Melodology

Welcome to Zeitgeist Radio. I'm Morgan Roe, founder of the Zeitgeist Academy. Every episode here on Zeitgeist Radio, I speak with someone from a unique musical subculture looking to understand their relationship with music. Zeitgeist means spirit of the times. Imagine all the things that make this moment feel different from other times.

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Morgan: My guest today is Arthur Brewer, a composer and host of the Melodology Podcast.

Arthur, welcome to Zeitgeist Radio!

Arthur: Thank you for having me. It's great to be here.

Morgan: I'm so stoked to talk to you. Um, you and I have known each other in various past lives, um, and we've both kind of gone on to do new and different things. And I can't wait to hear about some of these projects that you're working on.

Arthur: Awesome. I'm excited, excited to talk about them.

Morgan: Why don't you give folks a quick introduction, who you are, , musically?

Arthur: All right. Well, quick introduction. My name is Arthur Breur, B R E U R. Yes. That's just five letters. The last three letters look like Europe. I am a composer and a pianist.

I consider myself more of a composer than a pianist. If I had my choice, I would just write the music and have somebody else play it. Um, and I have been writing orchestral and concert band music a lot recently, uh, that came about through actually through a connection that you and I had at the Chamber of Commerce in Tualatin.

I started promoting myself. I figured if I'm going to be considering myself a professional composer, I should promote myself as a professional composer. I was already a member of the Tualatin Chamber of Commerce as a web developer, so I, I signed up as a composer as well. And that basically, uh, turned into a connection with a local orchestra.

And so my, my advice to anybody, if you're a musician, composer, whatever, join a chamber of commerce for whatever your professional at join a chamber of commerce, a regular chamber of commerce as that and promote yourself to other businesses. But that got me my first orchestral composition. Through a connection to the chamber and the orchestral composition company, my first commission for a concert band piece, and I've kind of been going with that ever since I am.

I'm excited to announce that, uh, for Midwest Clinic this year, I had a piece of mine selected for the reading sessions for Concert Band. Which is exciting. That is very exciting. I feel really honored by that, considering that, that the three composers, you know, me and two other composers basically started going to Midwest Clinic.

A few years ago and combining our expenses, we had four people before, but we now have three combining our expenses so we can afford a booth and be a publisher selling our wares at the Midwest Clinic in Chicago and. So that puts us on the level playing field with the biggest publishers in the world for getting read in the Midwest Clinic reading sessions.

That's phenomenal. Two of us have readings this year out of, out of, you know, three of the composers, two of us have readings and usually in the, in each reading session there's something like between 25 and 30 pieces that get read. So out of that selection. A little independent publisher is getting his music published.

Morgan: I love this story. This makes me, it makes my heart

Arthur: happy. And all of that, again, all of that does go back to the fact that I started promoting myself as a professional composer in a chamber, in a

Morgan: chamber of commerce, you, so. Back in, in my olden days, before times, I was in, uh, several Chambers of Commerce, , up to four or five, I think, not all at the same time, but in different, in different periods, and you are the Musical.

Well, I guess there was, um, in Hillsboro, there was someone who played piano. You know, she'd do events. She'd perform for events and stuff, provide background music and things. But you're definitely the only composer I ever met who was out there promoting himself.

Cause you wouldn't think necessarily the business community, you know, I think a lot of musicians kind of draw a distinction. I'm not business. I mean, I got to do art. I don't know what it is, which you

Arthur: are, no matter what you are, you're still a business and you seem like a business. And you'd be really surprised how many connections you get.

Now, I was thinking with the Tualatin Chamber, there were a couple of people who were singers. Yeah. And did concerts. I don't think there was anybody else who was music except them, you, and me. Yeah. And then in the Vancouver, Washington Chamber of Commerce here, there was a pianist who taught lessons and did, you know, did some like jazz piano performance stuff.

So yeah, that's really all I can think of. Yeah.

Morgan: , well, let's start back at the beginning of your musical journey. When did you start playing music? Um, and what was your first instrument piano?

Arthur: Probably my parents say that I was playing the piano and I was actually playing creatively as soon as I could reach the keys, basically.

As soon as I could reach them, I was playing notes and I wasn't playing anything that was a recognizable song. I wasn't trying to, I was playing the notes that I wanted to hear. Yeah. And that Would that be

Morgan: also called banging on the piano? No,

Arthur: because I never did bang on the piano. In fact, I have, I had an uncle, great uncle, who played organ and piano.

He played just amazing jazz piano. Cool. And I was the only one of the grandkids and the great nephews and nieces who was allowed to play his piano. That's an honor. Oh, I bet you I did not bang at it. Yeah. I started playing it. So that was, I, it was an honor, and it was an indication to my parents that, you know, there was something about the way that I was playing.

But I was in choir in church from the time that I remember. The, the robe that I had when I was in choir came with a bow tie and the bow tie like went out to your shoulders. That's how big I remember the bow tie was or how small I was. So that was, you know, probably four or five years old at that point, the cherub choir.

And I was in choir all the way, you know, in church all the way up through high school. And then when I went to college, I was in choir in college and I took piano performance in college and focused on composing. Um, but yeah, I, I remember. I remember music being around all the time. We had a piano. My mother could play piano some, my sister took lessons.

Uh, we had a Scott Joplin book that I started teaching myself how to play Scott Joplin. Nice. And really the, the point that all of a sudden I became a pianist. Because I was in music, but I wasn't really focusing on playing piano until I was eight. And I had a grandmother who played piano and I'd go and stay with her for the weekend.

And she would play piano and I would turn pages for her. And I just, she was my favorite grandmother. And she passed away when I was eight. And I transferred all of that. You know, all of that emotion and all of that love for her and love for the time I spent with her at the piano. I started teaching myself how to play piano and grabbed some of the music that she'd had.

I inherited all of her music. So I started playing the sheet music that she had and teaching myself how to play. And it wasn't until I'd been doing that for about two years that my parents finally said, Well, he's, he's serious about teaching himself how to play piano. So we should get him some lessons.

Yeah,

Morgan: well, first of all, what a beautiful way to connect, to continue that connection with your grandmother, even as like, that's pretty insightful for an eight year old to make that. I don't

Arthur: think I did it on purpose. I don't think I consciously thought, well, now I'm going to start playing piano. Because she's not here to play piano.

I think it was really a psychological transference kind of a thing, where all of the focus and mourning for her and all of the emotional attention that I would put on her I then turned and put to music. Yeah.

Morgan: Oh, that's beautiful. Do you remember the first piece of music that you ever

Arthur: wrote? I do. I do remember the first piece of music I ever composed and I wrote it down.

My, I'm pretty sure it was my aunt, my dad's sister who said, okay, well, if you're going to compose it and you're going to play it, you've got to write it down. And so I even have like the original paper. From the very first piece of music that I wrote down and it's a cute little melody but you know now looking at it the funny thing is looking at it with the lens and we'll get into the Melodology podcast and melody composing and all that sort of stuff but looking at it with that lens it's a pretty good melody.

I love it. It follows a lot of the rules of melody writing, and it, it's, you know, it stands up to some scrutiny.

Morgan: Well, that's awesome. Um, who would you say you've, you've listed? Uh, Joplin. Who were some early influences for you?

Arthur: Joplin was definitely an influence. I can, I have a little spiel that I now say about my musical influences.

I already mentioned I was in, church choir growing up, so church music thingable, the stuff that you can, you can play it one time through and then the congregation can sing along very melodic, uh, very catchy and memorable that kind of music. Uh, but we did have a, a diverse music program, so there wasn't just hymns.

There was a lot of contemporary music that we sang. There was a lot of big choral music and our church choir program was so good that we did tours. Every summer the high school and college level, uh, kids would go around the country and do choir tours. So that was one of the major legs of the, my compositional.

Foundation. And then Sesame Street. I was age to get very early Sesame Street. Uh, and then the Muppets in the late seventies. Oh yeah. Uh, and the thing about Sesame Street and even there was a show called zoom and there was the electric company and they all created music to engage kids and to teach kids.

There's lots of educational music that's in there. Uh, I also, you know, I benefited from growing up around the time that Schoolhouse Rock was new and Schoolhouse Rock was on television. Back when you would watch Saturday morning cartoons all morning long, I was watching Saturday morning cartoons and there was Schoolhouse Rock.

So the Muppets and Sesame Street are another major influence on me. And again, with The Muppet Show, they had lots of Really great classic songs and American songbook stuff and vaudeville and classical, just this really broad range of really good music and the Muppet show, you know, I

Morgan: have a street again, too.

Yeah. I have a student who was actually on this podcast. She came to me and she's like, I want to learn how to sing. She she's a Muppet. Like that's her hobby is everything Muppets. She has a blog. Uh, now she has a podcast. Um, she collaborate, like everything, all Muppets all the time.

And she wanted to learn to sing that. No, she, she just, she is a fan of the show and, uh, she wanted to learn to sing the Muppets songs better. And that's what led her to start taking lessons with me. Um, but yeah, the, the episode is very interesting. It kind of goes through. You know, I had heard of the Muppets, but I hadn't watched them regularly.

So through her going back to these songs, they're really insightful and good. Like it's good music. It's been a really fun journey, uh, for me learning of all of these songs. Um. And working on

Arthur: them with her, there's just, you know, so for your listeners, if you like the Muppets at all, and even if you don't, but you just want to have a diverse listening experience, Muppet Central Radio is an internet radio station.

You can get it through. You can just Google it, but Muppet Central Radio is 24 seven. Muppets, but that's not, it's like everything Jim Henson. So it's not just the Muppet show. Yeah. Yeah. Fraggle Rock. Fraggle Rock. It's theme, the theme from Farscape because that was a Jim Henson production and all sorts of different songs, Bear in the Big Blue House, which is some really amazing songs too.

So that's really, that was foundation number two. And then I am of the perfect age to have seen Star Wars, the original Star Wars movie in the theater as a kid. And that basically, I mean, it made me want to do the same thing that John Williams did with that. I wanted to create music that made people feel things.

And then if I could create music that people would then experience later and have, you know, if it was film scores, I thought I wanted to be a film score composer. And Um, that wasn't the path that I ended up taking, but if I, if I, you know, I wanted to do something where people could hear a melody and then remember or whatever it was they were experiencing when they heard that melody

Morgan: the first time.

Yeah. Um, well, you've brought up melody a few times, so this is kind of a perfect, I think, segue. You have a podcast, Melodology. Um, can you describe a little bit about what that is and then also what led you to melody as a focus? Yeah.

Arthur: Well, melody fascinates me. I am a melodic composer. I think of music primarily in terms of a melody.

When I think of a piece of music, it's not, it can be really anything. Music can be so much. And music can have no melody, and music can just be percussive, and music can be whatever. To me, And it, maybe it goes back to seeing the movies or the Sesame Street stuff or the church music because all of those things are melodic.

In the movie scores, you've got a motif that represents a person or you've got a theme or you've got a love theme or you've got a heroic march, something like that. And the idea that it's something memorable, that it's something relatively concise. That it's something that generally is, it communicates, and there's a, there's a, there's even a sort of a science or a methodology behind the communication in melody and in music.

So all of that stuff has fascinated me forever and I love writing melodies, and I became just kind of fascinated with. A lot of the, a lot of the classic tunes, like, uh, Swinging on a Star, or, or Over the Rainbow. Over the Rainbow's a big one. When You Wish Upon a Star. And I kept thinking. When I hear that piece of music, I've got this, like, it's like a key that fits into a lock in my head.

It just, it's exactly the right shape to be itself. And you hear the little bit of the melody and you immediately recognize it. And it has a feeling to you, it has a flavor. And I started thinking of the idea in terms of flavor, like, it's kind of like cinnamon. describe cinnamon to somebody, you know, but you taste it and you know, it's cinnamon.

So you, same thing with the melody. You hear this melody that you know, and you love, and it has that sort of, it's got its own flavor. It's got its own thing to it. It's really hard to describe sometimes. So I was like, what makes that happen? You know, what makes a melody work? What makes it be memorable?

What makes it something that somebody wants to sing again, or wants to listen to again? Um, they really, the first couple of melodies that I thought of were when you wish upon a star and over the rainbow. And we've already talked about the Muppets songs. Uh, I had another composer and McKinnon on the podcast and we listened to, or we, we looked at, uh, the rainbow connection.

Uh huh. So the Rainbow Connection is, it's another one of those songs where it just is a beautifully crafted melody. I was surprised doing the podcast how really well crafted some of these melodies are. And melodies you don't even necessarily think of in terms of craft.

Morgan: I was just gonna say, what does that mean?

Like I don't know. What does it mean to craft it? Like, specifics.

Arthur: Okay, so, the, kind of the general rules of melody, what makes a good melody, are generally, if we're talking tonal melodic music, you want something that is singable, and singable means you don't have huge leaps. That you, that you jump as you're singing, usually it's going to be either short leaps or up and down by step, very short intervals between the notes and a, you know, a scale is just steps up.

So a few steps up, a few steps down, the, the idea is also that you want to have something that you can grab onto, that you can remember each time. So a good example of that one was, uh, from Aladdin, A Whole New World. That has just a, you know, it has the same thing over and over again. Yeah. It's a little hook.

Da da da da. Da da da da. Da da da da. That, it's just over and over again. It's four notes. Yep. Beautiful. It's amazing. Those four notes can be so gorgeous in context in the song, but that gives you something that you remember then, and that gives you something that, that, you know, it's, it's a little motif that you can then play in different places or sing at different intervals and things like that.

A good melody also has direction or arc to it, um, and that can be basically that it rises up and falls down. It could just fall down. One that I always talk about also is Puff the Magic Dragon. Sure. Puff the Magic Dragon is a descending scale. Yes, it is. All it is is, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, 1, down to 3, and then back to 2, and then just goes back down the scale again.

And it's, there's no verse and chorus to it, it's all the same melody. It's got a slight variation between the two, but it's the same melody over and over and over again. And it's just a descending scale with a few ornaments added to it. But it's beautiful. It

Morgan: is. These are all like, this is a great playlist.

I feel like all of these songs you've listed are, I mean, you're right. They evoke something in me, usually from my childhood. Um. At least that's where I was exposed to. Even Puff the Magic Dragon for me would be, you know, old records when I was a kid. And yeah, just the, I mean, there are, there are jumps, but then they get you back to where you were going.

Now, now, When You Wish Upon a Star has a pretty big jump at the beginning. Yeah.

Arthur: Another rule of melody writing generally is if you have a large leap. Yeah. You come back from that leap in the other direction. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So you leap up and then you come back down or you leap down and you come back up.

And I like to say music is stretchy. Yeah. And that's part of music being stretchy. If you stretch too far away, you wanna come back a little bit. But also if you start a melody in a particular spot, you, that melody tends to wanna come back to relatively close to that spot. And that is, doesn't mean it's always gonna come back exactly the same place.

The Rainbow connection's a really good example of that. Because the rainbow connection, like a number of songs that are searching songs, the, another thing about a melody, is generally you have a, a setup of tension. in the melody, and then you have resolution of the melody. And the resolution, generally in music, means you land on the tonic note of the key.

You land on the note that the key is named after. If you're in the key of C, you land on C, and you're playing a C chord at the same time. But if you don't land on C, but you're in a C chord, you still have some tension. Mm hmm. So, as an example, Rainbow Connection, Never gets to the tonic. It never lands on the tonic key.

It never lands on the note that the key is named after. Until the very, very end of the piece. Uh, if I'm remembering this correctly, but the fascinating thing about that one, it's just kind of searching all over the place. It never lands at the home key and right when you think it could land at the home key, which is the words, the rainbow connection, it throws in an accidental and lands a half step away from the home key.

Morgan: This is so interesting.

Arthur: It's just a change in that one chord right there. Yeah. It is magic because it's the first spot where you've landed, like, really outside of the key. Like, where are we? What just happened? And it's beautiful. But it's, you don't actually land home, you land someplace else. Yeah. Which is really beautiful.

Morgan: And even on Lovers, the Dreamers, and me, that word me is not on the tonic. It's in the chord, right? But it's not on, it, it would go down at the end instead of up. But is it on the third? I don't

Arthur: actually know. Um, I think that's, I think that is there, I think, I don't, that may be on the tonic, but I don't know that the chord is set there.

Morgan: Also, the version of that that I am most familiar with, I had the, when I was a kid, I, one of my absolute favorite albums was the Kenny Loggins, the House at Pooh Corner. It was the cassette tape. And I, I listened to that over and over. And so he covered that and it was a beautiful, beautiful cover. And so that's the one I'm most familiar with.

And maybe he sings it a little differently.

Arthur: And in the Rainbow Connection, when you get to the lovers, the dreamers and me, that's. Landing. You've already. Right. That happens after. After. The Rainbow Connection. Yes. And you have all of this music. The rain. The words, the Rainbow Connection come in the chorus.

Right. And there's all this stuff that happens. You go through two verses before that, and they never land on the tonic. They never land anyplace really solidly resolved. Yeah. Which when Anne and I were looking at that melody, we're just like, Oh my gosh, look at this. Oh, look at this. Oh, look at this. And that happens every single time with even the most, even what you think of as going to be just a really simple idea.

Episode one, I didn't expect to be as fascinated by the melody. Episode one. Christina Rusnak was the guest composer and the piece of music that she wanted to listen to was the, the theme from Frozen. Oh, sure. Let it go. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I remember when that was on the radio. It was just, it was never ending.

It was constantly on the radio. Yes. And I thought, okay, it's a good pop tune. It's a good song, whatever. Didn't think about it. But then we looked at it carefully and all we looked at was the chorus. Yeah. And it's so well crafted. It is. Another thing that adds emphasis to a particular part of a melody is landing something on the downbeat.

Landing something right on one. Sure.

Morgan: And go in that example, go right there. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Arthur: In that case, no, it's, let it go. There's a, it doesn't land on the downbeat. One, let it go. Okay.

Morgan: Okay.

Arthur: Okay. It's very conversational. And that was one of the things that we were fascinated by is, it's not landing on the downbeat until she sings, here I am.

And she sings the highest note that she gets to, and it hits the downbeat right there, at this declaration, which the whole, that whole song, the point of it is her coming into herself. And deciding this is who I am and this is who I'm going to be and telling everybody about that. Or at least shouting it into the wind.

Yeah. And that's the highest point of the melody right there. And she lands on a downbeat. This is so cool. That's, that's the kind of stuff when I talk about craft, that's what I'm talking about. People. Spend time and, and knowledge and their experience creating a melody that really does something. And it, it carries you on this journey in a certain way because it does these different things.

And in some cases, I, you know, I don't know, like the first melody I wrote, I was telling you this very simple little melody I wrote when I was probably 12 or 13, maybe might have even been younger than that, follows those rules. And it rises up to a peak and then it comes back down to where it started.

I absolutely love Arthur's approach to creativity. I love his sense of play and freedom in composing. Also, did you know that he lived on a houseboat? Sign up for my newsletter to get stories like this, along with exclusive content, blog posts, and behind the scenes insights about topics brought up by each guest.

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Morgan: What I think is so interesting about this is I'm looking back at my own musical journey, and I did not major in composition. I took some classes in it, but we spent a lot of time on theory and chord changes and kind of , The supportive elements , you know, we would analyze scores and it was all about the chord progressions.

, I don't remember ever going into depth on melody it just was, you know, the melody just was, I don't ever remember looking into why, so this is so interesting to me because it's like a whole nother level like theory that I haven't examined

Arthur: Yeah, it's part of music theory the way that melodies work, there's also There's what's called Shankerian analysis Shanker was was a you know, one of the Germans I guess one of the people who who Like analyzed all the music and said these are the things that music does and so forth.

Of course. He was only analyzing German and like European music. Yeah. So he was, he was part of the whole process of. Making that the central thing of, you know, our music history instead of necessarily embracing every kind of music, uh, and music from different places. So there are some, some definite flaws behind the mindsets, but Schenker basically talked about this, this kind of overall arc of a piece of music or an overall direction of a piece of music.

Yeah. That you would break it down and take like a main focused note. That maybe there's other stuff going around that note, but that's the main note that's in that, that whole measure, maybe. And then the next measure is on this note and the next measure is on this note. And that's where you start to see these structures, these shapes of melodies, and you'll see an arc or you'll see a descent.

And that's, that's really a big part of it. So the music theory does cover those things. And then if you do get into things like counterpoint and Yeah, that sort of stuff is where you start having to deal with how melodies are composed and melodies are arranged because that also, it's something that's kind of wired into the way that we think of choral music in our culture.

And again, all of this stuff comes out of a particular tradition. Uh, when somebody says, well, music theory is just universal, and music theory is always, it's not. No, no. Nope, nope. This is, this is very European. Yep. Western 17th, 18th century. Uh, 19th century European music history that led to these things.

But a lot of it works for reasons. A lot of it works because there's stuff behind it that makes it work. Tonality, for example, some kind of tonality, works because of math.

Morgan: Right. I remember you were, at one point, you were, um, you wrote a piece, uh, or you, you had a project going that was all math, right? Am I remembering that correctly?

We can remove this. There was one

Arthur: that was chemistry.

Morgan: There was something about names, people's

Arthur: names. So this goes into one of my techniques for writing a melody. Uh, and actually one of the ways that I never have a blank slate when I'm starting to compose something is. I will use the letters of the alphabet, you know, the notes of the scale go A through G the way that the American music is written, uh, the notes go A through G, and I would just keep going up the alphabet, and every note of the scale then gets a letter, and each note gets three or four letters, so A also gets to be H because that's right after G, but it also gets to be O and V, and So I could take somebody's name and I could write it out in the scale and then you just bring that all into one octave and you get a pattern of notes.

So I instantly have a pattern of notes that I can start working with. Yeah. So at the very beginning of creating music, I usually have just a ton of material because I'll use words and sometimes numbers. Actually, I was working on something that was numbers. It was the 30th anniversary piece for the Tualatin Valley Community Band.

Because in their case, they were 30 years. Music and it was, it was, uh, it was 88 to 2018,

Morgan: so that really works. ?

Arthur: Yeah, so I used, I used 1, 9, 8, 8. So I went up a ninth and then down to the octave uhhuh, which basically if you reduce it down to one octave, it's just a step up and a step back down. Yeah. And then 2008 is one step or 2, 20 18 is two zero ten one eight.

And you could, so it was, that was one of the things that I did with that. Uh, but I also wrote a bunch of words into it and a bunch of names into it. There was somebody who was, was one of their early directors who passed away years and years ago that a lot of the members still remembered. That was a big part of their history.

So I wrote his name into the, the slow section, which basically is, you know, the whole section was about remembering the people who were in the band. Uh, whether they have passed away or whether they've just left and they're not in the band anymore. Uh, so yeah, that, that did deal with numbers. But yeah, that, that's one way of coming up with a motif is just take some letters and they become a pattern.

And then you can take that pattern. And in some cases. But you'll be surprised, like, you'll see the same pattern twice in a word. The same word will have the two patterns in it. Yeah. Oh, wow. That's kind of cool. And in some cases, you just end up with really random stuff, but you have something to start with.

And more often than not, it's kind of surprising how That pattern of notes that you get from a word or a phrase or something ends up kind of feeling like it has a structure. You interpret it, your own brain interprets it, but it looks at the notes and says, Oh, well, this looks like it lands here. This looks like it's in this key or whatever.

And it, you know, it gives you something to work with. It gives you something to have as a seed for an idea. Another, another thing is. Uh, I had mentioned the piece of music being played at the Midwest Clinic in Chicago this year. The piece that's being played is called, And Soon the Bands Can Be Notified.

And the title is that because it was a compositional piece. Lesson. It was, it was, I was in a group that was doing composition prompts with a, with a coach. And one of the prompts was open up a book to a particular page, find the second sentence on the page or whatever, and then read that sentence. Or read the first parts of part of the sentence and that becomes the rhythm that you're going to use to create a piece.

That's pretty cool. I thought, and soon the bands can be notified that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that. And I, so I, but I immediately, as soon as that, that's a nice. Even like, yeah, it's a nice even number of beats. It's a nice kind of rhythmic thing. And I immediately thought, well, let's, let's do like a John Williams march.

Like totally there is the lost arcs, the Raiders of the Lost Arc March or, uh, what's another one that has rhythm like that? Um, the Empire, the Darth Vader's theme, the Empire March has that same kind of a, it's got a. You know, a rhythmic motif to it. And so just like, okay, well, I love John Williams, so let me just do something that's kind of an homage to him using that style of there being a rhythmic motif that runs throughout the whole piece.

And then, you know, make a march out of that and make it something that's fun and exciting. And because it has bands in the name. And because I decided that, that wasn't just the, that wasn't just the idea for the piece, that was going to be the name of the piece. Like, this is, this is a superhero piece for band members.

Right. This is your, this is your superhero piece if you play in the band. I'm writing this for you because you are, you know, you're superheroes. You can play all these different instruments. I can play piano. Piano is easy. I can never play a piano out of tune. Right. If the piano is in tune, every note I play is going to be in tune, but the instruments and band, you know, all the wind instruments are just, to me, they are magic.

You can, the people can play those instruments.

Morgan: Do you play other instruments besides piano?

Arthur: I tried guitar. It hurt my fingers. Mm hmm. I tried violin, and my dog howled a lot. Uh, I would love to play cello. I just got to the point where I feel like that while I would like to, I'd probably like to learn the technique and be able to play them, I don't feel like I would ever play another instrument very well.

So I'm kind of not, not inclined to even try and learn. And if I can focus on writing something for those instruments and learning about the instruments and have other people play it, that's more where I'd rather be.

Morgan: Yeah. Uh, just on the note about the bands, have you seen um, an old show called, uh, Red Nichols and his five pennies.

Arthur: No, that sounds awesome.

Morgan: It's Danny K. And Louis Armstrong and Danny Kaye plays Rad Nichols who was, I mean, if you, I don't know if you know who he is. He, he was a trumpet player. Um, that who his band the five pennies. I mean, he, he was kind of the start of, um, the huge revolution in jazz that happened in the twenties.

Dixieland jazz band. Uh, Jimmy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller. Those were his band members. Like it was his band and they were the five pennies along with others. But, um, the, the movie is just this beautifully done. And, you know, Danny Kaye is he's silly and goofy, but it's also a pretty serious movie.

Um, so it's just this.

Arthur: Very, very good as a musician himself. He's, yes, he's fabulous. Very, very good in performing music. Yeah.

Morgan: And, um, anyway, it tracks his whole journey and, uh, he was up there with Louis Armstrong, this was Louis's younger days to be, um, it was kind of between the two of them, who was the best trumpet player in America.

And then, spoiler alert for the 1940s, but his daughter fell ill with polio and he had to make a decision, keep on the road or, or, you know, stop gigging and raise my family. And that's what he chose. But they have this piece, his legacy is amazing. And they have this, this piece, this, this song they do. Um, it's a version of when the saints go marching in, but it's twisted to who's going to play.

If the saints are marching, they must be marching to a march. Who had like, so who's in the band. And it's this whole thing of, of, of who's who from musical history and what role they would have in the big brass band when the saints go marching in, it is the clip is on YouTube. It's phenomenal, but it's very, it's like, you know, basically all the greats, didn't matter what genre. Um, and it's, it's a very fun, I forget what you said that, that made me think of that, but it's a very fun, uh, Oh, the, the march for the band. Cause you mentioned it was like, it was for the band and it's like, the saints are marching, but who's in the band.

So, um, okay. Going back to, uh, do you have a favorite melody?

Arthur: I don't know that I do have one melody that I could say is my favorite. I've, I've seen people play the game of if you had to take one song with you to a desert island, or if you had five albums that you could take to a desert island, what would they be?

Uh, I think any Any collection that I have would have to have something by John Williams and some of his melodies like the Princess Leia's theme. They're just so completely beautiful. Uh, but having to pick one that's just absolutely my favorite. Uh, I, I really don't know that I could do it. Cause I've been every day.

No, I like that one. No, I like that one. And, uh, if there's one particular melody that I would say stands out because of its sheer beauty. And the just insane craft behind it. Uh, it's gonna be really obscure for people, but it's the, the Ravel Piano Concerto in G. He wrote two piano concertos. He wrote one for two hands, and he wrote one for left hand.

The piano concerto that he composed for two hands, it's, it's light, generally. It's, it's not a terribly hard concerto to play. Uh, but the second movement of it. The melody in the second movement of Ravel's Piano Concerto in G is, it breaks the rules that we've been talking about of having motifs and so forth.

In the entire second movement, the melody itself, the main melody repeats, like it repeats once. It plays and then it repeats. But there's nothing in the melody that is a motif that repeats over and over throughout the whole thing. It meanders, it, it wanders, it plays these different things, but it never, ever, it never plays the same thing twice, but it always sounds like it's the same melody.

And it just grows and grows and grows to this, just this beautiful peak in the music. And right at the most emotional part of the music, it has this chord progression. That's a very. Non traditional chord progression. So it goes from a major chord and then it rises a half step to a minor chord, which is just Devastating when you get to it, and it's so it's so slow And not that it's just dragging like that But it's if you're trying to play it you have to just rein yourself back, right?

Because you want to push ahead, but you can't because it's got this steady meter. And it's funny because it's, it's, I think it's written in 3, but it has this beat that's a 6 8 beat behind it. So there's like a 1 2 3, but at the same time there's a slower 1 2.

So it's got all those things and I wouldn't say that it's just my favorite melody to listen to. But it's a real standout melody in terms of the fact that it's just crazy how well and how well crafted it is without it being something that has all of the, you know, it doesn't have any major repeats. It doesn't have motifs in it and there's two little things that repeat like at the end of the melody, but it doesn't have anything that really is a motif throughout and it's Just heartbreakingly gorgeous,

Morgan: man.

I'm

going to have to go find that and play it. I have a rebel book. I'm going to have to dig that out. I love rebel.

Arthur: It's, it's really beautiful, but yeah, I can't, I mean, for my own melodies, I have certain melodies that I think of in terms of, of, I really like certain things about them. I'm very proud of the melody that I created in the middle section of a piece I wrote called sky in motion.

Um, And it's a very beautiful downward flowing melody, uh, that, again, upon investigation because I was thinking, well, like, I really like this melody. Maybe I should look at it like the Melodology podcast, but I found out that it is a descending scale, the way that it's working. It's, you know, it's jumping octaves and stuff, but it's still descending down a scale.

And doing so in a, in a, a creative way, in a very clever way that I did not do intentionally. I listened, I like composed it, listening to it. I didn't compose it thinking, okay, well, I'm going to go down a scale. And then like, here's how I'm going to fool you into not realizing I'm going down a scale. Man,

Morgan: music is just never ending, right?

Like you do this stuff. There's so many, and like the approach, like you've listed already so many approaches. To getting something out on the page and then for somebody to play it like there's what would you if someone was interested? Like I I have an idea i'd like to write something down. What would you say to that person?

How would you approach

Arthur: someone writing in the first place? Yeah. Then I would say whatever way you have of making it into something that's fixed, fixed media, do so. So if you can play a keyboard and you're playing this melody on a keyboard, play it out and record yourself playing it. Mm-Hmm. like, put it on, put it on audio, record it if you're singing it, if it's something you sing, sing yourself and record yourself singing it.

Get, get that sound down somewhere. And if you can write music. Then write it down as music and if you can't write music Uh, you know, there's really good software called MuseScore, which is free sheet music software. Mm hmm. And so you can use MuseScore to record stuff like that as well. You can even play it in while it's recording and, you know, that sort of stuff.

So you can play into this, it kind of takes it as the time goes by and it'll record it for you. And that kind of thing is really useful, but get it down. Listen to it. Uh, the, the first kind of composing lesson I ever gave somebody was, okay, pick a note, play that. Right, right, right. What comes next? What comes after that note?

What do you want to have after that note? Okay. Now you've got two notes. What's after that note? And just keep going until you, and then you'll start hearing things, Oh, well, maybe I don't like that so much. That's not what comes next. This is what comes next. And Do that, kind of let that creative flow happen.

Yeah. Now, feel free to use the trick, you know, it's not my original idea to use letters as notes. I mean, it goes back to Bach and before that, that people would use letters that lined up with whatever the notes on the keyboard were. And they would use that as a theme. So I remember

Morgan: even Bach's name, that was a big one, B A C, where the H was a B flat instead.

But it was a, yeah, people

Arthur: would use homage. The German notation is there's different letters for different notes in the scale. Same thing that Dmitri Shostakovich used, D S C H, I believe. As a motif for his name and wrote that into music. So whenever he was kind of representing himself, he would sign his name.

Basically. Well, a lot of it was, I think in the case of Shostakovich, it was hidden messaging because he was. In this society that, and with this government, yeah. That wouldn't let him write the stuff that he wanted to write and do things the way he wanted to do it. So he was writing messages into his music.

And some cases those messages are just blatant. Yeah. In some cases those messages were very, very subversive and very subtle. But that's, I, you know, I think that's another thing that he was doing. And I know there are a lot of composers that do the same letters technique. There's some of them that do letters in a different way, although use a different, uh, different language, alphabet.

Because, you know, English, 26 letters, easy, but different languages have different alphabets and you can, you know, write, write a different language the same way.

Morgan: Yeah, and I think something to point out is, like, I've, I've heard this type of approach , be, um, I don't know, not, not dismissed, but, , people can think that it's, unattached or it's, , it's too logical and it doesn't have emotion behind it and I think it's important to note that, it's a way to get started with something that is very moving.

Arthur: Well, there's, sometimes people think in terms of, you know, you think of Schoenberg and you think of a tone row, you think of, okay, you've got 12 notes on the keyboard or 12 notes in the, in the musical scale and you've got to use them, you've got to use them exactly in a particular order and you have to, you know, you can't repeat all these rules.

And that's, you know, that's a particular kind of fixed way of doing something. I'm not talking about just taking those notes. Not examining them, not listening to them, not doing anything, just taking those notes and putting them into the music software and then having it repeat and then layering them in a different place or a different speed or whatever, that comes up with some amazing sounding stuff.

That's another way of creating music. That's, that makes music. It's a different approach and it's going to sound different. Whereas what I do is I take those notes that I come up with, you know, out of a word or whatever. And not only do I think in terms of what are the patterns that show up in those notes, but I think in terms of what note needs to have the emphasis.

Yeah. Is this starting out on the downbeat? Is this starting out before the downbeat? Starting after the downbeat? What's, where does the emphasis land on these notes? Or maybe I want to play this note longer. Or maybe I'll just experiment and I'll say, well, this note needs to be longer, and we'll hear how it sounds with this note longer.

Or maybe it needs to be a slightly different key. So even though it's, you know, it's A through G, maybe I put it in a different key and then everything's a half step, you know, slightly a half step different. And it sounds very, very different when you switch from, you know, if you had just the word ACE, A C E, you know, is it A, is it C natural or is it C sharp?

Is it A flat? Is it E flat? What, you know, what are the different notes that we're looking at in that? particular thing and you can change them up. But my point with that is come try everything. Yeah, try everything. Also, always, always, always turn it upside down and turn it around backwards every single time.

And the great example of that is, uh, if your listeners have not heard of this piece, uh, at a certain age, they will have heard of it, but rock monologues rhapsody on a theme by Paganini. Oh yeah. So Rachmaninoff took, you know, this, this Paganini, crazy good violinist, had this theme that he did that is, was a very popular theme for variations.

And a number of people had written variations on it. Rachmaninoff decided he was going to do a rhapsody on that theme. And he has all these different variations that he did on it. But the one that is the most famous, that people remember more than they remember the theme by Paganini. Is he turned it upside down and he made that into the romantic section of the Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini.

And it is so gorgeous, but it's turned upside down. Yeah. So take your melodies, take your ideas, and turn them upside down, flip them so that the intervals You might like it better. Well, yeah, you might, and it's still, you know, and just, you don't have to, you don't have to keep the first ideas. You don't even have to keep all the notes in there.

There are a lot of melodies where, where I started with an idea. And started with that, the notes that are in that scale. And then I decided, you know, I don't need this note here, or this note stands out, or I just don't want it. And I don't feel it's like a compositional challenge that I've got to use every single note in a particular set of notes that come out this way.

So, yeah, I'll, I'll, I'll change a note. I will. Adjust it if it doesn't feel like it's in the right spot. If I want to have a scale in a particular spot, then a note doesn't fit in the scale. I'll put notes in between. Uh, all sorts of different things you can do. It's very fun. I've got, I have one piece, uh, that.

It's a sentence, it's like a long sentence, and I was doing, I was doing a little exercise where I was taking a word of the day that an artist named Chrysanthi Tan was sharing a word of the day, and I was taking that word and I was turning it into a little melody and I challenged myself that I had to do it in 30 minutes.

Create a little melody, record a little melody, put it up on the internet. And I had to do it in 30 minutes and then I was done. And I didn't do it for a few days. So I kind of felt guilty and I wanted to do something a little bit longer. And I want to say that the word was smergadine or something. What is that even a word?

I think it means very, very green, uh, if I remember correctly. But that was one of the words. And then there was another word that was, you know, something as well. And so I, you know, I had a whole sentence and I took the sentence note by note through this entire sentence and I created a piece of music for it.

That's really charming and beautiful and fun. And it, it's just a fun, you know, it's a fun experiment to see. Can I just take just these notes and make them fit into a melody? That works as a melody. Yeah. It's just something that you could sing and that you could follow along with and that you would, you know, you'd remember.

I just love the

Morgan: sense of possibility, like just talking to you, like it seems so playful and fun and it's such a great approach to music. I love this. I'm loving this. . Um, you've, we've. You've mentioned a few of your projects. I did want to ask you about a particular one that caught my interest.

Can you tell me about The Ambitious Spider? I love that name and I would love to know what that is.

Arthur: This is the, the premiere performances on YouTube. Amber, The Ambitious Spider is the official title. And the idea came about when I was walking down a two lane street, walking dogs in the morning, early in the morning, and as I'm walking along, I walked through a spiderweb that was strung across the whole street.

Wow. And I, I just remember, first of all, I did the little crazy, you know, walk through a spiderweb dance. Right. And then I thought. What an ambitious spider, she's trying to catch a car. Actually, I thought, he's trying to catch a car. Uh, because I, you know, I got my own innate sexism there. Uh, I thought, what a, what a ambitious spider trying to catch a car.

And I decided that he was Arnie the Ambitious Arachnid. Cute. Okay. You know, because he was trying to catch a car. And I had this idea in my head, like it'd be just a story about a spider trying to catch a car. And that was 30 years ago. Wow. So last year I decided I have another narrated story that I want to tell that's a bigger story with lots of plot and lots of scenes in it and things like that.

And as I was working on it, it started to become kind of overwhelming. But I kept thinking, well, you know, I've got these other little story ideas too. And I've got this idea of Arnie the Ambitious Arachnid. So maybe Arnie the Ambitious Arachnid needs to be a piece of music. Yeah, maybe I can do a narrated piece on that instead of this bigger, grander thing, which, you know, I feel almost is going to be like a movie because it's got so much that I have, you have to go through to get to the, you know, through the whole plot.

So I started thinking, well, what would the story be? I mean, the spider has to catch a car. So I started researching spiders and that was when I discovered that I was being sexist about spiders. It's the girl spiders. that make the really good webs. The female spiders make the good webs, not the boy spiders.

The female ones are the ones that make the beautiful spiral webs. So it immediately became, well, it can't be Arnie for arachnid. How about we make it Amber to go with ambitious. There we go. So it's Amber the Ambitious, and I was calling it Amber the Ambitious Arachnid for a long time and finally just kind of decided arachnids may be too big a word to throw out as a title.

People might not know what it is. So it's, it's Amber the Ambitious Spider, uh, or just Amber the Spider for short. But the idea is Amber. She lives by a road, and it's, I, I said it in 1910 for reasons I'll get to. She lives by the road and for the first time ever in her life, a car drives by, and what's a spider going to think the first time it sees a car?

It's a huge bug. This is so cute. So she decides that she's going to catch it. And I've got two other friends of hers that are there who are having this conversation with her, and she says, I'm going to catch that bug. And you know, they say, well, it's too big. And the others are like, it's too crunchy. You know, I don't want to, I don't want to eat it.

I just want to catch it. Right. Right. Because she's ambitious. She's an ambitious spider. And so she starts stringing her web across this intersection where she lives, where these two country lanes come together. And every day she builds a bigger and bigger web and every day this great big bug just rolls right through it.

But she doesn't give up. She just keeps making a, you know, making a bigger and bigger web. Until one time she makes a web that's the biggest web she's ever made and she's just exhausted. So she falls asleep by the side of the road and that day something different happens. That day, there's a person walking down the street.

And the person was, you know, wandering down the street. And this is, here's a little musical secret. I was originally thinking that that was going to be the Peter and the Wolf theme, and it was going to be Peter walking down the street. Peter and the Wolf is not out of, it's, it's not in public domain yet.

No,

Morgan: seriously. When I, whenever I'm. Just like I'm going to go for a walk. I sing that theme to myself. It's the best walking thing theme.

Arthur: So I was going to use that, but it's not in public domain yet. If it was completely in public domain, I'd use it because it'd be kind of silly little reference to put in there.

I turned it upside down. So it's a reference to Peter and the wolf that uses similar, similar note structure to Peter and the wolf, but it's turned upside down. And so there's this little walking theme of this person walking down the street and they walk closer and closer to the web until finally they walk.

Right through the web and they start doing this dance that has got a spider on me dance spider web all over them which is another, I think, very clever thing. There's a kind of music called a Tarantella. Yes, this is perfect! Which is in 6'8 it's like a little jig. It's just, you know, so the, the music where the person is dancing around crazily because they just walked through a spider web is a Tarantella.

That is so perfect. And right before they step through, you know, when they walk through the web, they think they're, they hear a car coming. So, they dance themselves over to the side of the road and they're trying to get this spiderweb off of them off on the side of the road. But that day it's not just one car, that day it's two cars coming towards the intersection and both the drivers see this person crazily waving their arms around and dancing around the side of the road.

And because both of them are looking at the person that's dancing and laughing and like we're dancing and waving their arms, they don't see each other and they run into each other. That's it. Right in the intersection, right where Amber's web had been. So she caught them! The noise wakes up Amber and she looks and not only did she catch one, she caught two!

And her friends are amazed and just stunned because she actually did it! You know, how this was just amazing. You actually caught these great big bugs. What could you possibly do that would be more amazing than catching one of these great big rolling bugs. And then an airplane flies over and I did a little running gag thing where, you know, she's, she's.

Ambitious, but she's a little, you know, she's uneasy because she wants to have something new and something, something interesting and something big happen. Right. And then something new, interesting and big rolls by. Right. Right. And so at the very end of the story, it's something new, something interesting and something big flies

Morgan: by.

Oh, that is

Arthur: amazing. Yeah. And I originally wanted, I was thinking about using fixed media for the sound of the airplane and the sound of the cars. Uh, and I may even like, that might be something that gets added in, in future versions, but I was even thinking like the orchestra, I could just like watch during the air, watch the airplane go over, uh, but instead I, I did slides.

And so there's, there's illustrations that go along with the performance. How

Morgan: fun. That is so fun. That is so fun. Um, gosh, Arthur, I could talk to you for so long. We didn't even touch on some other things, um, including, um, Composer in Residence. You've been Composer in Residence for a few organizations. Um,

Arthur: And let me just go ahead and shout out to that, the Tualatin Valley Community Band, which I did that 30 year anniversary piece for.

I was kind of like the date that never went away for them. I kept coming to rehearsals after I was done with the music and I, you know, I was bringing them new stuff and bringing them pieces I was working on. And Phil Pasteris, who's the, the president said, would you be interested in being our composer in residence?

We don't have a budget for it, but we'd like to kind of make it official. And so he and I worked out. what a win win situation is for a composer with an ensemble. Yeah. Where the composer gets to have an ensemble in their pocket, and they can take music to them, and they can read the music, which is invaluable.

It's huge. That's huge. It's so wonderful to be able to just take it, and, or even just, even just one instrumentalist to be able to say, here, can you play this on a trumpet and let me know if it's playable? But to have 60 people in the room, all playing the parts and all being able to tell you if, you know, I'm sorry, we can't play this.

So the piece, and soon the bands can be notified. I took it in for them to read it before sending it up to Midwest Clinic, and some of them came back and said, you know, this, this note down here is really too low for us to play at the speed. Some of them said, you know, this, this is, you know, this particular thing is hard to play at this rhythm for our instrument.

Uh, some of them said this, you know, there's a little kind of a trill right here. This is a bad spot for a trill, and that's. You don't know that. Like again, instruments that aren't piano are magic to me. How people can play these instruments, make them sound good. Yeah. And then to have 60 people in a room doing that and having them all playing the music together and making something tremendously more than any one person would be able to play by themselves.

It's just fantastic. So that whole idea of how can the band benefit from having a composer while you get. You get to read new music. Yeah. So you get sight reading, but also you get to look at the process of composing. You get to give feedback to a piece of music. The music gets to be written for that ensemble and have their name on it.

And they get to do performances of premieres, you know, world premiere of a piece of music. And because of this, the Tualatin Valley, uh, community band has had. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 8 or 9 premieres of music that I have written or somebody else has written. That's phenomenal. I've gotten other people to write music for them as well.

Yeah. So, composerinresidence. org, that is basically where this agreement, the baseline agreement is that we created for that idea. And anybody can use that, the agreement's there for free. I'd like to do more with that in time and kind of make it more of a resource for people with the idea that composers and ensembles of any kind, or composers and performers, you know, be a composer in residence for a particular artist.

If you like an artist and the artist wants to have new music and they like your music, you know, pair up like that. But with an ensemble, it's really a value. I've had a number of people say, well, I'll never write anything for a symphony orchestra because I know it'll never get played. Right. But there are community orchestras, you know, it's not going to sound the same as having it played by the London Symphony, but you'll get your music played and you'll get it read and you'll get it performed.

And therefore you'll have better orchestral music that maybe people will play it right after the premiere. That's always a challenge too is getting something played more than once.

Morgan: Yeah. Oh, and then where can people find Melodology?

Arthur: So MelodologyPodcast. com and it is Melodology Podcast. On the social medias, it's just Melody Podcast.

So on Instagram, it's just Melody Podcast. On Facebook, it's just Melody Podcast. And again, it is. Uh, it's everywhere you can find it in podcast land and it's also on YouTube. Right now on YouTube, it's still just the podcast, except for a couple of episodes that are video. One of which was the songwriters from the Star Trek Strange New Worlds musical episode.

I got to interview them, which was a whole lot of fun, they are amazing songwriters. Uh, yeah. Tom Polce and Kay Hanley. Just fantastic people and fantastic songwriters and for them to take on the challenge of That particular thing was amazing, and it was great to get to talk to them about it.

Morgan: That's fabulous.

Uh, well, I have one last question for you, which I ask everybody. So, uh, you know what Zeitgeist means? You and I

Arthur: have talked. It's kind of like, I do remember you probably educated me on what this meant when you were doing the Chamber of Commerce thing. Yeah. And it's basically the spirit of now. It's sort of the feeling of now.

Morgan: The feeling of now. Yes, exactly. So I took that, that feeling of now and you're feeling connected and I, you know, applying it to music, a zeitgeist moment in music would be when, and it doesn't matter what, it could be Sesame Street, it could be anything. But we all have that moment where we just get immersed.

Um, and the music really comes alive. What was either a recent or a really memorable Zeitgeist moment for you? A

Arthur: really memorable one that I can just point to immediately was seeing Star Wars in the theater, not, not realizing being a musical person at the time, 10 year old kid being. a musical person and then going into the theater and having that huge orchestral score happen was and it talk about zeitgeists the star wars the original movie when it happened was a zeitgeist it was just created a huge fan base and a huge emotional connection for a lot of people and that was that's something that i will always remember that particular thing uh Um, another very zeitgeist moment for me, uh, is when my grandmother passed away when I was eight.

She would play a music, she, she played piano for, for weddings and funerals and things like that. And so she had a piece of music called Brian's Song and she would play that music, but it also, it also has words, I guess, and, um, but there was a singer who sang at her funeral. Um, and I just remember that moment of that particular song in that emotional state that I was iN.

Big emotional situations like that where there's weddings, falling in love with somebody, losing somebody. Those are moments where the emotion is so deep that kind of any music that's wrapped around it is something that stays with you. Yes. And lives with you. And that particular piece of music, uh, was, was very meaningful to me, uh, and I've had the particular singer who sang at the funeral, uh, also probably caused zeitgeist several times because she would, she would sing songs at the church, uh, and sitting in a congregation when there's a beautiful piece of music happening like that.

Uh, just recent ones, uh, I'm trying to think if there's anything that's been, well, yeah, That Star Trek episode, you know, it was, it was for me as a Star Trek fan and as a music fan, I was excited when the episode was going to happen. It was my birthday, the day that it came out and I invited some friends over to watch it.

And there are a couple of moments in that musical where the music really does. Say something they were really good about writing in little twists in the music, writing in little catches that change the emotion of the moment in the music. And I remember as I was watching that thinking, Oh wow, or, Oh my gosh, that's great.

Or one particular moment in that episode, if you, if you haven't seen it, it's completely uproariously hysterical right at the climax of the whole story. And everybody in the room laughing and just like, Oh my gosh, what the heck was that? That was crazy. That was a very, for me, that was a zeitgeist thing and it, you know, it wasn't necessarily, probably all the people watching at the same time were having a zeitgeist, but in the room it was a zeitgeist.

It was like, Oh my gosh, this is so much fun. You know, when you have an experience with any size audience and people react to the music that way, music creates. Zeitgeist. Yes.

Morgan: Totally. Aww. Arthur, thank you so much for being on my podcast.

Arthur: Absolutely. Thank you for having me. This is, it's a great way to reconnect.

Morgan: I agree. This was very fun

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