Speaker 1: Music is the most abstract of the art, especially just music,
like when you hear a choir, like when you hear
choral music, it's not as abstract because it definitely connects
to It connects to meaning and to know the way
that we experience storytelling or But when you have just
music that is only sounds that are playing against each other,
why do you think we care? Like, what is it
about what's happening that makes us pay attention?
Speaker 2: Looking at music as a experience of acoustics, you could
start with the understanding of music having its own internal
balance of order. Some would say this is the overtone
series where certain pitches are arranged naturally without any manipulation,
with certain intervals and colors, and based on that raw
experience of science, we can extract from that different melodies
and or rhythms.
Speaker 3: And it's something that's just there. It's just exists.
Speaker 2: And this is what fascinated the what fascinated the ancients
when it came to music, And I think a lot
of it has to do with the order it brings
to us internally.
Speaker 3: It's an ordering and experience.
Speaker 2: And that's why when they're let's look at film score,
when you see a thriller and something's about to happen,
there's more cacophony, there's more dissonance, and then when something
comes to order, you feel more resolution in those moments.
Speaker 4: This is Jonathan Fechel. Welcome to the symbolic world.
Speaker 1: So hello everyone, I am here with Nicholas Reeves is
a musician.
Speaker 4: He's a church musician.
Speaker 1: Uh he he has taught at Saint Latimirs Seminary. He's
also on the faculty of Adelphi University, and he's known
in Orthodox circles. He's been recommended to me by Richard Rowland,
who said, you know, Jonathan, since you don't understand music, you.
Speaker 4: Should probably talk to this person.
Speaker 1: And so uh so, you know, I have to be
honest with you, like it's a little bit of a
that we're going to jump into the fray because we
both of us are in the same situation where Nicholas
was also told by people, Hey, you should talk to
this guy, Jonathan Pajoe, I guess and so uh and
so we'll get we'll get into the conversation and hopefully
we'll he'll be able to help me understand a little more.
What's the relationship between music and symbolism, you know, and
help me kind of refine my understanding of what its
function is in the world.
Speaker 4: So, Nicholas, thanks for coming on.
Speaker 3: It's a pleasure to be here. Let's see what happens.
Speaker 4: Let's see what happens.
Speaker 1: So maybe tell people just a little bit more about
your about your background, about what you do, how you
got to where you are, and then we can move
from there. I.
Speaker 3: As you said, I am a musician. I have.
Speaker 2: Been trained in classical compositions for orchestra, chamber music, choirs, etc.
I am also a working church musician. I have a
church choir on Long Island in the Orthodox Church, and
I taught.
Speaker 3: At San Vladimir's as you said. And I also do.
Speaker 2: Workshops where I prepare church choirs to get ready for
certain seasons Pasca, Holy Week, the festal cycle, whatever that
may be, or just how to improve in general. And
I approach it from a pedagogical methodology of starting with
simple materials and the choir builds on those skills. So
I have my hands in mini pockets. I also write
electronic music that incorporates sound sources and found sounds and
put something together. And I really am all over the
place in terms of media, multimedia, using projections, using sound
sources that are sampling sounds, and or it's just acoustic music,
absolutely no interaction with electronics whatsoever. So I putting sound together,
juxtaposing sound. I think that's the best way to talk
about composition. That's that's what it is, and if there's
any meaning in that. I saw this beautiful quote from
Lennard Bernstein that we shouldn't listen to music to understand things.
We have contradictions, and in between those contradictions we find meaning.
And I very much agree with that perspective that you
have in music, contradictions of you know, dynamics, loud, soft, tempo,
fast and slow, everything in between, beautiful mo moments, caustic moments,
and juxtaposing those ideas is in some ways a reflection
of our human experience. And I see music more and
more as a handprint, like in Lasco in France, in
those caves, those cave paintings that go back so many
centuries where you can see people's handprints on the walls,
and that it's a part of them in the artwork,
that the symbolism in the artwork isn't just representing an animal.
They saw or a tree, but it's actually their interpretation
as humans of what they saw, and I think that's
very important to understand. It's an abstraction from a collective
experience that it almost feels like it needs to be done.
I mean, why else would they do this. It doesn't
help their hunting or their gathering or their survival, but
maybe it helped them understand better who they were as
a tribe or is a small society. It provides some
type of mental coherence, and I think we can extend
that today. Whether it's a rock concert, whether it's a
classical concert, there's something that we desire in terms of
understanding ourselves. Whether it's through words or whether it's through
sounds or sounds with words, it helps us to make
sense of what's happening because people still want it. You know,
people pay a lot of money to go to these experiences,
whether it's Coachella or Byroid to hear Wagner's operas.
Speaker 3: It's a huge investment of time.
Speaker 2: So there's some need that people are harping onto or
holding on to, and I think a lot of that
has to do with the logic and the coherence that
music provides.
Speaker 1: One of the things that people have said in some
ways is that music is the most abstract of the arts,
in the sense that especially just music, like when you
hear a choir, like when you hear choral music, it's
not as abstract because it definitely connects to It definitely
connects to meaning and to you know, the way that
we experience storytelling or but when you have just music
that is only sounds that are playing against each other,
you know, what do you think? Why do you think
we care?
Speaker 4: Like?
Speaker 1: What is it about that's what's happening that makes us
pay attention?
Speaker 3: That's a really good question.
Speaker 2: I think the experiential perspective is a good starting point
because it's all the adjectives that begin with our experience
of music, and then our understanding maybe comes later. I
was moved, it was beautiful, it was riviting, you know,
some type of descriptor is how people explain or make
sense of their music sperience. And it's a pretty mysterious
thing having sound waves come together in a certain arrangement,
and how it impresses upon our mind and some would
say even our souls, and how that makes such an
impression on us who we are, Whether it's with words
like you said, with a choir where there's more definite meaning,
or whether it's through instrumental music.
Speaker 3: I think.
Speaker 2: Looking at music as a experience of acoustics, you could
start with the understanding of music having its own internal
balance and order. Some would say this is the overtone series,
where certain pitches are arranged naturally without any manipulation, with
certain intervals and colors, and based on that raw experience
of science, we can extract from that different melodies and
or rhythms. And it's something that's just there, it's just exists.
And this is what has fascinated the what fascinated the
ancients when it came to music, of how if you
take a string and pluck it on a harp and
then divide the octave, you get the same sound up
and octave. And they were just fascinated with this experience
of sound. And I think a lot of it has
to do with the order it brings to us internally.
It's an ordering and experience, and that's why when they're
let's look at film score. When you see a thriller
and something's about to happen, the music gets more coponic,
there's more cacophony, there's more.
Speaker 3: Dissonance, and then when.
Speaker 2: Something comes to order, you feel more resolution in those moments,
and we respond to that. It makes sense to us,
and I think that's our extraction and our interpretation of
the overtone series natural sound sounds we hear nature. Some
people are very influenced by bird sounds, sounds of other animals,
sounds of water. You know, it's it's our interpretation of
the order that we see around us and how we
try and incorporate that into some type of communal event.
Speaker 1: Mm hmm.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: My intuition has always been that it's that it all is.
Can I say that it's all is a kind of
downstream from the human voice or the experience of the
human voice, because the music of let's say, the sound
of water, let's say, or the sound of I don't know,
of branch falling in the forest. All these sounds, they
they don't provide I mean, let me go down the
stream and see what you think. But they don't provide
order in the same way that the human voice does.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: So the human voice, it provides you with for example,
it's a way into the other person, right, it's a
way in as I'm standing in front of someone, there
are different ways into that person's conscious experience that I
because I don't I'm not in their experience. I hear
their voice. I can recognize intentionality, emotion. There's a kind
of drama to the human voice that will create fear
in me, like if someone yells at me, or someone's whispering,
or if someone you know, or the sound of your mother,
like this high voice that has a certain thing to it,
the sound of your father that is a deeper voice,
it's maybe more protective. More so, there are these different
things that we experience and I and I've always wondered if.
Speaker 4: Music is a is a.
Speaker 1: Fine tuning of that or a you know, a kind
of pushing these these tendency that we that we have
to learn the human voice into into patterns that are
hyper versions of that. Because one of my one of
my contentions is that that's what stories are. Stories are
basically taking events. Let's say you have events in your
life that are meaningful to you, like you have a
love story in your life, and then what a what
a story does is that because amongst your love story,
there's all this other stuff going on, right, You're going
to sleep, you're eating, you're working, you're you're you're doing
other things. But there is a line that goes through
that love story. And when you pull it together and
then you can tell, you can say it, you can say,
you know, here's the one and hour, one hour and
a half version of a love story. Then people are
completely captivated because what it does it pulls things together
and that it contracts them in a way that is
a hyper experience, hyper version of experience they normally have.
And so that's what I always wondered. I mean, this
is my my I'm sure other people have thought similar things,
that that is what music is.
Speaker 4: That's why we care about it, because it.
Speaker 1: From a phenomenological point of view, because in some ways
it is a abstracted or contracted like it's like a
hyperversion of our experience of the human of human interaction
with voice.
Speaker 2: So these are all very interesting points, so that I
want to explore more. There was a Babylonian tablet from
thousands of years ago, and some may consider that to
be the first notation of music, and it's the notation
of vocal music. And what's interesting about that is it
is a texted piece of music. Obviously because it's for
the voice and for anything to be written down.
Speaker 3: I'm sure in that time.
Speaker 2: Period it had to be worth it because of the
media we're so expensive to use, and only there were
a certain class of people who actually write down things.
So it must have been that important for the society
that they thought that they needed to document it somehow.
And you see this throughout the centuries of the documentation
of music, not all of it, but there's a lot
of it that is vocal, and not just sacred music,
secular music too. And your point about entering into the
mind of the other is a fascinating point of departure
because it helps you to it's about understanding. Yes, it's
part of a conversation, but the conversation cannot really move
forward without understanding. So when you have someone literally voice
his or her thoughts in a vocal context with lyrics,
then you're able to appreciate the perspective more concretely. But
then you talked about the compression, it's almost like it's extract,
vanilla extract of the human experience. You know, you just
take the most interesting parts or intense parts and put
it together in a very condensed amount of time, and
you know, even will allarge work like a Beethoven symphony,
you still feel the compression. There's so much intensity that
happens from the first note all the way to the
last note, and it does feel like extract of life, order, society, balance, dissonance, consonants, sorrow, joy,
whatever may be.
Speaker 3: I mean these are very general concepts, but.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that vocal music is very important because
of its meaning. And then the idea that you could
actually enter into someone else's frame of mind is part
of the mystery of I guess speech. And then you
enter in someone else's mind by a musical means where
it almost feels elevated.
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Speaker 2: If you I've done some experiences, sorry, some experiments with
the human voice where I'll take a word or a
sentence and I'll stretch it out with a computer program
for a very very very very very long amount of time.
And what's interesting, you start to hear when you stretch
out human speech. It starts to become pitch oriented, hear
distinct pitches because we're speaking so quickly that we have
so many pitches occurring while we communicate to each other
that it's hard to pinpoint anyone. If you were to
really elongate each phoning, you could sort of swim in them.
There's so much sound there. And while music is a
compression of the human experience, it's also entering into a
different timeline where the sonic effect of it is almost
the opposite, where it's time slowed down, slow motion. It's
as if you could take one emotion and just dwell
on that for thirty minutes or twenty minutes or fifteen minutes.
Because it's been stretched out through sound. The sound itself,
it's very nature, is a vibration of a medium, whether
it's a violin string or the vocal cords, and they
vibrate so quickly they create a pitch. But then if
you keep going faster and faster and faster and faster
and faster and faster and faster with those pitches, they
start to become percussive and sound. And so in a way,
our human speech patterns are somewhere between that long sustained
pitches and percussive sounds.
Speaker 3: And so there's that.
Speaker 2: Example of contradictions of juxposition of opposites, where you have
a compressed, extracted moment of human life, but you're experiencing
in slow motion.
Speaker 3: It's almost.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I know people are annoyed with cliche terms. It
sort of feels like a mystery when we listen to music.
We don't know why it does what it does to us.
You know, it's scientific, and and then it also isn't.
Speaker 1: At the same time, Yeah, there is, because there's the
whole other aspect, which what you said made me think of,
which is, on the one hand, there's this sense, you know,
this sense of the an abstraction of the human voice,
you know. But then there's also in music the percussion element,
you know, or the rhythm element, the idea that it
makes people dance, and then it then it's directly related
to the idea that of pattern pattern moving, the idea
of doing things in a in a kind of in
a patterned way. And so you know, and it's interesting
what you're saying to say that in some ways the
percussion is a sped up sound, right that that if
you if you, if you go really fast, and it
turns into that to this beat, to this rhythm. And
when we speak, we do have a rhythm. Obviously, you
know there's a there's a beat. There's a rhythm.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 1: You know it because when you meet people that don't
do it right, it's a like when you meet people
that overtalk. You know, they don't know when to stop
talking and they just keep going and there there's like
there has there should be a beat and the other
person should be able to speak when you when you
encounter that, you realize that there's a rhythm to speaking.
You know, there's really a rhythm, and it's it's there
between people. But it's also there in the way we speak,
there's this rhythm. We have sentences, we have words. All
of these are actual our actual punctuation right there.
Speaker 4: They're related, they're related to.
Speaker 1: They're related to to the idea of rhythm. And so
it's interesting to think that in some ways, music, especially
ancient music, you know, it would have had these two
extreme elements. On the one hand, an abstracted version of
of sound that would be, you know, just these tones
that are in patterns, but then also a type of
rhythm that would actually also make.
Speaker 4: You move, that would make people move, and.
Speaker 1: So everything is vibrating, like you know, you're vibrating, and
the and the the music is vibrating, uh know. Anyways,
it's interesting to think that when you listen to sometimes
you can't help it.
Speaker 4: Like you hear.
Speaker 1: Music, if there's a beat to it, your body just
will start to follow it.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Children do this instinctively, especially toddlers or younger than toddlers,
when they hear music, they their bodies start to sway
and in time too, they don't even think about it.
They it's that, like you said, that outward sounding of
rhythm of vibrations, which is what rhythm is. And let's
go back to the concept of dance and contrasts that
to sung music. A lot of sung music can be
used for a lament, something that's sorrowful, a tragedy that happened,
where joy is usually shown in dance and traditional cultures.
You know, you see this in Judaism, you see this
in African cultures, you see this in almost any culture.
Joy is own through dance, that organized, rhythmic, corporate experience
of people following patterns together and they feel united to
each other.
Speaker 3: It's a very bonding experience.
Speaker 2: And that right there is a physical manifestation of what
music does and helps us to understand why do we
want it so much? Because it maybe is fractal. It's
us feeling different patterns and symbols and shapes that on
a smaller level relate to larger ones in the world,
whether it is patterns that are natural in a in math,
seashells shapes and different Pythagorean means and you know, golden
sections and whatnot, and how that can course fond to
a corporate event of archetypes and things that we experience,
but that we feel it's not just cerebral, we really
it's visceral in our gut we feel that this is right.
It resonates, yeah, literally literally, and I think it's a
continuum it literally Yeah, it does make you know and
you you have the continuum where you start with. I
talked about pitch becoming rhythm. The rhythm can start us,
a pitch can start as rhythm where it's just a let's.
Speaker 3: Say a wood block sound.
Speaker 2: If you take a wood block sound and you were
just speed it up very very very very quickly, I
mean you need a computer to do this, that wood
block sound starts to turn into pitch.
Speaker 3: And then if you keep going, going, going.
Speaker 2: Going further further, further, further further than that, that pitch sound,
if you especially add more beats that are happening, can
become static. And the static, if you extract that, it
goes back to that one rhythmic pulse. So you could
think of sound as just this continuum of definite rhythm
that turns into pitch, that turns into chaotic static that
goes back to rhythm.
Speaker 3: And where on that design that model.
Speaker 2: Are you going to extract your experience of music and
what's its purpose?
Speaker 3: What's its function?
Speaker 2: Is something that we have a greater ability to do
now that it's the twenty first century. Because there's so
much cross pollination of different cultures. Technology is very very
much changed composition. Everyone can have his or her own
studio now in a room. You can make your own album.
You could also become your own producer. You can balance
sound in a way that's so detailed. There's a and
also you could share online. You could hear what someone
else is doing a completely different continent. You could share
files with each other, and so it's it's a very
different synthesis of sounds that are happening now, where if
you were looking at traditional cultures you were basically confined
to those regions.
Speaker 3: You see similarities.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but it's funny that you say that.
Speaker 1: But at the same time, it feels like, at least
in terms of popular attention, there's almost like a leveling
that's been happening, you know, especially in the past like
fifteen years. I mean, every pop song sounds exactly the same,
you know. Interesting time you even wonder you think, like
I've heard that, did I hear that?
Speaker 4: Like I've just heard that song? It's very weird. What's
going on?
Speaker 3: Uh?
Speaker 2: This is a that's also interesting, you know how the
more variety you get. Sometimes it creates a sameness in
terms of production, in terms of output, but then you
get it. Take a deep dive on SoundCloud with all
these endie artists, and they're just doing their own thing.
I think in more mainstream artists there's a certain standard
and formula, so to speak, and once you know it
and you hit it, you're more marketable and that sameness
is more apparent there. But some of the most interesting
artists are DIY artists, and a lot of them this
year got a lot of recognition at the Grammys, and
you listen to their music and it's just really really
refreshing to hear people just do their own thing and
not look back and say, Nope, it's the lane I'm choosing.
I'm just gonna focus on this.
Speaker 4: M Yeah. Definitely interesting. And so how do you see.
Speaker 1: Because on the one hand, I heard you say something
like you said you're involved in church music, but they're
also doing things like sound, like found sound and like
this more kind of contemporary type.
Speaker 4: I guess I could call it this this there's.
Speaker 1: Something accidental sometimes about these types of modern compositions. I
haven't heard your composition, so I don't I don't know,
So how do you bring that like, how do you
reconcile that in your Because I've learned many musicians. I
have some that are close to me who, on the
one hand, in church are quite traditional and really kind
of try to to be to follow the tradition of
the church. But then their compositions are are wild, like
they're they're they're atonal, they there, they have these these
kind of very very extreme aspects to them, and so
I'm curious to know how you bring that together in
your mind.
Speaker 2: I've thought about this a lot. And sometimes you're a
jack of all trades, you know, there's so many different
influences around you, and you write for whatever projects in
front of you. So I had one project where I
had to write a piece based off of the interviews
of what could have been someone who heard the final
transmissions of Amelia Earhart.
Speaker 3: So this is way outside the box.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, way outside the box when it comes to
someone who writes from the Oktoy coast, you know the
eight tones of where it's a chassok every weekend and
I'm not knocking either lane, but you know it's outside
your comfort zone.
Speaker 3: And but then what you find is that. Well.
Speaker 2: Actually, our experience is pretty broad with all the different
things we absorb in terms of images and sounds, with
the Internet and just in our education, we have a
pretty rich not only background in training, but also.
Speaker 3: Uptite. I mean, look at our cuisine in America.
Speaker 2: I mean, I'm in America, but you know, you have
a lot of Western cultures now have a fusion of
just about every culture that lives there. And so you
see those recipes all working together, and it's not an
all uncommon where you say, Okay, I want Indian food
this not and then I'll have Italian food this night,
and then I'll have some Mexican food this night, and
then I'll make some heroes this night. And they're all
completely in different categories, but you're consuming them in one week.
And I feel the same thing away. With music, I
think culinary analogies are very apropos when it comes to music.
You have to create something that works for a gathering.
You have to understand the timing of each course as
it comes out like a movement of music, and you
must understand how certain ingredients work with each other for
the desired effect that you want. And you cannot fake
it because when it comes to food, everyone not some
everyone's very particular about food, so you really have to
know what you're doing. It's chemistry, you know. It's the
same thing with music.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Interesting, The food analogy is interesting, especially the way you
presented it to us, because on the one hand, the
last example you gave is something about how a all
there has to be a kind of dance of the elements, right,
so everything kind of comes together. There has to be
a coherence. You have to experience experience the food as
having a certain type of coherence. If you if you
go too far in one direction or the other, then
you lose people if you make it too spicy, too salty,
whatever like, if you like, you can just go off
the track and basically make it unpalatable for people. But
then you also presented the other aspect, which you said,
you know, the fusion, in the sense of like people
now they have Mexican food one night, eating food the other,
and so there's actually a dis junk, like there's this
idea that there is no there is no common experience
anymore that that in fact, there's an individualized experience.
Speaker 4: And you mentioned that also with.
Speaker 1: The the the extremes of the pop artist as someone
who who basically does this dribble that everybody can agree
will make money, and it's so it ends up being
all the same. But then you also have the other extreme,
which is a bunch of people doing their own thing
and not caring about what the others are doing. And
so these two extremes are interesting. So I'm curious to
know what you think of that, because my tendency is
to think honestly, like my tendency is to think that
both of those are dangerous. That in fact, that true symbolism,
or true true coherence is something like a joining of
the multiple and the one together in a in a
real dance.
Speaker 4: Again a higher dance. Right, So you have.
Speaker 1: You need a type of unity to have a coherent experience,
but you also need some spice, some diversion, some exploration
in order for it to be interesting or to rit
to make your curiosity wake up. Anyway, So I'm curious
what you think think about that in terms of music,
because we seem to have these Everything seems to be
moving in different extremes in my impression, And.
Speaker 2: There's also the path that you have to choose. Do
you keep once you found your recipe. Do you keep
replicating that or do you reinvent yourself every two to
three years. And that's something that you see in popular
music especially. Yeah, one of the biggest examples of that
was David Bowie. You know, every two to three years
there was a different look, a different outfit, different sound
on his albums, and you know you see other artists
after Bowie really follow that model so they can stay current, fresh, contemporary.
I guess one of the problems of that is it
sort of feels a little schizophrenic. You know, you're you
never really focus on one thing and hone and on
that craft and want to.
Speaker 3: Really get into it.
Speaker 2: Although looking at David Bowie's last album, it's sort of
a circle. He's coming back to the concepts of major tom,
coming back to the concepts of self isolation. And of
course schizophrenia ran in his family. On a personal level
with David Bowie, and so if you're so your own person,
you become your own niche commodity. Let's say you're that
dey artist who has found what works for him or her,
then what happens is, well, do I keep doing that
same thing or is it going to turn people off?
Because I haven't really expanded or do I go more pop.
That happens with some musicians. You know, this is interesting
we are on this topic. But you know, some musicians
started one genre like country, and they're like, no, I
want to go more mainstream. And now you see the
opposite happening. People are more mainstream and now they're going
to country. And also, you know country is a huge market,
but it any of it. I do think it's a
combination of not caring what other people think. But but
that's different than saying I'm going to write the most
off putting, caustic music that is going to make everyone
put their hands over the years, but I'm going to
stick stick to my principles.
Speaker 1: That's different the idea that the musicians and the caret
other people think, that's just that's just a lie.
Speaker 4: I mean, if they're putting it up on.
Speaker 1: Spotify's because they clearly care about what other people think,
Like they want the reality, they want to see what
other people think of what they're doing. And so you know,
the posture of of the you know, I just do
this for myself.
Speaker 4: I don't want, I don't care what to a certain extent.
Speaker 2: Right because like you said, it's sort of counterintuitive to
making all of your public and to be consumed in
the public way.
Speaker 1: You know, as soon as you make something public, then
you it becomes you can't you cannot avoid the question
and of of of it being received, you know, by
a group of people, and that you end up participating
and in a discussion or in a you end up
participating in something. But uh, yeah, it's fascinating to think
about about. So, I mean, I don't know what your
approach is to church music. So how do you see
that as connecting to church music?
Speaker 4: Do you think?
Speaker 1: You know, some people might say that the Orthodox church
music in America is you know, syncratic. You know, I've
heard people say that where they're saying it actually is
just an import from the outside. It doesn't fit with
our melodies are tones, it's it's in some ways a.
Speaker 4: It doesn't make sense, you know.
Speaker 1: And so now we're also seeing people try to adapt,
like you've obviously heard the fame the famous Little Appalachian
uh you know version of Christ has risen that I
think really struck a chord with American people like it
in Europe too.
Speaker 2: You could hear choirs in European countries make their own
YouTube video of that arrangement.
Speaker 1: It start according with this, So what do you think
of the situation of Orthodox music and America in terms
of the different questions that we're at?
Speaker 3: Good good question.
Speaker 2: Before I get into that, I just wanted to summarize
what we were talking about. Where you do need to
have your principles. You need to stick to your guns,
but husually the principles that you should stick to have
to deal more with craftsmanship than being off putting. I
think that your principles should be things that are commonly experienced,
like breathing, sighing, love, relationships.
Speaker 3: Communication.
Speaker 2: Music is a huge part of communication, and so you
work on that through craftsmanship, through getting better and better
and better and better what you do now that could
apply to electronic, secular piece or Orthodox church music. So
there are certain principles that I take into consideration. Yes,
it's true, there's a lot about the Orthodox Church as
it is experienced here in the Western hemisphere that does
feel important. And then there's a lot of it where
it must be it must come from a living, breathing tradition.
It's not arbitrary, and I think I try to learn.
Someone told me that you should learn a chant tradition
very well and study with a master chanter. And it
doesn't matter what tradition is. You need to learn something
and really understand what it's worth and its value. At
the same time, I learned Western counterpoint, Western arranging technique,
and then I have a lot of experience which is
working with regular people and church choirs and what works
for their voices and instead, this is where the square
peg is forced into the round hole.
Speaker 3: Taking a particular context.
Speaker 2: Let's saying imperial Russia, and then forcing that in a
perish in America in terms of technique or skill set
may not work. A lot of the times it doesn't.
So I try to really think about what are the
strengths and weaknesses of your average American singer, but.
Speaker 3: Always in the elevating way, how can they sound the best?
Speaker 2: And so practicality plays a huge role of what I
do in church music. I'm also very much geared towards
using traditional chants or melodies as a starting point and
making my arrangements as transparent as possible because it's meant
for corporate prayer. You know, there is a very directed
use of the music, and the music is to lead
people into the teachings of the Church, the mystery of Christ,
the liturgy in particular, and all of the offices build.
Speaker 3: Towards the Eucharist and the Divine Liturgy.
Speaker 2: And it's a pretty awesome responsibility to have, and so
approaching it with that understanding of understanding, you know, is
to teach, is to educate, is to bring people together.
Speaker 3: And it also needs to be done in a way
that opens I.
Speaker 2: Say, your heart or your soul, if you want to
use these terms, if we could talk about them to prayer.
Same Propho's talks about prayer before prayer, lighting candles, being
around incense in a dark room sets the stage for
prayer so to speak, you know. And the music in
the church helps to become like sonic icons. They help
to reinforce the teachings of the church, the history of
the church, and also the living experience of Christ. And
so communication is very important to that clear communication and
also communication in a way that is it doesn't have
people emotionally hunker down and shrug it. People open up
so they can let it come through them and ruminate
all that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And I think that's that's such a I think
it's such a great point because in some ways, if
you're trying to serve those purposes, it's not even just
about being traditional for being traditional, Like it's not about
tradition for tradition's sake. In some ways, because you're your
purpose is to bring people into a certain state of being,
a certain direction of attention, then you have to take
that into consideration. And so if you if you shock
people with new melodies all the time, then you're not
doing that because you're forcing them to pay attention. You
see that, I mean I see that in some of
the churches that I grew up in, these Protestant churches,
where we actually used to have a pretty tight canon
of hymns that we sang, and then ultimately at some
point people started introducing like new songs every two weeks,
like they just kept introducing new songs to be to.
Speaker 4: Be contemporary new.
Speaker 1: So what it meant is that you're constantly being shocked
with like songs that are not that that are you
having to pay attention to way too much because in
some ways you're like, oh, this is a new song,
and you're trying to figure it out, and you're trying
to follow the melody and you're trying to kind of
see what's going on, and it's fascinating to realize what
it does is that it and then in some ways
becomes almost an obstacle to to worship.
Speaker 4: Right. But yeah, but at the same time, if.
Speaker 1: You are just in some ways saying we just need
to have tradition and just be traditional, then you're then
ultimately you're you're going to be dying, like because the
breath is going to run out. You can say, like
you're just basically going through the going through the motions.
Speaker 4: I was.
Speaker 1: I was at you know, the St. Andrew's Church in Riverside,
Father Josiah's Church. Yes, one of the things they're trying
to do is to take because in America we basically
have all these different liturgical traditions that are kind of
coming together and competing and jossing and you know, rubbing
against each other. And they're trying to kind of integrate
that into their services where they have both Byzantine chanting
and the more four part harmonies, the Wretchian tones, and
they try to find ways to integrate them in a
way that isn't jarring, that is actually kind of coherent
and it's fascinating. I mean, I don't know how successful
it is. I find sometimes it is very successful. I'm
sure sometimes people find it a little surprising. But that's
an interesting work that is in both both innovative but
also really with the desire to kind of bring the
Orthodox American experience together.
Speaker 2: Yes, and it is something that is probably more if
it's more natural, if it's more organic, it's probably going
to last longer because it's.
Speaker 4: Not forced and it's not imposed.
Speaker 3: That's right.
Speaker 2: And you also see that people are throwing the baby
out with the bathwater. Now I know of that parish.
I don't know what their music program is like per se.
But in general, the the sounds that we have, there's
a commonality, whether it is in Russian church music or
is in the Byzantine transradition, and that's the idea of
stasis sustained. So that's clearly shown in Byzantine chat With
an a song, it creates a space of contemplation because
you are focusing, so you lose track of time in
a sense. The music has rhythm, it does, but you
don't have the same understanding of harmonic development and harmonic
shifts that are in correspondence with rhythm. There's the idea
of this oneness of time where we don't know if
it's begne or when it's ending.
Speaker 3: We are sort of in that presence.
Speaker 2: And you hear that too with a lot of legato
contelena Russian choral singing, where everything's connected into this one
sustained sound. And the Orthodox all have this aversion to
moments of silence in the service. I notice, right when
something ends, something else is beginning. Always it's this constant
dovetailing of sounds. So sound the silence is kind of
off pooting for the Orthodox because it sounds like someone
made a mistake, you know. But if you notice, everyone's
always going through this relay of sound in the services,
and so there's also this.
Speaker 3: Cooperative sustate in the services and the.
Speaker 4: Yeah yeah, uh and what you say it.
Speaker 1: I realized that the moments where I've found that the
liturgy has been the most beautiful is exactly when it's
doing what you're saying, when you know, during the like
during the amen, the priests has started, you know, the
next part, and then there's this sense of like this
just this these things, you know, moving into each other,
where there's.
Speaker 4: No actual, actual cut.
Speaker 1: There's almost like this transition moment of two spaces, two
spaces overlapping and then continuing into the And that's really
the moments where I'm the most kind of taken by
by the music when that happens during the liturgy.
Speaker 2: So there's an awmen that can occur right before the Trubichim,
which is one of the most sustained parts of the service,
because it's just this long amount of time you need
practically to let the priests bring the gifts out, put
them on the altar table, and so you hear their
prayers being said underneath while the choir sings.
Speaker 3: And there's a historical development to this. It's not as
if this was.
Speaker 2: The original intention of the troop Bechim. However, regardless of that,
you feel this suspension of time happen, especially at that moment,
and a lot of the arrangements of the trub sound ethereal.
Whether it's a Byzantine chant or whether it's Russian choral music,
they sound out of time. Other moments like that too,
can be moments of the anaphroa, the egoistic canon after
the elevation of the gifts, and there's another awmen that
happens after that, and you move into you know, holy
things or for the holy and you transition into another
part of the service where we have the community hymns,
and it's this whole relay of meaning to meaning, logic
to logic, and peace to peace, love to love. If
you see in the services of loving Christ loving each
other with that distinction of Orthodox especially some traditions are
very very strict and formal and how they do things,
but it's almost as if that helps to open you
up to really think about and be loving, so you
put aside all of your own preconceived notions about what
that is and you really focus on the church like
water over a stone and a creek, shaping you, forming you,
forming you, over and over and over again.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's interesting because what you're saying, I realized, like musically,
like really just music. Obviously there's the meaning is part
of it, but just musically, I to me, the anafro
was always just always the high point. Like to me,
it's always the high point, uh, And it's the thing
that I just get the most and I'm just the
most seized by. But then I was talking to my son,
and you know, he was telling me, he said, the
true Big Kim was the part where he loved that
because it has this kind of soft, like this really
really soft aspect to it, where the Anafa is more
like this this you know, everything is coming together and
it's like this this this crescendo in some ways of
the of the experience.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 4: But but then I thought, wow, it's interesting.
Speaker 1: I realized, yeah, some that people will have things that
are closer to them in terms of their sensibilities, you know,
even though it's a it's it all comes together, you
know obviously. Uh, but that's a wonder that's it's funny
because I never thought about it when you said it.
I remember remember my son like pointing out to me
how how this is like his favorite part of the liturgy.
Speaker 3: And they are moments that are.
Speaker 2: Meant to be highlighted, you know, the procession of the
gifts during the true Uchim, and then the consecration of
the gifts at the Anafra. I mean, and there is
an overt corporate call at the Anaphra, you know, let
us lift up our hearts, we lift them up to
the Lord. And it's the direct address of the congregation
with a clergy to pray directly to God and offer
the gifts that are on the table the altar, and
so there. They're very powerful moments, and there are moments
that only really make sense when you are in the church.
You know, these are the mysteries of the church, and
they don't. The first parts of the service are usually
didactic psalms, scripture teachings at the church traparia, and then
you switch after the Gospel and it becomes very particular
to being in the church. I suppose that's why they
dismissed catechumans in earlier eras of the church. This wasn't
really for them at that point. It almost shows connections
with Christianity. And you know, I don't want to say
a mystery cult, but you know, these are the mysteries
that these are the real particular facets of the of
the church's experience that happened at those particular moments, and
that are heart sayints, you know, eat my bodies, drink
my blood, heart sayings to follow.
Speaker 3: They don't make sense. Yeah, unless you're in the church.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm curious what you think about because now we're
talking about like this deeply participative aspect.
Speaker 4: I mean, in some ways. The liturgy is the.
Speaker 1: The highest version of how music participates in our life
and how there's both you know, this this exchange between
the altar and the choir. You know that there's we're
all attending, we're all participating.
Speaker 4: We're moving, We ultimately move into it as we actually
it makes us eat. We actually eat the bread.
Speaker 1: And the wine that is result of this kind of
musical coming together. One of the things that have been
has fascinated to me is how music has become performative
in the past few centuries and the development of the
concert hall and the idea of listening.
Speaker 4: To music, right, the idea that you just listen to music.
Speaker 1: And so I'd like to know what you think about
that when you think the role of these things are,
you know, what do you think it's doing through our
sense of what music is and what its function is
in our society.
Speaker 2: You know, there's no clear cut point in the history
of music where something happened and something didn't. There's always
this fluid exchange, like in an ocean, with these different currents.
So you know, for instance, if you take a look
at twentieth century America, early twenties century America coming out
of the reconstruction era of the Civil War. A lot
of that's the Second Industrial Revolution, and a lot of
Americans are trying to outdo the Europeans the architecture, civil institutions,
and one of them is music. The Americans bring over
fabulous musicians from Europe like Gustav Mahler and the uh
Oh his name is Escaping Meat Dwarjack the check composer
to conduct at these orchestras here in the West and
the Western Hemisphere. And you have that kind of staid,
almost respectability politics of wearing suits and dresses and pearls.
And we have arrived, you know, we have come into
this place of affluence and success as Americans, and we
can do this too. We can produce European style concerts.
And at the same time, after World War One, while
you have that high society americanness outdoing the Europeans, you
also have the birth of jazz that really takes hold
of America post nineteen fourteen, and it sends people into
a tizzy, a frenzy, and you see the dancing that
happens there. So if you look about, look at that
the chairs in a concert hall are literally screwed into
the floor you can't you can't dance, you can't move them. Yes,
And it's not just something particularly to America, obviously, it's
this is the European concert experience. And this is something
that you saw was being challenged just naturally in American
culture with high society people who would go to Harlem
on the weekends dancing, who would make the same people
who went to Carnegie Hall for a concert of European
style concert music. And you see that the two have
been divorced, go back a previous century. This is something
that Ricard Wagner was very keen on synthesizing. He talked
about the synthesis of the arts, and he felt that
they were divorced. You know, why is their acting and
singing and costume design and dancing. Why are they all separate?
Why can't they be just one giant synthesis. And that's
one of the aspects Wagner was trying to bring into
his dramas, his musical dramas is what he called his operas,
where it was a synthesis of everything that had been
divorced in European culture coming together. Now people in the
hall and Yroid aren't dancing, those chairs are screwed into
the floor too. But sometimes you'll see in opera dancing
on the stage and coming bringing back together of all
these different time periods, looking back at the Renaissance, how
did the Renaissance appropriate an earlier era Greek and Roman culture?
The Greek culture and concepts of the chorus and of drama,
of tragedy and comedy. How did people in the Renaissance
appropriate something that they were separated by hundreds of thousands
of years, And then you move forward to three hundred
years in European culture, how did the nineteenth century Europeans
look at their Renaissance and then look at the Greco
roma culture, always trying to get back to the communal,
public experience of art and what does it mean in
European culture in the nineteenth century, there is no higher
art form than an opera. It is the pinnacle.
Speaker 3: You can say.
Speaker 2: In twentieth century America, there's no higher art form than
the movie. You know, and look at the movies. Sometimes
all those things come together.
Speaker 1: So one of the things that I've been pointing to,
and you can tell me what you think about this,
is that if you think of Greek drama, you know,
and the chorus and the Greek drama and everything. We
always have to remember that the Greek dramas, at least
at the outset, they were liturgical events, like they were
events in the in honor of Dionysus, on the feasts
of Dionysus uh. And there was a a kind of
procession of the plays that ended with a with a parody,
like a comedy play. And and so this is the
sense that I've been wondering about, is that, like when
I think of Wagner and his gazooms contract like this
idea of the of the complete work of art.
Speaker 4: My intuition is to say that liturgy.
Speaker 1: Is the is the complete work of art, because the
one thing that's missing in in the opera and in
the movies is participation. You know, you there is this
separation of the public and the performer.
Speaker 4: And then and therefore you you're you're.
Speaker 1: Looking at something like a painting, and you're you're you're
looking at it.
Speaker 4: But the liturgy is has everything.
Speaker 1: It has the music, it has the motion, it has
the drama, it has all of that.
Speaker 3: It has the food, but it's your story. Yeah.
Speaker 4: It also has the eating, yeah, which is not The.
Speaker 3: Eating is very important.
Speaker 2: Well, I can tell you about eighteen opera in Italy
in the seventeen hundreds. Oh, they would be eating during
the performances. That's why you've got the concept of throwing
apple corps at people, because if.
Speaker 3: They didn't like your aria, they would throw it at you.
Speaker 2: That's a different story, but that was sort of an
impromptu I'm gonna bring my own meal to the opera thing.
Speaker 3: But in terms of.
Speaker 1: It wasn't It wasn't part of the story. It wasn't
part of what of the experience. It was like eating
popcorn while you're watching a movie. It's not part of
the movie. You're not engaging in the movie while you're
eating popcorn.
Speaker 4: No.
Speaker 2: No, And so in the Christian context of the Eucharist,
that food is all essential, and.
Speaker 3: We come full circle.
Speaker 2: It's about culinary arts, it's about cooking, it's about ingredients,
it's about how having everything perfectly balanced, because that's probably
one of the most communally binding aspects of human culturest food.
And so the liturgy does do that, and it does
it not just with the u gress, but also does
it with other types of food that could be off
to the side. You know, different types of bread, raisin bread, whatnot.
There's also memorial wheat, the so called kohliva, et cetera,
and other types of food that are appropriate for certain occasions.
But as you said, it's actually part of the intention.
It is incorporated to the service itself, and that is
the reason to gather.
Speaker 3: The reason to gather is because of the ugriss. I mean,
it's a meal.
Speaker 2: And I suppose in early Christianity the ritual developed around
the meal, whether it was the Passover meal or the
meal that love agapi meal of getting together remembering Christ
every week, and it extends from that. And you see,
of course with the the Coptic Orthodox, they have never
divorced dance. They have never divorced rhythm, and they've never
divorced singing, and they had never divorced eating. From their
liturgical experience, it's all that. Yeah, it's a complete experience we.
Speaker 4: Will have.
Speaker 3: I was just gonna say, that's it, that's it.
Speaker 4: That's the yore they were walking around the altar.
Speaker 1: But you know, at least we can say that we
have that little little bit of a dance left in
our liturgical world.
Speaker 2: Yeah, if you I looked online, I saw a wedding
in Romania, and they actually held handkerchiefs and did a
line dance around the table. Oh yeah, as you would
do counterclockwise, but like a real balk and dance around
the table during the dance of Isaiah.
Speaker 3: But like you said, that's that's it. That's it. I
mean in Eastern Orthodoxy, that's all we get.
Speaker 4: Yeah, just get the marriage the marriage dance. But one
of the things I mean, I'd like to hear your
being on this.
Speaker 1: One of the things that I've been thinking about in
terms of popular culture and how to make popular culture
more participative right now is the notion of making it
into celebration.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 1: The idea of writing anthems, for example, is something that
nobody does anymore. Nobody writes anthems, you know.
Speaker 4: But the idea of a.
Speaker 1: Celebratory art where you're you're basically writing something in order
to express its value to you and then and kind
of express our our participation in it. You know, you
still have you still have experiences like that in games,
like at sports games, people will use music in an
anthem manner. But it seems like, let's say, it seems
like now would be a time, I think for musicians
to think about that to think about this idea of
the panegyic aspect of dance, it's like celebratory aspect that
that brings us together.
Speaker 2: Many musicians do. I mean, look at em. EDM is
all based around dance. I mean when you go to
EDM concert or what do you see? You see the console,
the DJ table.
Speaker 1: It's not we don't dance together with DM. Nobody people
don't dance. People dance individually in a crop.
Speaker 6: That's true, there is this sense of celebration, like like
this idea of like I said, like an anthem where
it brings you together and then you're you're all paying
attention to to something together and you can see as
you're doing it.
Speaker 1: Like I mean, like singing a national anthem. That's what
happens when you sing national anthem. Obviously you can have
anthem to all kinds of other things that are not
your country, but it seems like that's something.
Speaker 4: I mean, that's one.
Speaker 1: Aspect that that could help to heal our culture a little,
because now it's like everything's so fragmented.
Speaker 3: Hmmm. You know they're there, right, I mean, the anthems
already are there, they exist, and it almost feels i
don't want to say it feels sort of.
Speaker 2: Passe for people to sing the national anthem, although because
when I'm at a sport event when it's being sung,
it's not as if people are being irreverend.
Speaker 3: Everyone's into it, you know.
Speaker 2: In terms of pop music, you know, you had the
stadium Rock in the seventies with all those big, big,
big anthems, and that got the audience, you know, moving
and grooving together. And you did have the Christian rock
movement at the end of the night where they had
a lot.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they have got they've got a little bit of that,
like the kind of yeah, they do have a little
bit of that anthem sense, you know. And then and
also they make the song simple and then people participate.
It's kind of repetitive, you know, they have this way
of doing it that gets people into it.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And even like Dave Matthews as talking about the late nineties,
you know, aspects of Christianity and his music or the
group Creed as a group in the late nineties, very
big on over Christian themes. But you know that comes
also from the contimperary Christian experience, where anthems are a
huge part of that tradition, you know, and having people
participate together at that moment.
Speaker 3: In the Black Church, certain hymns are.
Speaker 2: Certainly meant to be participatory, and there's different reasons for them.
One is to get you engaged, and then the other
is to have you reflect. That's shown by the tempo
and how the music is sung, the lyrics.
Speaker 4: And.
Speaker 2: That's an experience where rhythm, motion, anthemic, if that's the
word you want to use, participation all comes together and
that's that's that's an experience that has not divorced those
either to this day.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so Nicholas, I think we've
been going for like about an hour. I would say,
can you tell people where to find your your stuff?
Speaker 4: Like where where?
Speaker 1: Where can we find your compositions or where can we
be where can we engage with you?
Speaker 2: Sure, Nicholas rieus Music dot com is my website and
you can see the projects I'm currently working on right
now and they span the gamut and I would love
for you to take a look at them, and I
hope to see some of you at the events.
Speaker 1: So thanks, yeah, thanks for taking the time. You know,
I need to think about some of the things you said.
You brought me onto path that I had never been
in terms of music, and so I'm still kind of
for me, music is really I mean you said it's
a mystery, Like for me, it is kind of a
mystery because I've always I don't understand it that well.
I can obviously experience it, but I have to kind
of continue my education.
Speaker 4: So thanks for the time.
Speaker 2: It's been a pleasure. Thank you for all of the
interesting thoughts and the interaction. I appreciate it.
Speaker 1: If you enjoy these videos and podcasts, please go to
the Symbolic world dot com website and see how you
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