full interview_rob kapilow_1.mp3
Rob Kapilow [00:00:00] I'm Rob Kapilow, I'm a composer, a conductor, a commentator, and an author.
Speaker 2 [00:00:11] So what, you know, so you know we're doing a story about art and science, okay, and one of the ideas we're looking at is the idea of harmony, so the world seeks out harmony in many things, in architecture, in food, you now, there's scientific examples of harmony. Tell us about harmony in music, what is your working definition?
Rob Kapilow [00:00:32] Well, you know, if we're just talking about harmony in music, then there's a simple definition. Two or more notes played or sung at the same time. But I think what's sort of interesting is that, though that's the purely musical definition of harmony, two or more note played or song at the time, but I'm interested in sort of the larger definition, a combination of parts into an orderly or pleasing whole. Because that can refer to a bunch of notes, but it can also refer to a chef cooking a four-course meal, an architect putting together a building, a collection of parts into an orderly whole, or it could refer to a project team putting together team out of orderly parts, or ultimately a country.
Speaker 2 [00:01:11] So, musically, two notes played together.
Rob Kapilow [00:01:14] Two or more notes.
Speaker 2 [00:01:15] Two or more notes played together, but any notes?
Rob Kapilow [00:01:20] Well, the question of which notes you put together is the question that's bedeviled both listeners and composers for centuries. And what were the kinds of notes that you put together back in Greece and in the Middle Ages are different than the kinds of notes we put together. You know, one thing that's sort of interesting about the combination of notes is that fundamentally there is a physical reality to sound. I mean, because all sound is really is vibrations. Now, the thing is most people think that when you play a note, all you're hearing is that note. But the real truth is that when you're hearing that note, you're hear a bunch of other notes at the same time. In fact, I can demonstrate that to you. What you're here is what we call the overtone series. So if I play this note, but I hold down this key an octave higher silently, and then I strike this note. Let me do that one more time. You hear that first overtone. But that's not all you hear. If I also strike this note silently, an octave and a fifth above it, you can hear that one as well. And now if I strike two octaves above it and hold it silently, you can also hear that one as well. And best of all, if I strike the next overtone, two octaves and a third above it, you can hear a full chord. And you've got the basis of total music right there. A triad. An octave, a fifth, an octave, and a chord. And right there, it's built in nature. So many people think that fundamentally, consonance is about that. The sounds that you hear over a note. In fact, what only diff... Let me say this again. In fact, what differentiates one instrument from another is simply how loud those overtones are. A clarinet and a violin can play the same note, but it's the strength of the various overtones that makes a clarinet sound like a clarinette or a violin sound like violin. But all the way back to Greek times, they thought that was the basis of music's harmony. That was what was consonant, the intervals that you heard in the overtone series, and the ones that were higher up in the overtones series were dissonant.
Speaker 2 [00:03:30] So now, what do people expect when they think about harmony in music? What do you think the lay person?
Rob Kapilow [00:03:37] Well, you know, I think harmony is actually in the ear of the beholder. One of the interesting things is if you look at the history of music, what was harmonious to one person and at one moment in time is not what's harmonious to another person. I mean, now we routinely hear music with what we call seconds. And that seems perfectly consonant, but back then, even a third, our most basic interval, the heart of a triad, was considered dissonant. So I think what we consider consonants and dissonants, what we consider harmonious, because most people think when they say harmonious pleasant. But one person's pleasant is another person's unpleasant. One person's consonants is another persons dissonance. So I think at different moments in time, we've thought of what harmony is as different- Let me say that again a little bit. I think at different moments in time, we've defined harmony in different ways. But most people think of harmony as pleasant. They think of things like the famous flower duet. ["Flower Duet"] Let me play that again. We have these lovely thirds. Perfectly parallel, perfectly in harmony. That's what most people think of harmony, but harmony actually only has meaning also when there's dissonance. And it's that ebb and flow between tension and release, between consonance and dissonant that really makes up harmony.
Speaker 2 [00:05:02] So if somebody showed up on your doorstep and said, teach me something that's harmonic, play me something.
Rob Kapilow [00:05:09] The first thing I think of is, back to my first lesson with Nadia Boulanger in Paris, I think we take Bach's first prelude, which our assignment was to play that as pure harmony, as fast as you can, chords. Each one of those is divided one note at a time. Instead of this, we play one note a time Instead of this, we play one note at a time. But that is the purest example of harmony. Total Consonance, A Little Dissonance, Tension, and Relief. So we start with perfect...
Speaker 2 [00:06:04] You tell her, Adam, I don't know what to do.
Speaker 3 [00:06:09] Um, start the sentence with harmony, not with none of your voluptuous images.
Rob Kapilow [00:06:15] Oh, you don't like stories about Nadi Mojt? No, I love the story. Okay. Oh, okay. I mean, that story is okay. Okay. Okay, when I think of harmony, I think of my first lesson with Nadia Boulanger in Paris, a terrifying experience. And what we had to do was sit down and play Bach's first prelude from Well-Tempered Clavichord. But we had to play as pure chords as fast as you could. Now there, each one of those chords is actually played one note at a time. And this one, one note at a time. But what it shows beautifully is the ebb and flow of consonance and dissonance. That's the life of harmony. We start off utterly stable, or at least stable since the 13th century. First little dissonance. Cancer First resolution Discover this head somewhere else? Then this exquisite dissonance, this is what makes harmony alive. I mean, that's what we live for. That's what harmony is all about. Head somewhere, direction is what harmony is about. Arrive somewhere else. Suddenly tension
Speaker 4 [00:07:52] As a minor, more tension, temporary resolution, than in other exquisite dismin- Heads for another arrival. We think we're home. But no, and then the best chord...
Rob Kapilow [00:08:22] Never would have been allowed in the middle ages thank heavens we're not in the middle ages now head for dissonance
Speaker 4 [00:08:31] People thought this was unacceptable to go right to this chord. Too dissonant for the times. Now, the essence of harmony, delay. Tension, delay, waiting for arrival. Delay. Build delay, even more than this. We don't know where we're at. We're almost there, we should be there, but...
Rob Kapilow [00:09:12] Or dissonancy. And then somehow we revolve up here in this magic land. Back Home Consonants Harmony Resolve That's what I think of when I think up harmony. And in fact, the piece was such pure harmony and so complete in and of itself that more than a hundred years after Bach died, Gounod took the complete piece and made it an accompaniment to another melody that he put the words of the Ave Maria to. So that complete piece actually became the harmony or the accompaniment to another piece with a completely different melody that he added.
Speaker 2 [00:09:54] So, listening to it, I feel chill.
Rob Kapilow [00:09:57] Chills are what harmony is about. I mean, the reason I went into music is because of the chills of harmony. You know, when Sunday in the Park with George, finishing the hat, there's a great moment in finishing the hats. George, the painter, Sarah, horrible to dot his mistress. She's just left him. He says, huh, there, she left. Wait, what's the word? Let me think of a word. What's the words there? Let it look for me. Oh yeah, okay. Great moment, George's mistress thought has just left him and his words are, huh, yes, let her look for me, good. That's what he's saying, but the harmony is telling you everything he feels. Those two chords are what he can't even admit to himself. It allows us to hear his subconscious mind. This is what he feels and everyone in the audience is going, I mean, that's what harmony is to me, but it's been there since Bach. You know, you take a Bach chorale. I mean those kind of moments which then chills up your spine is why we do music.
Speaker 2 [00:11:08] What does that mean? Because it is just north, this is my nation, right?
Rob Kapilow [00:11:13] You know, the question of how this moves us. I mean, these are just sound vibrations that have hit our ears. I mean there's lots of sound vibrations that hit our years. You know you drop a tin can and there's sounds. How come it moves us is a question that has plagued mankind since there was music. Now, with all respect to all the hundreds of neuroscientists who are doing fantastic work on this. And there are lots of different theories as to why this works. In fact, there are so many different theories that that's one of the problems. Which of the theories do you pick? You know some people say that the reason it moves us is because we've gotten accustomed culturally to it We've gotten to associate happy music with happy movements We've gotten to associate happy music with happy moments in a movie, so we've sort of learned what's happy music. We've seen sad music at funerals. So some say it's about cultural associations. Some really interesting research, which is done recently at Dartmouth, cross-culturally as well, actually gives subjects, two different subjects, two different groups. They've got sliders that can affect how fast something moves, how high it moves. Some are altering music. Some are altering an animation of a bouncing ball, but they can determine how fast it moves, how fast is bounces, how steady it is, how big the jumps are. They can affect lots of its different parameters. And what they discovered is when they said, make the music happy and the people move their sliders or make this bouncing ball happy, they put their sliders in the same position. So that many people think that actually movement and music are all connected and that it affects the same part of the brain, the cerebellum, that actually movement does. So that's one theory. Interestingly enough, they then took that to a Cambodian village which had no experience with Western music and they asked them to do the same thing. Create music that's happy or sad or angry, create an animation of a bouncing ball that's happier. The sliders were in almost the same positions as the people with western music. So that's one theory. There's all sorts of theories about expectation. You know, dopamine release when you finally resolve here after a dissonance here. The real truth, in my opinion, is that with all respect to all the wonderful neuroscientists like Dan has been doing this fantastic work on it. I really believe the answer is Robert Frost's two-line poem. We sit round in a ring and suppose, but the secret sits in the middle and knows. We don't know. The real truth is with all the research being done, no one really knows why the mystery of vibrations making us weep actually occurs. It's possible that someday we will discover it. There's brilliant research being done. There's all sorts of theories about it. But I believe at this point, no one really knows and I'm extremely happy about that. It remains a mystery. It was a mystery to the Greeks. It's still a mystery as we put ourselves in tubes and look at the frequency range in our brains, but it's still mystery.
Speaker 2 [00:14:11] It is, however, quite an amazing phenomenon. I mean, even if you travel to a non-Western place and you see how people respond to their music, it's like you just see this visceral response.
Rob Kapilow [00:14:23] Yeah, what's amazing is that all cultures have music, and they have always had music, and they all respond. Some people argue that there is a Darwinian evolutionary adaptive purpose to it. In other words, it bonds people. All you have to do is go to a rock concert and see people band together. I mean, for centuries people have marched into battle using music as a unifying thing. So some people think there's an adaptive unifying bond that's created by music. There's all sorts of theories, but every culture has had it. There's no doubt about it. Steve Pinker, the famous neuroscientist, says it's really nothing more than auditory cheesecake. But I must say, if it's auditory cheese cake, we have a very overweight culture, because everybody's ordering it. So it's been there forever. No one exactly knows why it's worked, but it's there in every culture. It will still be there. It makes people move. There's no doubt, I do believe, that there is some connection to that movement idea. How people move and how people listen to music. And also, they did an interesting experiment where they played music and they asked people whether it was happy or sad, and they played. And then they played music and they asked was it happy or sad and they played. And they had near universal response. Everyone agreed that the first was happy, the second was sad. But they also then made tapes of people talking and walking. And what you discovered was people talked the same way they played fast music. Loud, fast, higher. Even their footsteps were loud, fast and higher. And you could determine their emotional expression just by the sound. And the same thing for the slow music. They talked lower, their body language was that. So there's clearly something that connects our emotions, our movement and music. But the precise labeling of why it works is still a mystery, and I hope it will always remain.
Speaker 2 [00:16:10] So the question about emotion, you mentioned before something about harmony as pleasant. You connected the word harmony and the word pleasant. And pleasant seems to be woefully inadequate to describe the box you played or just some amazing pieces of music.
Rob Kapilow [00:16:26] You know, one of the things I think that's really interesting about harmony and pleasant, and particularly that definition of harmony as a combination of parts in a pleasing or orderly whole, is as I said, one per- I shouldn't, I get rid of the eyes I said. One of the things that's really interesting to me about harmony, in particular that definition of a combination of parts into a pleasing or orderly whole, is not only that one person's pleasing or orderedly is not in other persons, but that part of it is pure pleasure becomes utterly boring. In other words, doing nothing with any dissonance, just pretty chords becomes immediately incredibly boring. Even in Bach, if we just played chords like that, we would be bored. It's the fact that we have dissonance and resolution. It's dissonant and the resolution that actually makes... Without this, there is no this. Without this there is not this. Without this... And then this there is no this. So in fact what we find and this is interesting to think about when you think about buildings when you thinking about a country when you think about a family without some kind of dissonance you don't actually have in my opinion a true harmony that it requires actually difference it requires dissonant to actually make consonants meaningful and you know some of the most beautiful moments those chills that you get. I mean, take the opening of Reveille, Mother Goose Sweet. I mean it starts off so pure, just two little parts. I mean, we're in fairyland here, but it's very austere, just two parts, but then later it comes back like this. And the difference between this and this. I mean, when you suddenly discover that that black and white world actually contains every color in the rainbow, you know, that's what harmony does. But were it not for this, this would not be nearly as beautiful. And it's that repertoire, it's looking in front of you and seeing that the world contains so many more colors than you ever thought. So many of the most beautiful moments in harmony are what we call reharmonizations, where you take a little fragment of melody, a person that you've met, and you think you know, and then all of a sudden you completely change the harmony underneath that melody, and it's literally like discovering another side to a person that you never dreamed was there. Take a famous example, Debussy, Prelude, It starts off just like that, two little parts. It's called footsteps in the snow. Now, these are the footsteps. I call this left foot, right foot. Left foot, Right foot. Now, in and of itself, that's nothing. We have no idea what it means. It's a person who we've barely met, just two parts. Though if you listen closely, there's already a beautiful dissonance. You can hear that note hanging on. It's not this, but you can hear the lower note Hanging on. That beautiful blending and here as well. We think that's what this piece is about. Now this is going to happen 50 times in the piece, but each time it will change. The first time it's just a pure accompaniment with a beautiful melody above it. But just those two notes underneath, a great rhythm. And then only here do we get our first chord. Now, we think we understand the world, but then a moment later, this... Becomes this. And then this. Your jaw is dropping. And then THIS. And we now think, okay, now we understand the world, but that's still only the beginning, because it also can become this, incredibly dissonant. It's like a mathematical demonstration of all the possibilities, and then it keeps becoming a new thing. But all from just, but what it's teaching us to do is see how rich the world is right in front of our nose. You know, Joseph Campbell, the brilliant writer on mythology, he quotes from the Gnostic Gospels and he says, the kingdom of heaven is spread over the earth, only men do not see it. In other words, it's all right there. And he's teaching up to listen to see how many possibilities there are in just a left foot in the snow and the right foot. And the most beautiful thing about that piece is, Every single one of these 50 versions happens with these exact notes in this exact register. Only at the very end of the piece do we discover that actually the world is even bigger than that. You can put those same notes up here. That is like an unbelievable discovery. All your world has been is this. It might be this, it might be this, It might even be this. But suddenly we discover it also could be I mean the chills. You're literally discovering a register of the piano that never existed before. We're speaking up there in harmony of the spheres. And then the piece just ends. And we invent this chord. This has been one of the most stable chords since the 14th century. But now with this huge space in the middle, down here, the left hand, the right hand up here, it sounds like we have discovered the most table chord in our universe for the very first time. Consonance and dissonance invented over and over again.
Speaker 2 [00:22:32] Now, certainly in the 20th century, there seems to be a real pushback against this idea of harmony or content. But that's just very reasonable.
Rob Kapilow [00:22:41] Yeah, I'm also I feel like should I go back? I feel I didn't do a great version on the Greek thing when you first like the stuff before this That was the overtone stuff. Okay Yeah, yeah, I mean I could do some more of the Greeks they there's something about okay. All right. Okay, so 20th century
Speaker 2 [00:23:00] Yeah, just because I think partly we're going to go into modernism and all that, and justice. I always think of it as just kind of a, I'm going to show you. You like harmony? I'm gonna show you, so just talk a little bit about pushback.
Rob Kapilow [00:23:15] One of the things that's sort of interesting about music, in the late 19th century, Darwin's theories started to take hold and there got to be this notion that music in a Darwinian way had to evolve. In other words, we had what we had, but each generation's job was to make it evolve to the next generation. And so harmony got richer and richer. Think of it as starting only with primary colors, red, white, and blue, and then each generation feels like they have to add new colors to it. And the idea was each generation had to add more colors than the previous one. And finally, it got so rich with so many colors that the basic notion of tonality and harmony seemed to almost evaporate. And then one of the big turning points was Arnold Schoenberg as we hit the 20th century, who talked about the emancipation of dissonance. And this was a major thing. What he was saying is, forget all your rules about consonance and dissonance. Forget about the Greeks. Forget about your textbooks. Anything goes, essentially, was what he was saying, and there is no longer a consonance or dissonace. And any note can work with any other note. And because of that, he had to invent a whole system called a 12-tone system, because now, with ultimate freedom, we have ultimate anarchy, and they were no longer rules governing anything. What was interesting is, for about 30 or 40 years, You know, we actually tried to make music that way. You know, we tried to make atonal music. And there was a belief that somehow we would all adapt to it. We would get used to it, and Schoenberg was, you know, fond of saying that, you now, 20 years from now, kids will wake up for breakfast and hear atonal music and will sound as ordinary as a Bach chorale. It never really happened. You know one of the interesting things, one of my favorite quotes is from Kierkegaard, and he says, life is meant to be lived forwards but understood backwards. You know, going forward in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, there was really this idea that atonal music was the only music that counted. Pierre Boulez, the famous conductor of the New York Philharmonic and a tyrant of new music was saying, I have no use for anyone who doesn't write in the 12-tone style. And for about 30 years, there was terror in the academies, and all you could write was this atonal Music. Unfortunately, the public didn't agree, and there was tremendous pushback, and finally it became clear that that was just not the music that was going to work. Interestingly enough, it went against everything that the Greeks had told us back before See. That the Greeks had told us back in B.C. When they were sitting there saying consonances and dissonances exist in the physical universe. It's not yours to change. I mean we can still discuss whether or not there's something inherent about tonality, but there is no doubt that there are certain frequency relationships that are more consonant and more dissonant, and the public voted against it. And then what came in was the exact opposite, minimalism. They're trying to reevaluate, I'm going to play a single chord over and over and over again. It's literally the opposite, the complete rejection of what Schoenberg was all about. And that became the new kind of music. And now we're in a middle stage where, once again, anything is possible. But certainly, those days of the emancipation of dissonance seem to have disappeared. But going forward, no one knew that. For 30 or 40 years, it really thought that was the evolutionary adaptation. We had gone from tonality, strict, added colors and colors to the palette, and now any color went. But it turned out that those basic fundamentals of consonants and dissonants, those basic interval relationships that were there from the Greeks when Pythagoras was plucking his monochord, still somehow seem to be in our ears in some way. And music has now gone against that. But again... We can't tell what will be the next generation's response, but there certainly was a veto of that. And that music is rarely heard now.
Speaker 2 [00:26:52] Thanks, that was great. Let's go back, because you've introduced the Greeks. Let's talk about math.
Rob Kapilow [00:26:58] You know, it's interesting, we have a very narrow definition of harmony, a definition of harmony in music, two or more notes played or sung simultaneously. And there's a larger definition, which is always separated in an encyclopedia from the musical definition, which is a collection or a combination of parts into an orderly or pleasing whole. Back in the Greek days, the idea of harmony was far bigger. It encompassed all of the above. For them, in the Middle Ages, let me do Greek first. Let me think of which one I wanna do. Okay.
Speaker 2 [00:27:32] We're not going to be able to get deeply into like Greek versus Middle Ages.
Rob Kapilow [00:27:35] Well, that's why I'm trying to figure which is the best one to do. Okay, I know what I'm going to do! I'm going to do. Yeah, yeah, I'm going to get to the math. In the Middle Ages, with people like Boethius, the idea was there was three kinds of harmony and three kinds music. There was harmonia mundana, which was harmony of the universe, which regulated the planets, the stars, the seasons. That was one kind of music. Plato actually even believed there was a sound to that. But that was one thing. Then there was harmonium mundana. Then there was Harmonia Humana, human music, which was the harmony of the body and the soul of each person. Then on the third level. You said human music. Did you mean human harmony? No, human Music. Harmonia humana. Okay, okay. Harmonia, Harmonia umana. Then there were. Human, yeah. Okay. Then there was Harmonia Humana, human harmony, the harmony of the body, the harmony of this soul. Then only at the bottom of this, the lowest level was Musica Instrumentalis. Audible music what we think of this music but the idea was that music was simply a reflection of the universal Harmony of the spheres and it was governed by the exact same Mathematical laws that govern the harmony of the planets that governed the harmony Of the human body so music simply was the lowest form but it was a complete Reflection of the larger harmony and it all governed by math. It was all governed By numbers it was all govern by the same principles the principles that said how far apart the planets were how they interacted in the stars, were reflected in how intervals reacted. So this was literally the biggest definition. Music simply existed as a reflection of a universal how do you combine parts into an orderly and meaningful whole. And that's why it played such a big part in education. Because it was one of the best ways you could demonstrate to a young child the kind of harmony that they were to have in their life, that they would have in their body, that we were to as a country, as us, or as a state. So music existed simply as a of the same mathematical principles that govern both the visible and the invisible world.
Speaker 3 [00:29:45] There's something else on the subject of mathematics. You said about this in UC that there was a mathematical demonstration of all possibilities.
Rob Kapilow [00:29:56] Yeah, I guess I was using math in a kind of a metaphor. I mean, it's not so much that it's math. It's just that it has a feeling of, what can I do? Well, in Debussy, it is a demonstration of, I've got an idea, a proposition, a theorem. What are the properties of this system? It's a kind of mathematical way of thinking. What can I make out of this? Well, one possibility is this. And you can literally almost see him thinking out loud. But it's like a math proposition. It could be this. It could this. And it could be. So it's sort of inventing its own mathematical system. Each piece of music creates a universe, and he is literally creating the universe of that piece for us, but step by step, like a math demonstration. We start with the simplest, then we make it somewhat richer, but not dissonant. Then we make more dissonance, so it has the kind of logic of a mathematician approaching a proposition and then gradually deducing what's the possibilities inherent in that proposition.
Speaker 3 [00:31:05] I have one other request for a change topic, and that is, would you be kind enough to say, I guess, simply in one short statement, your point about neuroscientists, as much as we know we don't know, close to Robert's question, sort of as a...
Rob Kapilow [00:31:28] Yeah, sure, absolutely. Sure. With great respect for all the neuroscientists doing wonderful work on music and the brain. In the end of the day, we don't know why music moved us. It's really Robert Frost's two-line poem. We sit round in the ring and suppose, but the secret sits in the middle and knows.
Speaker 2 [00:31:47] Okay, so, we're talking about math, we are talking about science, patterns, so tell us about that.
Rob Kapilow [00:31:55] One of the key things that makes music understandable, and this is what's difficult when you go from culture to culture, is the idea of patterns and expectations. Even if you're not conscious of it, the minute you hear a musical pattern, you hear possibility for the future. And one of the biggest things that make music work is a pattern, an expectation, and then a defeat of that expectation. Stravinsky once said that all composition comes down to a balance between unity and variety. Too much unity, too much repetition leads to Borden, But too much variety leads to chaos. You know, and so for example, take expectations, and expectations exist on so many levels once you're inside a culture. Let's take a last movement of a Haydn string quartet. Now, by this point in Haydns life, he was the most famous composer in the world. I mean, this was serious business. He was getting honorary doctors from Oxford and Cambridge. I mean he was a serious guy. So he starts this movement, and he's the father of the string quartets. I mean this is serious music. And he starts his last movement like this. I mean, this just goes against every expectation you have about what a string quartet is, who Haydn is, what serious composers. I mean it's like starting a piece with... I mean, now, how do we know that that's the end? Only because we have heard hundreds of pieces and it's in our culture, it's a pattern we've learned. Now, however, if you were in another culture, you wouldn't know that, and the entire conversation that we're about to look at could never make sense. But we know this is the end. Now we have a rest, silence. Now, if your really inside this piece of music, that silence is time for you to question what just happened. You're sitting there going. What the heck was that? This is the beginning of a piece. This is a main theme. Haydn is a serious composer. Now all this goes on in our brain and makes this music live only because we have all these expectations before we sit down and even hear those notes. So we hear this. Now what music is all about is what's next. Now whether you're aware of or not, whenever you hear something your brain is always thinking what's Next and it always chooses the least interesting So, we're sitting there thinking... What? Now, we're desperately hoping he certainly wouldn't do that again. I mean, it's fun to do the joke once, but you would certainly not do it a second time. Here's how it goes. I mean the second one is even worse. Now what's actually happening is a repetition But the reason it's so shocking is because our expectations are completely different for this composer now at this point We are praying that he wouldn't do it a third time. I mean doing three of those would just be intolerable I mean it just would be completely unacceptable But here's what he does and this only works if you're inside this world and you have all these expectations it goes like this The end, I mean, what I call the combo pack. The end. I mean this is incredibly funny, but only if you're inside the piece, asking, talking back to the piece. Say, what's this? How's this happening? What's next? And this is the kind of expectations. Now, later, a moment later, he comes back to this same music, and it almost sounds the same. But if you're listening closely, you realize what's different is the silences. The first one had three beats of silence in between. The end. When it comes back, we only have one beat. Now we're creating a pattern. You don't have to be aware of this, but when we then go, and this is the key to all expectations and patterns right now, we then start to do it in minor. If I asked anyone to sing what should come next, everyone would go... The piece has set up that expectation. Let me get that in your ear one more time. We go. Everyone expects But what actually happens is And the piece is fantastic, incredibly witty, but only because of the expectations. And it's an elaborate play on our expectations, measure by measure by measure. And what scientists have discovered is that dopamine gets released. If you do things that are predictable, it's interesting, but only for a short while. People actually want to be surprised. It's the same thing that happens at horror movies. It's a same thing happens on roller coasters. The dopamine gets released when you have these surprises. That's only the beginning and the piece continues that way, but it's all about expectations, foiling expectations, and this is happening whether you're conscious or not. Music is all about what's next, and half of music could be defined as the third time change. In other words, you do something, you do it a second time, the second time creates the pattern, but then the third time already we have to change because by the third we would already be bored. We already need a new iPhone. Expectations are the lifeblood of music. Take something familiar and simple, I Got Rhythm. So we start off with four notes, I got rhythm. Then you do the exact same notes backwards, I got music. Then you did them forwards, you've got a pattern, I got Music, then you got a punchline. New rhythm, new notes. Now we've created a pattern for the whole song. It happens again. Repeat. Remember, third time change is the key to everything. We go away to a B section, but we come back and do it a third time. But the third time, instead of, we go... And then resolved. That's a classic example of patterns and manipulations. But you can find it in all kinds of music with varying degrees of subtlety. Take a piece by Chopin.
Speaker 2 [00:37:45] We're going to stop for a second. That was great and efficient. So what do we feel when we hit that last note?
Rob Kapilow [00:37:52] Okay, well, yeah, you want that, okay, okay.
Speaker 2 [00:37:57] Okay
Rob Kapilow [00:37:59] Okay, okay, you know one of the interesting things about that is almost all of Broadway has a basic form what we call a 32 bar farm Almost all of Broadway music has a basic form, which we call the 32 bar Broadway song form. And it's built on our idea of memory, patterns, and expectations. You do an idea, eight bars A. You repeat it, eight bar A. Therefore, we develop an expectation. You go away for eight measures, so when we come back to it, it feels fresh again, then finish with eight bars, A. But what happens here is you've got eight bars. I got rhythm, I got music, I've got music. Who would ask for a- But now, in the story, actually, she's actually not sure that she has everything. She's really worried because she knows that her husband's actually fooling around with other women. So when she's saying, who could ask for anything more, the last time tells us it's first just a question. Who could ask anything more? Is that really true? Then she convinces herself, and thus, she really has got it all. Who could for anything, more? All doubts resolved. Dopamine releases pattern manipulation. Maybe I can do a better ending. Did I get that story in clear enough?
Speaker 2 [00:39:05] Well, Adam, the thing is, we don't even need to know what the story is, because the idea of when a resolution happens, after being...
Rob Kapilow [00:39:11] Right, okay, we come back to the, we've been distracted, we come back and all we want to do is hear the same thing one more time so we can go home and whistle the tune. We come back and it starts the same.
Speaker 2 [00:39:27] Is it? Yeah, oh, I'm sorry. Yeah, sorry, we need that.
Rob Kapilow [00:39:31] Was that through that whole thing? No, no. Just the end. OK. OK. We'll do it right on the other end. OK. So we come back the third time and we expect to hear the exact same thing a third time. I got rhythm, I got... But instead, we get a question. We're desperate. Our expectations are firing. We just want that resolution. We're safe back home, dopamine released. All's well with the world. But expectations happen in so many different ways. They can happen with incredible subtlety in classical music. Take a Chopin mazurka, which starts just this way. Now, first of all, our expectations are always that pieces would start home, stable. This is a Mazurka in A minor. We should start clear, firm at home. Clear boundaries, beginnings and end. But it starts with a dissonance. And we're left with a question. All of us want some kind of, we're not gonna get there for 20 measures. But now watch how subtly you can manipulate. We want desperately this chord. All of our bodies want this for the dopamine release. But we start with this beautiful melody. What do we wanna hear next? No such luck. Now we start to move somewhere else. Our entire bodies want to hear this. One more time. The manipulation of expectations can be incredibly subtle. Take this Chopin mazurka. It says it's a piece in A minor. We expect pieces to start and end home in A Minor, but we don't. We start with an incredible dissonance. No resolution. All we want to hear is this. But the melody starts and we still don't get it. We want to here this. No such luck. We get this instead. Then we start to head somewhere. Everyone in the audience, our entire bodies, want to hear. That's our expectation. Instead, we get this. One of the saddest chords in the world. But it's only sad because we expected. And we got... And even the very ending of the piece. We want this, but has the piece end? Like we began. No resolution. You know, the last chapter of my first book ends with finished versus complete, and it's about the distinction between something that's finished, done or ended, the conversation was finished, and complete, whole and entire, with nothing wanting. We want our music to be both finished and complete. This is a piece that's finish. But utterly incomplete. And we're left to accept the incomplete as complete. A relationship can be finished, divorce, but incomplete. This is one of the first pieces that says we have to learn to be complete with unfinished. Um, okay, um.
Speaker 2 [00:43:06] Is that enough for the expectations?
Rob Kapilow [00:43:13] I'm just, is there one? I there there is one other really good one, but it might be an example for something else if I can it's from over the rainbow I'll do it really. I'll see if I could do it. Really fast It's when everybody knows okay one of the most perfect examples of Expectation and surprise and the chills that it produces is one of most famous songs ever over the Rainbow it starts off with an enormous lead This leap of an octave was so big that, in fact, the producers wanted to cut the song from the show. They thought nobody could ever sing such a big leap. It would never sell any sheet music, and they literally removed it from the show for the first performance. A big leap of an octave. But this isn't just a leap of an octave, it's a leap from two different worlds. The low note is Dorothy's troubled reality. It's Kansas. It's black and white. It is aridity. It's the beginning of the film. It's where she wants to go to is our high C. Low C is Kansas. High C is Oz, it's over the rainbow. It's more ethereal, it where she wants to get to. Now, each verse tries to get from Kansas to Oz, but at the end of the first verse. She's still stuck in Kansas. End of the second verse. Still stuck in Kansas. We go to the normal Broadway form, we repeat it and the piece should end at... But there would be no transformation. She would still be stuck in canvas. She... Would still... Be stuck in Kansas. I keep saying Kansas. She will still be stuck in Kansas then in a brilliant stroke Arlen decides to bring back the music of the B section but only in the orchestra. And she starts sinking it out, almost like a mathematical proof. The music of the B section. Its troubles melt like a lemon in the drops. And then there's one last rise. Y-O-Y. Where does it rise to? Remember, what's the song about? Kansas us, Kansas us. One last rise to us. Ah All our expectations, finally... Transformation from reality to fantasy from low sea to high sea and her transformation is complete and we are satisfied and the dopamine is released
Speaker 2 [00:45:47] That was great. We'll get you to play it through later, please. So we're going to ask you a couple of questions related to other stories we're doing, and then we're gonna come back and throw some music cues at you to talk about what's going on. So we are doing a story about pipe work.
Rob Kapilow [00:46:07] Huh, okay.
Speaker 2 [00:46:10] You don't have to be there to play pipe organ, but you sat in the audience and you played one. There's something going on in pipe organ that's not like another instrument. They're really cool. They're deep, they're really impressive. Tell us about emotionally what you understand a pipe organ produces.
Rob Kapilow [00:46:30] You know, one of the things that's interesting, and neuroscientists talk about this a lot, about the relationship of music and emotions, is they say sometimes it's not just the actual content of the music, but it's the whole cultural surroundings of that music. And when we hear a pipe organ, nearly all of us associate it with church. Not only a church, but a big church with big stained glass windows, a performer up there in the loft who we can't see as if the music is coming from God itself. So I think pipe organs, though people are now trying to make it a concert instrument, are for most people's minds associated with church, even if you're Jewish. It's still associated with Church, and not only that, it's associated with tradition, it's associate with the Middle Ages, it associated with that trip that you went to see a hundred churches in Europe when you first went there as a kid and you were utterly bored. But there's a whole set of emotional circumstances surrounding pipe organs, and I think we bring that to that sound now in the same way that those like In the same way that those stained glass windows in a church were supposed to somehow give us this sense of God surrounding us, that's what a pipe organ does. The sound is enormous. It's huge. And we imagine it reverberating through these huge cathedrals echoing. So we are literally surrounded by it. So it's part of this entire confluence of things. You're in a Church. You're praying to God. You are seeing this beautiful stained glass. The ceilings are incredibly high. There's this music coming from a place that you can't see. It's surrounding you. In a way, it's sort of like what a rock concert is, that kind of pure volume. You can never underestimate how much of the effect on our emotions pure volume is, and those are some of the loudest instruments that you can possibly have. In fact, it is probably the loudiest single instrument outside of an orchestra that you could produce. So it's that being swept up by this huge sound that has ages and centuries of tradition surrounding it, religion surrounding it, and I think whenever we hear a pipe organ, even if it's in a concert hall, that's the music that hits us. Also, it often has these incredibly low notes, which you literally feel. You know, many people talk about that one of the reasons that music creates feeling is literally the vibrations assaulting our bodies. And the music of a church organ, particularly those low pedal notes, you literally it rumbling. It's as if not only is God speaking to you from up here, but he's literally coming up from the ground and you feel your entire body vibrating along with it so it's again that same feeling you get in a mosh pit at a rock concert where literally you are surrounded and enveloped by sound from above from below you're feeling it in your body the vibrations are assaulting you there's now doing actually vibroacoustic therapy based on this idea of sound raves actually hitting you. But I think it's the all-embracing-ness of it and the social-cultural connotations that we bring to it that makes it have such a powerful image. It's very hard not to hear a church organ and think of everything I just described.
Speaker 3 [00:49:18] Um, isolate the idea of the emotion that comes from a huge pipe organ and being in a rock concert, just that. What do you mean isolate? As a single statement, you know, as a single thought.
Rob Kapilow [00:49:33] OK, I think the effect of a huge pipe organ is very similar to being in a rock concert. Whenever you're surrounded and enveloped by a kind of music that literally blots out everything else, all your senses, all your other thoughts disappear, you are completely enveloped in that sound. I think it goes to a primitive part of the brain, and it triggers something that nothing else does. So it's very similar a rock concerts, a mosh pit, but just that feeling of being enveloped in sound is the same whether it's a pipe organ or the Grateful Dead.
Speaker 2 [00:50:05] Is that sort of the thing you want? That is exactly what we ordered up. That was great. Were you comfortable with it? Yeah.
Rob Kapilow [00:50:12] Yeah, I mean, that's what I think about Thai board.
Speaker 2 [00:50:14] I don't know if everyone has those associations, but that's... It's interesting because I don't want to get off of it because I keep going. I get the same thing about hearing a 100 piece choir.
Rob Kapilow [00:50:27] It's just pure sound, I mean volume. I can add one more thing to that. I've often wondered why people actually go to football games. I mean, it's freezing cold. You can't see anything. On television, you can see instant replays. You can absolutely follow. There's no doubt that going to a football game is worse than any experience you could ever have on television. But what it has that television lacks is that ability to be in this immense wave of sound. When it's one second left, someone is taking a field goal. And everyone is literally together, holding their breath, waiting to see if the field goal is successful or not. There is a kind of group experience that is almost terrifying. And the kind of applause, if it's the home team that actually wins at that moment, is so deafening and it's so terrifying in a way, because you stop being a me. And you become part of a we. And I think that's what pipe organ music is about. I think what rock concerts are about. It's the erasing of a me and becoming part of the we, which is both exhilarating but terrifying because you lose literally a sense of you. And that's why there are often these riots that happen at a stadium after these concerts. But that experience of stopping being a me and becoming a part of we is what pipe organs and church, what rock concerts and what football games have in common.
Speaker 2 [00:51:50] When we started thinking about pipe organs, we also thought about another idea, not particularly profound, but sort of simple, which is that technological innovation often precedes artistic use. So somebody came up with the idea of pipe organs whatever it was, 1750, and it took Mozart and Buxtehude and other people to come along and like turn that into a real instrument for making great art. And isn't that something that has happened consistently throughout the history of music?
Rob Kapilow [00:52:20] One of the interesting things is that two parallel things have happened simultaneously. On one hand, technology has created possibilities that artists have then utilized, but also the reverse has happened. Artists have created possibilities that then technology had to run around and create to actually make usable. For example, Beethoven had concepts of what a piano might sound like that went far beyond what his pianos could play. And it was piano makers who were trying to keep up with Beethoven's innovation and create pianos that could actually do what he actually imagined. So on the one hand, you have composers imagining things in the same way that science fiction imagines things that technology companies come along with. I mean, many, many years ago, there was a Dick Tracy wristwatch which had to wait many, many years before Apple could come up with its own version of it. So on one hand you have artists imagining things. That technology comes up with later, but you also have, as you said, the reverse. Technology creates a possibility, and then artists work with that possibility. And we see that now every day. If you look at the history of rock music in the 1960s, I mean, the creation of the fuzz pedal for the guitar created the possibilities that Jimi Hendrix used in ways that no one else had ever done them. And in fact, Jimi Hendrix said whenever there was a new possibility or a new sound effect that came out for a guitar, he immediately went to the store, got it, and started working with it. He discovered the possibilities of feedback. So technology creates possibilities that artists then use. But the other way happens as well, artists create possibilities that technology then invents and makes possible.
Speaker 2 [00:53:57] Oscar, do you think there's some other examples of such a buzz-buzz?
Rob Kapilow [00:54:01] Um the synthesis well the invention of eight-track recording you know if you look at the early history of the Beatles for example their first records were made on four-track recordings All of a sudden, when you invented eight-track recording, suddenly you could overdub things in a way that could never have been done before. Sergeant Pepper could never of happened without the invention of eight-track recording. Now we have digital recording. I mean, we don't literally have to cut tape. Now we an infinite number of tracks that are possible. If you listen to a Jacob Collier version that won the Grammy for Best Instrumental Recording last year, he literally overdubed himself 5,000 times and in one room by himself created this unbelievably massive score on just technology with one person, and it won the Grammy for Best Instrumental Arrangement. So, yes, technology creates possibilities that artists immediately grab, and whenever there's a new sound, artists are going to grab it. I suppose you could also do something with painting for that too, you know, new forms of paint and stuff like that. And you could certainly do it with architecture, I mean, you look at that L.A. Concert hall as you know.
Speaker 2 [00:55:07] Yeah, absolutely, you know, all Frank Gehry couldn't have done this stuff 50 years ago with that computer, you know, that computer generated stuff. Partly, one of the things we're interested in is sort of looking over the horizon here, as it were, over the rainbow. It's how I'd give AI. And I don't know if you've given much thought to AI composition. You probably get it. Just tell us what your thoughts are.
Rob Kapilow [00:55:34] Yeah, I think one of the interesting things about AI has to do with patterns and expectations. As many people have talked about, at the heart of music's power to move us is this whole manipulation of patterns and expectation. And nothing works better with patterns than AI. But what's so wonderful, and what AI has not managed to conquer, they have a tremendous ability to create patterns and expectations but not that sublime moment when the expectation is defeated. So they are fantastic at creating music that sounds like Bach, but what it's missing is the thing that makes it Bach. They can do all the statistical analysis, and I've looked at several of these computer-generated Bach chorales. And what they can do is look at all the statistics of what Bach did here, here, and here. But every Bach piece has the moment that no model can ever predict. And that's still, in my mind, is unpredictable. So we can produce facsimiles in the same way that many people try to copy the latest new invention, but it's always the animating, genius innovation that isn't what anyone could have expected, that goes beyond any pattern that truly makes the great art great.
Speaker 2 [00:56:40] Do you think that there's a chance of the AI figuring it out?
Rob Kapilow [00:56:46] You know, the question of whether AI will figure it out is hard to know. I would love to believe that they never will, partly to defend my own art. No, I would like to believe AI will come close, but I don't think they will ever create that animating moment, that aha moment, where suddenly you see a possibility that was never there. Because I think that's what's so exciting about great art and great music, is suddenly a possibility is discovered that no one has ever heard before. You know I often say that all great art is about listening for possibility. But, you know, just hearing this... I don't think any computer could ever discover all the possibilities in those two notes that Debussy heard in them. So I think what great artists do and great designers in every area is they see a possibility that isn't expected, that isn't part of a pattern, and it's the very breaking of that pattern, the uniqueness of that, whether it's an iPhone, whether its Debussy, whether it's a chord progression here, I think that's still what makes art great. And I don't think a computer can possibly duplicate that. I think we're safe for now.
Speaker 2 [00:57:50] Great. So, let's hope.
Rob Kapilow [00:57:52] I'll add one thing, you know, even in the latest James Bond movie, I think it's possible that a computer could have discovered the opening. What we have is a simple melody, done three times. Each time has a different harmony underneath. First is this. Same melody with a different chord underneath. Lovely. Third one. And then a resolution. The piece is in this key, and the last chord should have been this. But what makes it James Bond and what I think no computer could have ever discovered without years of James Bond movies and knowing the entire history of James Bond and cultures and theme songs is this chord, not this, but this. The day that a computer can discover those two extra notes, I'll resign.
Speaker 2 [00:58:52] Tell us about your composure. Tell us about your creative process.
Rob Kapilow [00:58:56] Well, my creative process is different depending. I write a lot of what I call city pieces, where I go to a city and I spend two years asking them what's on their minds. So for example, I did a piece for the National Symphony in the Kennedy Center for the year 2000 called DC Monuments. And it grew out of the fact that in Latin, monument means to remind or to warn. So I went around to various people saying, I'm writing a piece, what should we remind it about? What should we be warned about? And one of the places I went was to a very scary part of Washington in Anacostia. And I went to a session for at-risk youth run by a former gang member. And I asked how many of them had had friends who were shot. Everyone raised their hand, which was striking. And I said, well, what would you do as a monument to them? Now, I don't know if this happens in New York, but he said, we would put up their sneakers on a telephone line. I don't know if you've seen that. They put up sneakers on the telephone line, and I said well, what else would you as a monuments? And one the kids said, Well, I would rap. And I said, well, let me hear it. And he said, I haven't written anything, but you could tell he was talented. And he made up this rap, and I said, what would you like to do, write a movement of this piece with me? And this was, you know, someone who had been left back for years in school, you know was in gang, blah blah blah, but we got him a tutor, we worked with him for six months, he wrote this fantastic piece, you know coming up out of the cut with my Czech brother, Step Back Look, and this became part of the piece. So my process started with really, who's out there? I don't think of composition for me as purely an individual process. I think of that as something seeing what's out there and then listening for possibilities that are out there. I'm writing a piece right now called We Came to America based on intergenerational immigrant stories that we've been collecting over the last three years, trying to humanize the immigrant response, trying to humanize our country's response to immigrants. So we've listening for two years to parents. Kids and their grandparents tell their stories of coming to America, and that's where the piece grows out of there. So for me, often it comes from listening for a possibility that's out there. I wrote a piece for the anniversary of the Golden Gate Bridge, and I discovered that the Golden gate bridge is actually one of the largest suicide sites in the world. And so I met the coroner and then he introduced me to families of teenagers who had jumped off the bridge and after I got to know them they gave me their teenager suicide notes and one entire movement is actually the chorus singing words from there. So for me rather than going off into the woods turning inwards and creating out of my innermost deepest thoughts you know Stravinsky says creativity doesn't begin in here with thinking begins out there with observation with noticing what's in front of you. So, for me composition doesn't began in here with me just going off into a studio, it begins with going out there and listening for what possibilities are out there. So, you know, lots of different pieces have grown out of that. One of my first pieces grew about just because my son came running home from school when he was seven, and he said, daddy, daddy, you can't be a composer, you're not dead. And so I thought, I better do something about that. And that night, I was reading to him Green Eggs and Ham, Dr. Seuss's book, and I realized that Green Eggs and Ham is actually a parable about prejudice. It's actually a child teaching a grown-up, who we call the grouch, to try it, try it and you may. And I suddenly saw there was a possibility that if I could set that book to music, millions of kids who would never come into a concert hall would come in not only because they know the book, but it's the only opera libretto that every kid in America knew by heart. They all knew, I am Sam, Sam, I Am, but they never heard it set to music. Now, there was a problem no one had ever been allowed to set a Dr. Seuss book to music before, and that's another story for another day. But again, it started with an opportunity of seeing that there was the possibility not only of setting this book that would change how kids would hear music and allow them to come into a concert for the first time and hear words that they knew, but also it was a vehicle for me to talk about prejudice to kids and families at those concerts. So again, I don't start with I want to write symphony number one. I start by looking out there, as Stravinsky says, looking out there right in front of my nose and seeing what I can make out of that.
Speaker 2 [01:02:59] Is there an alchemy where you suddenly realize you've created something?
Rob Kapilow [01:03:04] Well, another thing I will say is people often have an idea that you sit down and you plan the piece or you plan building. And it might be true that some architects sit there and like Mozart, the whole piece is sitting there in front of me. I do not create like that. John Cage said, begin anywhere. And that's my story. I just begin with anything. I never think, is this gonna be the beginning? Is this gonna the end? There's a wonderful book by Anne Lamott called Bird by Bird, and it's ostensibly a manual for writers, but it's really a manual about life. And she talks about, you know, a moment that I'm sure we've all had, you know, where you're working on a project and you're getting nowhere. And she says, you know, eventually you find yourself back at the table, staring blankly at the pages you read before. Staring blankly at the pages you wrote before. And there on page four is a paragraph with all sorts of life and its tenses, sounds, smells, and colors, and even a moment of dialog that makes you say, hmm, H M M dot dot dot, you know, and for me listening for the hmm, HMM, that's how I create. In other words, I just look for what moment in a text makes me go hmm, or maybe it's just a little musical idea. Like the movement I'm writing now for We Came to America, there was something in a conversation that someone said, I was talking with them, and I was asking them what their experience of what they left behind when they came to America was. And they said to me, this beautiful line, they said, home was until it wasn't. Something in me went. Hmm, that's where I started the movement. I just immediately set that to music. So when I look at it I don't think what's the first line, I don't think what is the last line. I just think what makes me go hmmm. It might be a musical idea, it might be fragment like that, I start with that and I just trust that somehow all these fragments will somehow coalesce and become a building. I don't start with the doorway, I dont start with a five year plan for my career or anything else. I start whatever moment makes me going hmmm and then I just build from there and I just go like this and somehow amazingly they all come together and they make something. But when you say Is it actually finished? Do I know that moment when it's really done? You know, I think Paul Valerie once said, a poem is never finished, it's just abandoned. And that's how I feel about a piece. It's never like you feel like it's finished. And in fact, once I sent it off to the printer, you're always thinking of the things you could change. And then whenever I go and conduct these pieces, I still change it. And there are still things that I'm horrified by. Every time I conduct Green Eggs and Ham, I can't believe how stupidly I orchestrated these eight bars. And every time I have to conduct those eight bars, all I wanna do is change it, so I think that a piece is never finished. It's just abandoned. And though it exists as a frozen moment in time, because now we publish them, You know, I think that's actually one of the difficult things about music these days is that, you know, in the early days, it was more like a Tibetan sand painting. You know a Tibetan painting is made and then it's dissolved. You make it and it's dissolve. And music was designed to be in a way that way. You go to a performance and then its done. And that's what's so wonderful about a live performance. It's a once in a lifetime experience. But now for most of us music exists as recorded sound which you can play over and over and again. So it exists kind of like a rock in the hand more than like a Tibetan sandpasing. But for me I think of a piece, even when I've handed it in as just something that it's done for that moment and when I come back to it I wanna do it again differently. Sometimes my publisher is not so happy about that, but to me a piece is never really actually finished I never have a moment where I'm satisfied and say it's done. It's just abandoned
Speaker 2 [01:06:29] you feel the weight of all the other composers that have come before you, who you know are geniuses, somewhere else are genius, as well as the brilliant people who are making music in Pakistan and Indonesia and all these other places up there.
Rob Kapilow [01:06:45] The whole thing about the weight of history is a complex thing. I remember still writing a preface to my very first book saying, the absurdity of anyone thinking that they could possibly add one book to the world's trove of books and add one more thing. I mean, it is petrifying to think about the shoulders on which we all stand. So what I try to do is creatively ignore that as much as possible and assume that What I have to offer is. This thing, at this moment in time, you know, I believe that everybody has their own unique gift to make to the world, but not everybody's fortunate enough to discover what it is. You know, there's a great quote from Mark Twain, he says, the two most important days in your life are the day you're born and the day that you discover why. And so I think it's only our job to put out there what it is that we feel we're meant to put out there, how it's judged, what its place in the universe is, is really out of our hands to discover. So I try not to think about the weight of Bach and Beethoven, because then you would just be paralyzed and do absolutely nothing. But I just think, I'm here in this moment in time, anything I write or do is actually in some way connected to this moment and time, which is not Beethoven's moment in time. So it will come out and be filtered through something that's different and unique through this moment. But in the end, all I can do is offer what I have to offer, and the weight of history is not in my hands.
Speaker 2 [01:08:01] So we've been talking about harmony, and we originally started when we first called you up, you know, several months ago, we were imagining vocal harmony. And now we've ended up with some lovely stuff about musical, you know non-vocal harmony. But let's go back to some vocal harmony as it's kind of known in popular music and in rock. I just want to talk about that, some examples of it. You know, anything from like the Mills Brothers to Beach Boys, you know, just what's going on when we're listening to that? Is there appeal there? Thank you very much.
Rob Kapilow [01:08:36] I think harmony is really the same, you know, whether you're talking about the Beach Boys, whether you are talking about Stephen Sondheim, whether your talking about, you know, Mozart. I mean one of the things that's sort of interesting is once you get to sort of Mozart and you get fundamentally what harmony is all about, it hasn't really changed. You know, everyone is listening to everybody else, the Beach Boys harmonies might be higher in pitch, but you're really talking about the same fundamental system of harmony from really 1800 until the present. I mean, minimalism expands it, modern composers in the classical world expand it really more. But if you listen to pop music today, I mean the harmony of the brand new theme from the Ron movie. This could easily be in the 19th century. The harmonic system has not really changed and, in fact, what's sort of interesting is people have sort of gone backwards in time. It went very, very far forwards, it went very far forward towards atonality and more and more dissonance, but it's now swung back, the pendulum has gone back and forth. And in fact you actually see that swing in the pendulum throughout history. Music gets a little bit out of hand, a little more disonant, and then the church says no back in the 14th and 15th century, and we go back this way, and it gets more adventures and you're constantly pushing at the envelope and it goes back this way. You know when you get to Pet Sounds, you know for the Beach Boys, you push in this direction and though Pet Sounds was a really huge critical hit, it was not a big seller. And then everyone wanted them to go back and just do the Beach Boys surf songs and car songs that they had done before. So I think the harmonic system is really very much the same in the popular music world. And even if you listen to Billie Eilish now or Adele now, it's really not much different than it was back 50 or 60 years ago. One of the interesting things is people forget how recently popular music or rock music was actually invented. You know, in the 60s, music was only about four years old. I mean, it didn't really start pop music until Elvis Presley, 1956 is when it really starts. So then it was being invented. It was sort of like in the days of Netscape Navigator, when everything was being invented for the first time and we didn't know whether it would be VHS, we didn't t know whether we'd be Betamax. But once it's settled in and things got more settled, I think harmony has remained relatively unchanged. And there's not much that's new harmonically in pop music today. There's a lot new in terms of arrangement. There's a lot new in terms of overdubbing, what's technically possible to do in the studio and the kinds of synth sounds that you can create, but the fundamental harmonic system that's happening in the songs that are on the radio today is not significantly more advanced or different than what happened 30 or 40 years ago.
Speaker 3 [01:11:15] So Elvis Presley made a huge hit out of I Can't Have Fallen in Love, which is Psydua D'Amour.
Rob Kapilow [01:11:30] I don't know that piece, the Elvis Presley piece.
Speaker 2 [01:11:35] I'm falling in love with you. You know if you've done more, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's basically they just, okay, but if you don't know it. I don't. Da da da da, da da. I'm sorry, I don't have, I dunno. All right, let's do something that I assure you not because you're writing a book on it and doing a series on it, The Beatles. Harmony and The Beatles, give us some examples. So I have a new song that everyone will know as soon as they hear it.
Rob Kapilow [01:11:57] Yeah. Um, let's see, uh, let me see. Um... I didn't bring any needles, I'm trying to think, for vocal harmony, what can I say? Wait, is that it? Wait, uh, what?
Speaker 5 [01:12:31] Oh.
Rob Kapilow [01:12:37] Yeah, that's it, I think that's the way it is. Yeah, that's it. When the Beatles came in, mostly what was happening was single lines. People were singing. It was the blues. It was R&B. Everyone was stealing and culturally appropriating wherever they possibly could. In fact, no English groups actually were hits in America. And in fact, the Beatles were far more of a hit in England than they ever were in the United States. The United States wasn't interested in English groups at all, but in England, what they were interested in was R&B. They were interested in the blues, 12-bar blues, they were interested what the black singers were doing, and so early on, the Beatles were a cover band. They were not actually doing their own material, and in fact, it was a real fight for them to do things like, I want to hold your hand, and please, please me, because they I wanted them to actually do covers. And not through their own material. But when they did come in, what they started to do more than other groups was have these two- and three-part harmonies and have all the people actually singing, as opposed to a backup band, but everybody who actually played also sang as well. And they created these tight harmonies. And all these years that they spent in Germany playing thousands of shows a day allowed them to perfect a kind of tight harmony that other people hadn't had. And that really was one of the most distinctive things about them. Before, they were distinctive for their own actual writing. They were distinctive for their actual kinds of harmonies. And even in a thing like, she loves you, yeah, yeah yeah, which by the way has all these kinds of reharmonizations that we see. You have a fragment, then you change the harmony underneath, which is no different than the Keharan-Bahn theme.
Speaker 2 [01:14:24] And by the time this comes out, the button...
Rob Kapilow [01:14:26] Oh, oh you think it will be forgotten. Oh, okay, okay. Okay. Yeah, okay But what you find is what's so interesting is they're willing to harmonize in a way that other way. So this is fine. But then you get to this. And you get this incredible second at the cadence. Anyone else would have just gone... But you actually have this. And that dissonance, the Greeks would have been horrified, the Middle Ages would have been horrify, a D and an E, a second, the frequency ratios are completely unacceptable. No one would have put that harmony next to each other, but that's what made the Beatles so special. And it's hard harmony to sing. But that's what gives it the bite, that's what gives us the specialness. And the constant arrangements, they spent so much time doing these vocal arrangements. And if you listen to the Sergeant Pepper album, I mean, there are these absolutely incredible three and four part harmonies. And again, back to technical. Once you have these multiple tracks, instead of actually having to just do what you could do live and three people singing, you could actually overdub vocal parts and you could add part after part after part until you could get these rich harmonies that were not possible in the studio beforehand. So I think the Beatles were one of the first ones to really take advantage of that and to also say that this kind of harmony was possible. Now there was a constant battle between the Beach Boys and the Beatles as to who could outdo each other one, you know, and literally pet sounds grew out of the fact that Brian Wilson heard, you know, heard Sargent Pepper and said, oh my god, this is the future, I've got to make an album better than, you know, than Sargent pepper. So it's that back and forth, you know, going back and fourth, but vocal harmony had a lot to do with it. And if you listen, do you think you can drop in stuff? Because the thing is, it's really about voice. It's just, it doesn't, you know, you know, so if I know you're going to do that, then I can refer to that. Because it's just it doesn' work on the. Yeah, but absolutely, yeah, yeah. But if you listen to the harmony on good vibrations. Thank you very much. Have a great one. Or, you know, or you listen to the harmony on God Only Knows. I mean, not only is it up in this incredibly high register, but it is incredibly rich, complicated, four-part rhyming. You know, one of the distinctions people often make, incorrectly in my thought, is between what they call harmony, which is the vertical side of music, and melody or counterpoint, which is horizontal side. But what's so great about the harmonies of the Beach Boys is not only that each slice vertically is so interesting, but each line that each of the Beast Boys sing is also a wonderful melodic line. And by the way, that has been the challenge for composers since Bach chorales. To not only write interesting vertical chords at any moment, but to have each of these voices who are moving from chord to chord have their own beautiful independent line by themselves. And it is only groups like the Beach Boys and the Beatles who learned to do both at the same time, who, without ever studying a Bach chorale, learned what the Bach chorals have to teach. You know, when Bach writes a simple phrase like this... I'm sorry, what is that story? Oh Now, those are beautiful harmonies. If you look at each vertebrate slice, but what really makes it fantastic is if you listen to each voice by itself, listen to this tenor voice and then the tenor voice leaps up to here to the god only knows range and makes that beautiful chord so each voice the bass line going down You know, it's the lesson that it's not only the vertical slice, it's a horizontal slice. And that's what both the Beatles and the Beach Boys have in common, is not only richer, vertical slices with more dissonance than anyone had ever put into pop music, but also these beautiful lines that each voice was singing by itself. So if you listen to, if you listened to Sergeant Pepper and you listen to the Beach Boy's Pet Sounds album, you see what has happened to harmony in pop music. It's just, it's a very hard one to demonstrate at the piano.
Speaker 2 [01:18:44] Okay, so Jess, let's assume that you're, we're going to drop the music here, okay? Think Beatles, Beast Boys, Joni Mitchell, whatever, some favorites of yours that you think really demonstrate the idea of harmony, you know, in modern, in recent...
Rob Kapilow [01:18:58] Yeah, well, I do think we should definitely use the Jacob Collier because that is the most, you know, the one I sent to you. I mean, that is most, it's the most recent one and it's most far out harmony in the world. I'll get to it bit by bit, so okay. You know, once the Beatles opened up the possibility of rock music really being art music. And that's really a change. People forget that early on in the 60s, people thought that rock music was a fad that was gonna be disappearing. Record companies thought, why should we invest in rock music? It's just gonna be a fadd like skiffle music was in England. But once it became clear that this was something that was going to last, and the Beatles opened up the possibilities harmonically. Arrangement-wise in the recording studio, vocally in terms of the harmony that was possible, then everyone started to pile on and do things. By the time you get to the harmonies of, say, Paul Simon and Garfunkel, just incredibly rich harmonies and also a beautiful example of both wonderful vertical slices but also incredibly beautiful lines going horizontally at the same time. Once you get harmonies like that, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, and then you get people like Joni Mitchell, what you start to do is you start to fuse the richer harmony world of jazz. And you bring that into popular music as well. Because however sophisticated popular music was, jazz was even more sophisticated. People were worried it was too sophisticated for a mass audience, so they were worried about bringing it in. But again, along that Darwinian line of music always evolving, once it became clear that rock was going to survive, it gradually took that Darwinan path and got richer and richer. The vocal harmony got richer and richer, harmonies from jazz and Joni Mitchell. If you listen to Blue. You will see incredible jazz harmonies happening that would never have happened before that. So I think there was a gradual development of what was possible harmonically. And I think the ultimate stage of what is possible harmoniously was the 2020 Grammy Award winning. A score for instrumental or vocal acapella arrangement by Jacob Collier of Moon River. Now, what's so fascinating about this is, you know, Moon River in its own day was a wonderful piece, but Jacob Collyer exploited every possible modern harmony that anyone could create, recording his own voice 5,000 times, using chords that are so rich and unbelievable that they actually modulate out of equal temperament. Into just temperament, the temperament of the Greeks at your increase like G sharp half minor. So literally it expands the harmonic palette using every possible chord from both the jazz world, the modern world, literally every color that any painter could ever have on their palette is in there and he takes a traditional tune and it's literally about here is what harmony has come to from the Greeks eat your heart out. This is everything that harmony could ever do, and I think this is a beautiful example. I mean, that's the one to pick because it uses, you have heard that, right? Yeah.
Speaker 5 [01:21:56] I mean that
Rob Kapilow [01:21:58] That is everything that harmony could possibly do. It's vocal harmony times 5,000. It's every chord that any person could ever create. I'll put one more thing in there. What Jacob Collier says, though he has no idea because he's too young that he was echoing Schoenberg, is he says that any melody note can be harmonized with any bass note in the world. He didn't know he was talking about the emancipation of dissonance, but really, to Jacob Collyer, every harmony in the universe is possible to be used, and I think every one is used in this piece.
Speaker 2 [01:22:36] So along those lines, following that thought, one of the groups we're following is roomful of teeth. And they seem to also be pushing some limits. I know you know them.
Rob Kapilow [01:22:49] They're the ones who did the partita, right?
Speaker 2 [01:22:51] We actually got them, some of it is very melodic, some is breathy and clicks. I can talk about that. Just talk about what are they trying to achieve and they seem to be trying to go somewhere that no one has done before.
Rob Kapilow [01:23:03] You know, I think one of the things that has really animated artists in every discipline is the idea of, as they say in Star Trek, going somewhere no one has ever gone before. You know there is this Darwinian idea that our job is to do something that no one has done before, to push the boundaries, to push the envelope. You know in a certain way it was pushed the furthest by John Cage in his piece Four Minutes Thirty-Three Seconds in which all that happens is the composer, the pianist sits at the piano and plays no sound. And basically the message of that piece is... Every sound in the universe is music, it's all a question of just how we listen to it. So in a way that opens up the possibility of any sound being part of a piece of music, and I think that's what composers have started to do. Now suddenly sounds that no one would have ever thought of as being part a piece a music, the click of an actual flute, you know, a click of a flute, a breath, a hiss, a gurgle, suddenly anything can be part of a pieces of music in a sort of like the Duchamp urinal, you know saying that anything that's out there in a world can actually be part of piece of a music. So by the time you get to pieces like Carolyn Shaw's Partita, literally anything can be part of a piece of music, as long as you use it in an orderly way. You know, when I work with kids, often times I ask them to define music. You know, and almost every definition they come up with is wrong, you know, until you get something with, you now, an organized collection of sound meant to be heard. Pretty much now that's all that a piece of music is, anything that a composer organizes in some way, but even that can be improvised, you, know, but that's meant to heard. It's that, that's what really makes the Duchamp urinal a piece art, is meant to be seen or meant to hear. You know I think one of the wonderful things that's really been opened up since John pages. 4 minutes 33 seconds where a pianist just sits at the piano and plays nothing. And the message is that all sound is music. Anything you hear is actually the piece, and all that's required is you're actually listening to the piece of music. Anything is opened up. And again, technology has also helped us as well. Pretty much anything that you can make as a sound in the universe can be reproduced by a synthesizer. I once did a program called To Press a Key. And the program was about everything that's happened when you pressed a key from all the way back in the 1400s to today. You know, and there were forte pianos, there were celeste, all the things that happened when you press a key, but by the time you get to modern synthesizer when you press a key, literally every sound in the universe is possible. And any sound in the universe that's possible is something that a composer can manipulate. So literally, if you're a vocal group, it could be breath. It could be gurgles. I actually used a PC, what was it? I used a PVC pipe hit with a flip-flop for my piece for the Golden Gate Bridge. Literally any sound that a person can think of can now become part of a piece. We routinely use actually transcriptions of field recordings. It could be of a Beatle, it could be someone speaking. In the 9-11 piece that John Adams wrote, he used tapes of people. So literally any sound available in the universe can be put into a piece of music. As long as you decide that all that it needs to be to be a piece music is sound ordered and intended to be heard. Oh, I can add a little bit more. I mean, you now hear sounds in the. Piece about the triangle, shirt, waist, factory, fire in my mouth, you hear huge scissors that imitate the scissors that they use. That's part of a piece of music. Percussionists have used break drums, tires, screeching. Every possible kind of sound is used. In fact, in the Motown era, they were so interested in trying to make some kind of sounds so that people couldn't cover their songs, so that one of the songs actually took tire chains and dragged them through an echo chamber. The Beatles were constantly experimenting with different kinds of sounds. On simple levels, things like a C-tar, but trying to play tape music backwards, they would take actually tape loops cut them up, throw them in the air, and then whatever arrangement actually was there was put into it. The Beatles used on Sergeant Pepper, a full symphony orchestra. No one had ever used a full-symphony orchestra, so composers are constantly looking for new sounds, and whenever there's a new sound, composers are going to manipulate them, create expectations, defeat those expectations, but whatever sound is available in the world will ultimately be used by some composer. Oh, let me add one sentence to that. Any sound will ultimately be used by some composer, because in the end, it's all music.
Speaker 2 [01:27:24] Say that again and I'll drop the word. OK.
Rob Kapilow [01:27:30] In the end, composers will use any sound that's available in the universe, because in the end, it's all music. That sounds like a good tagline.
Speaker 2 [01:27:45] You mentioned like Simon Garfunkel, you mentioned Joni Mitchell, people like that. Do you mind mentioning specific, like what a specific Simon Garfuffle song that uses harmony? Maybe tick off a few, you know, that the PBS audience would know. They're not going to know Blue, probably.
Rob Kapilow [01:28:04] Yeah, that's the one I was gonna mention, you know. I mean, surely a song like... Surely a song like Bridge Over Troubled Water could never have been possible without all these innovations that happened during the 60s. I mean, this incredible mixture of not only vocal harmony, but gospel harmony. You know, the kinds of constant interrelation, grabbing from the R&B world, grabbing from gospel world, grabbing from pop world, and then creating harmonies that churches never heard. I mean that song is a perfect example of the kind of mix that was possible as harmony became richer and richer, as rock music became more and more art music. It's better to hear, it's better, you know, one thing I've learned, which is really hard for the Woodstock book is, you, know, and I talk about this in other contexts, is that if you're talking about American songbook stuff, the primary document is actually the song. So in other words, if you are talking about Gershwin's I Got Rhythm, you can play I Got Rhym. No particular recording defines the piece. The or document is the piece, but by the time you get to pop music, the or document is the recording. It's actually the sound of Simon and Garfuckle doing it or the sound of the Beatles or the sounds of the Beach Boys doing it. So the or document is the recording, not, not the actual transcription. And that's one of the things I'm fighting with, you know, writing in the book now, because it's hard to actually do it at the keyboard.
Speaker 2 [01:29:25] It's where most people argue about, you know, like, which covers are better than the original. Right. There's like three. Right, that's right. But it's, you now...
Rob Kapilow [01:29:28] Right, that's right, but it's literally the recording is now the document, not the sheet music anymore, so that's the change of it.
Speaker 2 [01:29:38] So, before we get you just playing, do you gentlemen have anything you want to add?
Speaker 3 [01:29:44] Can I ask you something? I believe, brother.
Rob Kapilow [01:29:50] Yeah, well the Everly Brothers, that's what inspired Simon and Garfunkel. Everly brothers inspired all this harmony. Both the Beatles were huge fans of the Everley brothers, as were Simon and garfunkel, and also it's amazing how much Elvis inspired them too. But the Everle brothers, particularly their harmony, was a huge inspiration. I know that was only two people, you know, but that was a real inspiration for all the harmony of both Brian Wilson talks about it, and Paul McCartney and John Lennon talk about the Everly Brothers as being a huge influence on them.
Speaker 2 [01:30:20] You know
Rob Kapilow [01:30:21] I don't think it was any one particular song that did it, yet it was just their sound.
Speaker 2 [01:30:30] Okay.
Rob Kapilow [01:30:33] Although John Lennon talks about Heartbreak Hotel all the time.
Speaker 2 [01:30:39] We're just quickly looking around. We did some great stuff.
Rob Kapilow [01:30:44] You want me to play Traumerei or something? Oh, or do you have more questions? OK.
Speaker 2 [01:30:51] Mr. Sepp, do you have one to ask something? Well, I was just curious, you know, if you just talk about broadly that that moment of inspiration for you, aside from any particular song that just do you run out of the shower? Do you keep a notebook? You mean as a composer, you mean? Exactly.
Rob Kapilow [01:31:07] Um.
Speaker 2 [01:31:08] And end the speech of living.
Rob Kapilow [01:31:09] Yeah, well for me, I really do keep coming back to that listen for the hmm moment. For me, it can be a line of text. Well, let me see. For my whole career really, the idea of listening for the hmm has really been the animating force behind everything I do. It's the one, it could be when my son comes home from school and says daddy daddy you can't be a composer, you're not dead. It could be when someone in an interview for We Came to America comes up with a line and says home was until it wasn't. It can be the very first. A city piece that I ever wrote because I never intended to do them. I was doing an outreach program in Kansas City and I just often, when I go to a city, I often like to talk to the taxi drivers and ask them, you know, what's happening in the city? And I was driving into the, to Kansas City for just a regular program and he says, well, there's this horrible sculpture that's going on with the Nelson-Atkins Museum. It's the worst thing I've ever seen. And he went on a five-minute rant about this sculpture. And very rarely does a taxi driver go on a 5-minute rant about a sculpture. And it turned out that this was a sculpture by Claes Oldenburg, the one who did the walker spoon and cherry, the lipstick. And he had done a sculpture called Shuttlecocks. Now, even if you've never been to the Nelson Atkins Museum, you know what it's like. It's one of those museums with lots of columns and pillars and lots of stairs, because art is high and you have to walk up to get there and you're tired when you get there. But it had lawns like Versailles, and he decided it looked like a badminton court for God. With the museum as the net, and the lawn was a bad minton court. So he built four 5,000-pound bad Mittenbirdies, as if God were hitting one was here, one was here, and one went over the museum's net and was in the back courtyard. And this had taken the city by the storm. Had taken the city by storm. Half of the city thought this was the coolest thing they had ever seen, and half of the city thought it was like painting a mustache on the Mona Lisa. But something in me went, hmm, it had clearly touched a nerve. So I went on the radio just to do a normal interview for my concert, nothing about shuttlecocks, and I said, you know, I know some of you love shuttlecox, I knew some of hate it, what do you think a piece of music would sound like about shuttlecock? I just threw it out as a question. We were deluged with responses, And something in me went, hmm, and I thought there's an opportunity here because classical music doesn't reach the public. You know, my manager once said to me that the only thing Americans like less than classical music... Is new classical music. But I saw there was an opportunity here, so I actually talked to the presenter and I said, well, what if I wrote this piece and each month I wrote a minute, then went back on the radio, offered it to the public and asked them to help write the piece with me. And suddenly, that's what we did. And so I wrote this piece over eight months. It became this huge project. The whole city got involved. The American Badminton Association got involved, I had questions on the call-in line at the newspaper. You could win free badminton equipment. I mean, it was this huge Hallmark Cards, which was actually their creative competition for teens to design a t-shirt. The winner could get an internship. And it became a program that we aired nationwide on public radio on July 4th for millions of people. And they said that it was the most diverse audience they'd ever seen. Because people had had a participatory, you know sense of what this piece was like. They added dancers They added costumes the city had a huge impact on this and something in me went hmm And that's what started the whole idea of these city pieces But it really grew out of nothing more than having a conversation with a taxi driver seeing that he was so interested, hearing people respond to an off-handed comment on a radio station, and then that became a whole project and a whole slew of city pieces, which now continue to this very day. So for me, really, anything where something goes, hmmm... You know, you don't have to even know where hmm is gonna lead. You don't even have to have a five-year plan. But when something goes hmm, I think it's really important to act on it and just take the next step. You know there's a wonderful quotation from E.L. Doctorow and it's about writing, but I think its really about life. He says, it's like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as the headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way. And that's how I write music and that's how I do everything. I don't really know where the whole journey's gonna be. It might just be, hmm, there's something here with shuttlecocks, hmm there's something here with that phrase, home was until it wasn't, hmm there's Something here. You can't be a composer daddy, you're not dead. But you just need to take the next step and see only as far as the headlights and sometimes you can make the whole trip that way. I haven't played that since my days in a rock band. Alright. I also got to play Those were the old days.
Speaker 5 [01:36:27] It would be if I remember that. I said, yeah.
Rob Kapilow [01:36:39] Can do that much of it. I can play it a little better. Wait, wait, wait. I'm sorry. Um, how about, um... We'll see you next time again. Can you cut a phrase that I didn't play the great chords? So well. Can I type that in the last phrase? Okay, so, last phrase. Let's take one from Bach.
Speaker 2 [01:40:26] Yeah, yeah
Rob Kapilow [01:40:29] OK. OK.
Speaker 2 [01:40:30] So what have we done so far? We've done trauma. Trauma.
Rob Kapilow [01:40:32] Traumatized, that's okay. And we did some Beatles, and we did the Beatles. And you've got, I've got rhythm in there, too. Is that enough for you? Ah, I can't remember what was that. Let's check the end of our cameras. I think I put that in there. Yeah, I got that in. Oh, Debussy? I don't need the whole thing there, but I'll give you a bunch of it.
Speaker 2 [01:43:11] You were very good about the unveiling and also about the consumer.
Rob Kapilow [01:43:16] So you want me to play the beginning and the end? Yeah. OK. Alright, can you use up to there? I just made him a take. Is that enough? And I'll play the ending. Okay, sorry, that's enough? Okay. Okay, just like a little bit of that, okay. Okay, okay, sure, okay right, okay? That's up to the first chord and then ending, okay. Isn't that so weird? That's how it ends. I mean, it's so weird. Complete versus finished versus complete. You know, I have a feeling that when I talked about it, I said that the final comment I said was backwards. I think I said something, I think that something can be, I think it said complete but not finished, but what I really meant was to say was, can we drop, was finished but incomplete. Cause that's what that is. It's finished but in complete. I can't remember what I said, but... Okay, so we haven't said no. Yeah, right, right. That was too big. It's finished, but incomplete. Okay, okay. Maybe okay. Let's see how much of it went. Okay. I should do the beginning the end I guess Tell me when you're ready Should I stop there? Is that a good place to stop or should I have gone on? Okay Okay, well, so maybe one time Then I'll cut to the end. There's a wonderful quote from Yip Harberg who wrote the words to this piece and he said, words make you think thoughts, music makes you feel a feeling, but a song makes you feel a thought. Um, and I guess, let me add, um, um. Something about emotion, I can add one more thing. Okay. We start in Kansas. We yearn for Oz. We circle and yearn. Now, the words are way up high. That could have been nice and cheery, way up, high. But listen to how much emotion we feel in the accompaniment of the harmony underneath. Way up. It's the harmony that tells us what Dorothy feels. The words are just way up high. It's harmony that tell us who Dorothy is.
