundofages choir.comslash events, to reserve your seat today. And we'll catch you next time on the Sound of Ages podcast.