Sound of Ages Podcast
Sound of Ages is a professional vocal consort based in Utah. They specialize in performing music of all styles, genres and time periods, with a focus on the timeless fundamentals from medieval and renaissance times.
Hosted by Founder and Artistic Director Kam Kavanaugh and Composer-in-Residence and Chief Strategist Andrew Maxfield. Discussions range from musical concepts, entrepreneurial strategy, live concert streams, interviews with fellow professionals in the industry, and essentially, all things choral music related.
Previously known as "Early Music Monday," Kam has already interviewed a variety of choral rock stars from around the globe including Nigel Short, Eric Whitacre, Owain Park, Cecilia McDowall, Andrew Crane, Chris Gabbitas and many more.
Sound of Ages Podcast
Dumpster Candy or Brilliant Simplicity? | The Lord of Glory Is My Light
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Writing "simple" music can be rather complex and requires a lot of thought, craft, and discipline. The Lord of Glory Is My Light represents Andrew Maxfield's disciple and commitment to craft. This piece is the next track that will appear on Sound of Ages upcoming album Wind, Water, Stone, release date May 22, 2026.
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Welcome to the Sound of Ages podcast. If you're new or welcome back, if you've listened before, great to have you. Today, we are going to talk about the next piece on the Windwater Stone album, which tends to be a lot of people's favorite, called The Lord of Glory is My Light, and we're gonna talk about simple and complexity, and simplicity on the far side of complexity, and as Andrew Maxfield says, potential dumpster candy. I don't know, you can decide. Is it dumpster candy or is it brilliant simplicity? Your call. But we'll talk about it and we'll listen to it at the end of the episode, so don't leave early. Stick around, and this is the Sound of Ages podcast.
SPEAKER_01She would be sh would be she.
SPEAKER_03Hello, Drew.
SPEAKER_00Greetings, Cam.
SPEAKER_03Dude, that was the epic disco pose.
SPEAKER_00Yes.
SPEAKER_03I'm putting that as the thumbnail on YouTube, by the way.
SPEAKER_00Well, please, yes.
SPEAKER_03Today, speaking of disco, we have a piece of choral disco. I just tried to work on my segues. I don't know if it's working, but we have an awesome piece fully fully prepared to be discussed today with the composer himself called The Lord of Glory is My Light. And this piece in several ways is Drew exploring an opposite of the mag and the nunk. But also keeping true to his principles because he's a principled composer with skills and craft that guide his every move. So Drew, speak to us. Spit your words of wisdom about the Lord of Glory is my light.
SPEAKER_00Alright, Cam. I'll do that. So the Lord of Glory is my light. Um it it happened because we had a gig that needed a piece that sounded like this.
SPEAKER_03We're we're singing, we're we're singing in a right there, is actually the story of history, music history. And I wish that more young composers knew that.
SPEAKER_00Well, I will I will uh dally in one little comic aside here is that um a couple years ago, probably back in like 2018, I was in Boston and I went to a music conference, and the keynote speaker was Peter Shickley, uh aka P D Q Bach himself, and talk about one of my heroes. I mean, the the guy's breadth of musical knowledge, his sense of humor, like you just don't you can't find anybody with that special perfect storm besides him. Um and I got the chance to chat with him and I said, Well, what what advice what advice do you have for a young composer? And he thought about it like he wasn't he wasn't being dismissive. He thought about it, he said, be a working composer, and here's what I mean. He said, uh when I was an undergrad at Swarthmore College in a music department that was evidently very, very small, he was an unusual kid because he he declared himself a composer. He felt like he had a compositional destiny to fulfill. But he just decided that he would write a piece of music for literally anyone and everyone who played anything. And so if he had a friend who'd played piano, he wrote a piano piece. And if a friend who played oboe, he wrote a an oboe piece, whatever, you know, just every single opportunity. He said, and in the dorm, in the hallway of the dorm, there was a glass case with a fire hose in it. And my friend and I looked at it and we noticed that the nozzle resembled a brass mouthpiece. So I even wrote for that. And he said, That's what I mean by being a working composer, sort of just seizing the opportunity to write for everybody and anybody all the time. And that it was actually super inspiring for me because uh, you know, sure, I you know, like I will write pieces for my own curiosity and satisfaction all the time, but I love collaboration, I'm wired for it. And so if an opportunity presents itself or is even within a long arm's reach, yeah, that is the reason to write a piece of music.
SPEAKER_03That's amazing. And it makes me think of really quickly another side thing for those of you who are interested in leadership and business. I don't know how many of those of you are there out there, but there's a fantastic book by Liz Wiseman called Impact Players, and one of her main quotes from that book is don't do the job you want to do, do the job that needs doing. And she talks about how that leads to more and more opportunities, and then it will lead you to be able to do the job that you wanted to do in the first place, but you have more knowledge on the other side than you would have had, and it's really cool. Impact players, it's fantastic book. Look at everything with opportunity goggles and just continue to. That's how well the funny thing is, that's how I got to into BYU because I was at BYU Idaho, and that's what I did, but on the conducting side, because I was in the student composer society because there wasn't quite a comp composition program yet, or like major. But I went because I was interested in it. But then what I did is I was just like, hey, do you need a conductor for the student composer's recital? And so I just kept asking people, and before I knew it, everyone was just assumed that I was essentially the conductor. Not every piece needed it because some of them were solos and small groups, but if anyone needed a conductor, they knew they needed to just ask me. And so then I got to I got asked to conduct my friend's senior composition recital, and it was a full hour's worth of conducting, and those videos are what I use to submit, and the opportunity was just like right there. So be a working conductor is also what I would say.
SPEAKER_00Amen. So I still have a a little post-it note on the bottom of my computer, which is and it says be a working composer, and that's my little note to self from that conversation. So we had this we had this gig, and it was for the Faith Matters conference, sort of a um uh, you know, it's a it's a large gathering, um topically related to faith, and we we knew we'd have an audience of I don't know, four or five hundred people, and we needed an opener. And we at for whatever reason we didn't have one. I thought, oh yeah, I should probably write an opener. And I knew who was singing, knew what the venue was, knew what the mood was that I wanted to evoke. And those parameters were what kind of guided the so-called creative part of the piece, although I think that parameters are creative too, they cause creative responses, and sometimes the more constrained the parameters are, the more creative the project becomes. I love constraints. Anyway, so because of the context and the uh this the the place on the program, I thought to myself that we needed a text that would be aspirational and sort of elevating. Um and I and I just went digging into Isaac Watts' poetry, you know. He's this sort of legendary as one does.
SPEAKER_03I mean, I'm not a poet, so that I mean that is a sentence that has never left my mouth. I just went diving into Isaac Watts' poetry. Like that's so obvious, obvious choice, true.
SPEAKER_00Thank you, Cam. You should dive into Isaac Watts' poetry, it sounds like yeah, I really should.
SPEAKER_03I need to now I have a list. Yeah, so he was of a what grip what grips you about Isaac Watts, I guess.
SPEAKER_00Well, he's an interesting guy because um so he's born in 1674 in England. He was well educated, very devout, and as a matter of his, I guess, personal devotions, he would read psalms and then respond to them by kind of rephrasing or retelling a psalm in his own uh verse. Cool. And it tended to be these sort of metrical, rhymed uh lyrical verses that are absolutely pre-fashioned for singing, they're just perfect for singing. And so his uh hymn texts uh are all over Christendom. I mean, they're they're in just about every hymnal you've ever picked up. And as a result, it's a little bit like I don't know, it's a little bit like Shakespeare. He's not exactly like co-terminous with Shakespeare, but he's his his hymn texts have kind of passed the test of time. And um it's not like they're perfect or like they're ever, you know, like perfectly evergreen or whatever, but they they just have sort of proven their merit. And so I went looking for something like that because it felt um, you know, safe, beautiful, public domain, hey, all the all the right things. And so I found I found a text called The Lord of Glory is my light. I'm certain it's been set to music before, which bothers me not at all. Right. And I looked at it and it had this kind of aspirational, beautiful language. The Lord of Glory is my light and my salvation, too. God is my strength, nor will I fear what all my foes can do. It you know, it's just like, come on, come on.
SPEAKER_03It's just so and it has this long arc to it, right? Where it's not just like it's just got this uh it's just so flowy, I guess, and feels organic. It kind of like unfolds organically. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Yeah. And so in I took the liberty of modifying a couple words, which you know, I don't know if there's purists out there who just passed out while listening to this podcast. If so, take heart. There are things are okay. But you know, there's a phrase like um, when troubles rise and storms appear, there may his children hide. God has a strong pavilion where it was a little wonky for singing. He it's like he he got uh he had a beautiful image, but the language was got it got a little bit chewy, and so I I just made tiny substitutions here and there to make it flow, which I think is okay, you know, with that that much remove, that much distance historically. And when I look at the uh era of the text when Isaac Watts lived, uh it's hard for me to hear um almost any anything except for this kind of British choral sound attached to words like these. You know, it's just it's almost like the i it was inevitable or something like that. And so I reached, I reached for a sound that is, you know, kind of rooted in that world. And um, it tends to have kind of a a high tessatura, which it actually is not typical. I don't usually keep people high.
SPEAKER_03Oh, no, it's it's it's when I think about it, it is very distinct in terms of your output. And when I first got it, it was like, oh gosh, I'm just glad I'm not singing it because Spiderfly is brutal for me. But that's my own range issues and my own passaggio and all that kind of stuff. So so but it it is, it's one of the but it's bright and it kind of sits up there, it's brassy and vibrant and trumpety and that sort of thing, and and that's super exactly, exactly, right?
SPEAKER_00Because if you imagine a choir with that kind of timbre, with those kind of vowels singing in that kind of architecture, when you hear the phrase, the Lord of glory is my light, you want it to feel like that sort of like shafts of light coming through the stained glass.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, right.
SPEAKER_03It just 100%, man. That's how it feels like I can hear Trinity singing it right now in my head, you know, just across the the chapel to each other.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, man. Yeah, yeah, I'd love that. Anyway, so the those are all just kind of design parameters. We haven't even talked about sound yet, you know what I mean?
SPEAKER_03Um but it's amazing how much focus that gives you already, and then how creative you can be. Because the thing that I love about this piece is and I asked you this question, but it was kind of a leading question, and maybe I'll kind of give my perspective on the answer, just not good interview etiquette, but whatever. The uh I I love how mu it's right after the nunc Dimitis, the doxology on the album, very complex with that ostinato in the loop pedal on the guitar in 5-4 with three textures going on at once, two in the voices, one in that ostinato, and then the guitar doing its own thing, the percussion stuff, it's very complex contrapuntal motion, and it's amazing. And then you hear this just one ping from the guitar on the B flat, and then you hear this homo rhythmic, very simple, but just as elegant and well crafted, like the craftsmanship is the same, but it's found this simplicity that is in that Anglican uh uh Anglican slash Anglican adjacent realm that it just harangues your attention. After all of that, you get a breath, it's kind of like that last ah man, blam. And it's almost like everybody's muscles relax, and then it instead of like calling you back, it grabs your attention but keeps you relaxed and has this very simple opposite of what we just heard.
SPEAKER_00Well, I'm glad that you hear it that way because one of the things that I've realized about myself just by virtue of trial and error, which is the path of composing, or shall I call it error and error.
SPEAKER_03Um it's the path of conducting to and singing and all of everything in life. So there's another life lesson there. We got all kinds of life lessons going on today.
SPEAKER_00My my trial of error after error after error. Um no, but I realize that um there's a couple things. One is that I like all sorts of stuff, I really do. Music is like this gigantic, beautiful, fascinating house that has like a thousand windows and no doors. And the best thing that you can do to get a view all the way into the house is just look through as many windows as possible. And you you never get to go all the way inside. I mean, the joke would be like, well, Bach did, and maybe that's true, and that would be really irritating. Uh, but it's and it probably is true. Um Him and Arvo Parrot are sitting then there alone. Yeah, yeah, yeah, seriously. Uh but anyway, but I just you know, there there are very few windows that I've looked through that I didn't just love and find fascinating. And that's true if I'm up at two in the morning at the Blue Note listening to the Robert Glasper trio, or if I'm in an orchestra hall hearing bar talk, or if I'm at Coral Evans Song at Trinity, or you know, you fill in the blank, and I'm like, I am just here for this. I love this. Music is why I'm here.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, man. It's that simplicity on the far side of complexity, right? Because you can get bogged down, but you find it again. And I think this piece is a perfect, a perfect example of you finding that simplicity on the far side of complexity. Because I know like a lot of people will conflate the definition of counterpoint and polyphony as if they're one and the same. But but that's the great thing, is like real counterpoint is not because first species is still counterpoint, and that's note against note. And so maybe talk us through now a little bit of the nuts and bolts of kind of the verses.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let me I'll share my screen so that I can share the the score and also a little bit of audio too, if all goes well. Oh, score got lodged somewhere between my monitors. There it is. Yeah, but um in terms of following on the heels of the nunk, I just like lots of things. And I think in the in the long run, people will probably talk about John Adams as being an eclectic composer. Like he's written a lot of things that don't sound like each other. I'd love to be an eclectic composer. That makes me happy. Yeah. I'm I'm as content writing a 12-bar blues as I am writing a you know, kind of an Anglican-adjacent motet as I am writing a uh crazy uh symphony. Dock dox yeah, doxology that's in 5-4 with uh a sorted percussion or a symphony or whatever. So here here's kind of the theory and vibe of this. So we start, as you said, in a really bright place. Do you hear that by the way?
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so this bright B flat sonority, which means that like home bass for the soprano is already up in a little bit of a chirpy register, but but I don't mind that because um because why? Well, if you think about a cathedral choir with boy sopranos and this kind of thin, I don't want to call it chirpy, but there's this very special sound that lives way up there. Yeah. So when you look at the melody, it isn't actually all that um, it isn't all of that distinctive. It's just like, you know, some major scale m uh noodles. I'm gonna turn the audio on that down just to tear it a little bit because it feels quite loud in my ears.
SPEAKER_03It's actually, if you can handle it, it's actually just right. Oh, is it? Okay, then we'll then I will and on the previous episode, it was actually just a little bit quiet. It was hard to make up. So it's awesome. It's probably if it's blasting your ears out, I'm sorry, but it that's probably just about right.
SPEAKER_00Okay. All right. Fine, fine, fine, fine, fine, fine, fine. Great. My ear, my ears will be sacrificed very happily for this. So the point is that I'm not trying to write an unforgettable melody. We've talked about that on previous episodes. And counterpoint, if you take it as the study of line, what you're really striving for is coherence. You want to create linear coherence. And sometimes you can use that in service of writing your hit melody that nobody will ever forget. Sometimes you get a hit melody by breaking all of the principles of counterpoint and writing a one-note samba or whatever or whatever. And that's that's great too. But when I talk to students, I say that it's kind of like there's four corners in the ring, and in one corner you've got scale, we know what that is, stepwise motion. In another corner, we've got arpeggio, we know what that is, movement by leaps. In the other corner we have melody. We all intuitively feel like we know what a melody is. And then in the fourth corner, kind of like lurking in the darkness, is counterpoint, and that's the study of line. Line. And I I'm interested in line more than I am in this piece than in writing an unfortunate. Forgettable melody. But when you look at the way that the chords move from one to the next. And I'm h hovering on that chord for a reason. The harmonies are not remarkable, right? Because it's one, four. Sorry, what? One, five. No, I thought you were saying something else. So one, five, one, four in first inversion, five in first inversion one, and then we get down into the first inversion, into the four chord. I mean, talk about um talk about like ordinary sounding stuff in a common common uh practice vernacular, right? But getting getting the spacing and the doubling to be uh to be effective is the job of harmony. And it matters to me that I that I attend to those little details. So getting that bright, confident, uh resonant sound comes from attending to those details. But one of my favorite composers is a British composer named Francis Pott, a really uh gentle, generous soul, and an amazing composer, polyphonist that I wish I could be like someday. But one of the things I've noticed from his music is that he never ex he never tolerates a boring cadence. And so when we land on uh and my salvation two, I don't want to just land on and my salvation two. That feels a little underwhelming and it doesn't feel like it's loaded with forward momentum. And this isn't a particularly tangy example, but if you do this, you're leaving it, you're you're finishing the word on this harmony.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. Oh man, that bass and alto together is so propelling.
SPEAKER_00You can't help but feel like, oh, we need to go somewhere, and where we go then is as we move through that passage, again, none of this is revolutionary, it's strictly diatonic. We're using sort of common common practice, doubling and spacing. But what I'm trying to do is manage a sense of forward motion where we just feel like we must keep moving. And the way that people have done that historically is by mastering patterns, uh, cadential formulas, sequential patterns, and those are all um the devices that get us from one beat to the next. And this is very homorrhythmic, certainly compared to the MAG and the Nunk that we've just talked about. Um and in the moments where you could say it's polyphonic, it's just little line level decorations. But ever but at the same time, at the level of counterpoint, every voice, each line should have its own rhetoric and architecture that just keeps the thing moving.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, and that's what I love about singing when I I mean I haven't really sung with Sound of Ages before. I mean, here or there. But when I sing through every piece that you send, and I sing through it before I give it to the singers, it's like, oh man, I would love to be the alto in this one. Oh man, I'd love to be, and then the next part, oh, I'd love to be the tenor in this one. Oh man, I'd love to be the bass. And I say that about every part, and it's and that's what to me it sounds simple, it even looks simple on the page, but even in execution, there's something that compels you toward it because of the craft of real line versus just thinking chord, chord, chord, chord, chord, chord, chord. Because I've seen pieces from theory students or or young composers when they want to uh have me look at a piece of theirs that is chord, chord, chord, chord, chord, it's chordally conceived. And it the lines don't sing this way.
SPEAKER_00Well, there's and there's good reason for that because um the the sort of default teaching of harmony in most like undergrad classrooms, um and AP music theory, by the way. And AB AP music theory. I mean, we even use words like harmony and theory interchangeably as though those were the same ideas, which I think is oh man, yeah, kind of a crazy tell right up front. But it's very vertical, it's very Germanic, it's very blocky, and what you wind up with is this basic notion where it's like um, okay, get from one verticality that can easily be identified with a Roman numeral to the next, and don't have any parallel fifths or octaves, and do as little damage as possible with your voice leading, and then move on to the next blocky, you know, um Roman numeral unit. Right. And the thing is that that I feel like that I'm not saying that theory teaching really embraces that, but it's easy for people to assume that that's how music really works.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. Without because so many so many instructors are doing their best, like because I I don't want to criticize at all either, because I I get it, but it's like you have to help frame the students in the language that it is and help them see that as one tiny small part of the picture, not as the whole picture. And I think a lot of times implicitly it comes across as this is the whole picture instead of oh, this is one small piece of the pie. Let's look at it from zoomed way out, 10,000 feet, so you can see how it fits in with line, because this came first.
SPEAKER_00Oh, yeah, for sure. And I subscribe uh personally to more of a French tradition, uh, but also totally to a contrapuntal way of seeing things where counterpoint produces lines and lines aggregate to produce harmony. Like har harmony is a byproduct of counterpoint. And I think that sort of this like Germanic obsession with Roman numerals, yeah, it totally makes sense because it's easy to test, it's easier to teach, it's harder and more time consuming and um unreasonable in some ways to have this kind of contrapuntal obsession with wine, but that's but I think that's where the real music making is because when you hear a piece that just like grabs you by your face and pulls you through time, and you're like, wow, every single instant feels inevitable, and I absolutely have to know where this is going.
SPEAKER_03Because it's a surpr it's that paradox of inevitable and thrillingly surprising at the same time.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I'm just gonna go get out there and say that it's not Roman numerals that are giving you that sensation. It just isn't.
SPEAKER_03I completely agree.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_03So then when we move through this verse, because this this piece to to zoom back out for just two seconds, it's strophic. So we have this verse, and then we have a refrain, and then we have another verse that's very similar, and then we have another refrain, and then we have a very simple outro that is like another verse. And so when we get to the refrain, when troubles rise and storms appear, there may his children hide, there in God's shelter. It's such a such a cool thing. And now all of a sudden, the the texture it doesn't shift really just by looking at the page, but the sound sure does, and the tone sure does, and the timbre sure does.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Well, so one thing that I did as a composer is that I overlaid a song form. Yeah. Right. You know, like this, I'm not I'm not writing this as though this were a hymn. And that wasn't my intention from the outset. And so you if you look at it musically, you'd see a song form that's essentially A, A, B, A, B, and then, like you said, kind of an A outro. And that's one way in which it's different from what you might think of as a just a standard um hymn tune, which is just a single, fre frequently kind of like a single you know, cycle through whatever the form the hymn takes. And so when we get here, we're coming out of something that does feel a little bit hymn-ish with the homorrhythmic stuff, and then it we have this uh uh not just hymn-like, but also a little bit um sort of measured and um not overly emotionally juicy, but then we come to this um thing that we've that is this this transition into the you might call it chorus, refrain, however you want to think about it, um, with the tenudos and the retard in this big swell, right? And so far we haven't had that kind of notation. When trouble rise, and what we have right there is a downbeat, a strong beat minor eleven chord. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And we haven't heard that yet.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, right.
SPEAKER_00We've been staying almost exclusively triadic. Yeah, I haven't I haven't scanned back to make sure that that's the gospel truth, but at this moment, everybody's ears, whether they notice it or not, are probably perking up just a little teeny tiny bit because you have something that's not far off from triadic harmony. I mean, we're still working in you know, in that layman, that language, but we have an added note and it's tall and it broadens the total range, it expands the dynamic, and I think if you if there were sort of like the juicy emotion meter or something like that, if there was a knob that was being turned, it goes right.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, and this is where we first hear the guitar, and we have a phase uh sweep as well. We do the cool phase sweep, which is and the baritone guitar with it, oh my gosh, like it it's so and you know, like you've said, we've had this metric feel, but it's it's really kind of been almost reminiscent. We tried to do it multi-mega robo of Anglican chant-like, where it's push and pull, push and pull, but uh, within this kind of wave-like pulsing nature, and then I mean, this is almost completely out of time. Yeah, yeah, that we that we chose to do it.
SPEAKER_00It's well, and I mean, here's the thing is like I I was joking with you and some of the other singers that uh when I got to this moment, my my little songwriter intuition was kind of like do chubbles, rise, you know, whoops, rise, and stall scoops up pee. You know, it just feels like it goes cheese ball for a moment, certainly if I perform it that way. And I was I was joking that I suddenly went dumpster diving, which is totally a silly thing to say to begin with to begin with. But I remember Dalen, the tenor, saying, uh yeah, keep that dumpster open, man. Dude, keep the dumpster open, man.
SPEAKER_04I just will never forget him saying that. Dude, keep it open. This is awesome. This is so good.
SPEAKER_00So it's the same thing. You get a minor minor 11 chord, yeah, minor 11 chord, which is let's be honest, probably my favorite chord. You can't play um Herbie Hancock without just loving loving that chord. Yeah, so here it is, and then it moves us to there, and then it resolves back into that kind of primarily triad language, and uh we kind of step back just a little bit from the big juicy stuff. There may his children hide there in God's shelter, he makes my soul abide, and then we're back into that kind of the the chant style verse homorrhythmic, and when the chorus comes back, it lifts a little bit higher.
SPEAKER_03Right, and it's even the the the emotional juice-meter is really high and imperceptible at that moment comparative to everything else, because it's been so Anglican and stoic and like brassy, bright, lifted, but still very reserved in a lot of ways. And I think that's what makes it even more compelling when we get to the second refrain.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I hope so. And I I feel like um I never want people in the audience to feel like they need a music degree to understand what I'm doing or to enjoy what I'm doing, or something like that, because I think that obsesses composers end up thinking about the wrong things routinely. But I frequently think about people in the audience, I imagine them, and like what can they perceive? Well, you can perceive contrast, right? And Nadia Boulanger, I think this is in the Quincy Jones biography, she says, um belief, knowledge, feeling, attachment, sensation, the type of music is immaterial if you're striving for these qualities, right? And that's right. Uh, you know, so I imagine somebody sitting there and you've been hearing this kind of uh the this sort of uh even chant. It feels and when it's done and when it's done so well, like in service and stuff, it feels like a singular voice that's speaking to you sort of from from heaven or something like that, right? Totally agree. And you you attune yourself to that voice so that then when this moment of contrast comes, there's this welling of sensation that happens that you haven't been attaching to the chant. So when here's the 13 or the the 11th chord, but then we just dial it up, it's not particularly hard to tune. Right? It's not a shocking sorry.
SPEAKER_03Great awowl of rise. It's yeah, it's really great.
SPEAKER_00And call it dorky, but it rises on the word rise. Which you know what I mean.
SPEAKER_03Too much heavy-handed text painting is a little um not as refined, I guess, but but it's but it's still subtle, and this is like the audience doesn't even wouldn't even be able to articulate that that's what's happening, but they can feel it. Yeah, like that they know that that musical gesture and the text is connected right there in that moment.
SPEAKER_00Right. And so your upper three voices are just doing totally natural, and then your lower voices um shift from a very bold sound in a bold register, but as they move up, they change the timbre into something kind of floaty or light, and that's a sound that I like a lot, where you you know you you you move f through ranges and you shift timbers into this kind of shimmer.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. Where it feels more like all treble voices, kind of yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00Love it. It's like a source of color and variation without actually flipping that many switches. And then the same thing happens next, right? And storms up here, and here's where it gets bigger. We have the tenor line lifted. I'm like, oh yeah, this is gonna sing. Oh yeah. Like, that's just gonna sing. And the same thing in the upper voices, though, it's not particularly aggressive. There are no accidentals. I don't think in the No, there's one accidental in the cadence earlier on, but this is you know, that's not really wild writing, but when you have it on the word appear, yeah. And you get this, uh, you know, it's funny because like in a theory class, they're gonna say, now don't have parallel octaves between your voices, and so this moment between the tenor and the soprano would be verboten in your theory class. But then when you think about the actual contrapuntal structure, you're like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. No, no, because this moment is not actually an issue of parallelism. This is an orchestration move, right? This is like where you have your French horn here and a trumpet up above sweetening the same expression of the same line, and they're they're in like it's like they it's like the the the planets come into alignment for a moment and it's beautiful because of that. Or it's like the way that we makes me think of stack woodwinds or something, right?
SPEAKER_03And it makes me think of a like a fountain pen where it's just one line, and then all of a sudden you just turn it a little bit so the line gets a little thicker, yeah, and yeah, gives it some character. Like, yeah, because that's and that's exactly how it plays out in the piece and time of and then and then you hear so so it's it's like this one line, and then it gets thicker for a second, and then you hear the soprano just like step down at the last second, kind of in that Francis Pot type of philosophy of not letting the cadence be too too uh too plain to give us a seven, like it ends on you know G minor seven, which is so I that's my favorite sonority is minor seven.
SPEAKER_00I just can't get enough of that sonority, so it's just so cool because it feels so neutral at the same time, and oh yeah, because I I think those kinds of sonorities are great because they're ambiguous, it feels major, it feels minor, and it's both. Yes, and isn't exactly isn't it a great world where things can be two things at once? Like that's that's what keeps music interesting, and it also points to this uh convergence that follows the Cesura because you have the two soprano voices that are converging on the E flat. Yeah. It pulls them because we're coming out of a thicker texture. This is the six-voice version that for Santa Vages, and so we're pulling them out of this um shimmery, bright, intense, multi uh, you know, six-voice timbre back into the next thing we hear, which is um this C minor seven. Like we're just we're starting to enter the denouement where everything's going to cool and clarify and and and sort of come back down towards the ground where it's eventually just going to settle comfortably on the ground. And that's the goal of the rest of the piece.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. And it just kind of lands perfect with this little floaty thing up at the top at the end, and oh so this has turned into several people have come up and like, oh man, that was our favorite piece of the concert. And it was because the dumpster was open, man. And well-crafted dumpster candy, to quote Andrew Maxfield, is is very uh enjoyable to audiences everywhere. But it's because it's well crafted and it's simplicity on the far side of complexity, and there's all of these very intentional choices, and it's not just chord, chord, chord, and it's still counterpoint and it's still line, even though it's homo rhythmic 90%, 95, 97% of the time. Yeah, and that's that's the one thing that I love.
SPEAKER_00The the dumpster combat I just think is kind of funny because for what I Reason, like left to my own devices, if I'm just uh gonna write something that's f fun and interesting to me, I I I frequently tend towards like uh kind of janky angular sounding harmonies and uh a lot of polyphonic activity and I want to tell uh an interesting story, you know. And it's like a quir it's like a quirky joke where the punchline you you laugh at the punchline, but you also are like, wow, that was weird, you know. I maybe that's just my my sense of humor or something like that. And so I and I I feel like sometimes the the last thing that I'm good at writing is the the flowy, pleasant choral thing that you know that's like the bread and butter of choral things. Uh but maybe I should try that more often. That's the that's the lesson I'm taking from this podcast, Cam.
SPEAKER_03Yes, we need a whole batch of Isaac Watts simple, amazing quote unquote dumpster candy beauty. You know? Yeah, let me know when you've written it.
SPEAKER_00That sounds great.
SPEAKER_03Well, it will not be beautiful, and it won't be handy. Maybe just the dumpster if I were to write it. Well, so let's take a listen then to the Lord of Glory is my light as it appears on Windwater Stone.
SPEAKER_01And my salvation to God is my strength, nor will I feel what are my force can do one privilege my heart is high until the churches of thy sings along the samples of my car and storms of children high not shelter. He makes my soul upon shall I offer my request and see thy beauty still shun me thy messages of love and love.
SPEAKER_03So hopefully you had a chance to decide is it dumpster candy or brilliant simplicity? I think it's the latter. Yeah. But it's a great piece. Check out the album Wind Waterstone coming out on May 22nd, 2026. And don't forget to sign up for Sound of Ages email list, look at our events page. We'll be announcing our next season pretty soon, and uh check all things out on the group.
