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Today's episode is brought to you by Besso Now, which is bringing the excitement of a night at Boston's Symphony Hall to you wherever you are. A subscription to BSO now gives you access to brand new performances by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, plus behind the scenes storytelling with conductors, composers, musicians and more. If you want to give it a try before accessing the complete BSO Now series, you can sign up for a free twenty four hour trial at BSO Dogs.

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Now the music plays on BSO, now BSO season sponsored by Bank of America.

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Welcome to Switched-On Pop, I'm musicologist Nate Sloan and I'm songwriter Charlie Harding Charlie. This week we have to talk about the Netflix series Bridgton.

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Do we do? This show is taking the world by storm for a number of reasons. I was told I wasn't supposed to watch it. I think my wife just wanted to watch it by herself.

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I think there's a few things that have made people obsessed with the show. One is for the aforementioned, it's sexy take on the aristocratic culture of Regency England to its progressive approach to casting.

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Unlike a lot of historical dramas who claim authenticity is the reason that they have an all white cast.

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Yeah, Bridgton has a really diverse set of actors playing the roles of these 19th century British aristocrats, and it's really refreshing to see the third, and this is the one that really matters to us is the score of this show.

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And by score, you mean music, not the risque nature of the show. People scoring.

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Oh, I get it. That's funny. Oh, thanks. Yes, the music in Bridgton has gone viral and it's helped make classical music fun again.

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OK, this is neat. I assume you have been going on a real deep dive into the classical score of Bridgton then?

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Indeed I have, Charlie. I've had to watch certain scenes over and over and over again just to make sure I've really got the musical quality of them.

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Right. And I did watch at least the beginning of the show, and I was definitely compelled. And the music you're hearing me in as well.

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Oh, you're going to be bingeing the rest of it. As soon as this conversation is over, some of the music you get is kind of what you would expect.

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It's like classical greats, Mozart, Shostakovich, the big wigs.

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Some of the music is original compositions by the composer Chris Bowers. And I actually speak to him in the second half of our program, get a deep conversation with him.

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And then Richardson also features classical style arrangements of pop hits by Sean Méndez.

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Maroon five. And Billy Eilish. That's good. I can see that smile on your face that you're feeling this I love that this is really small and intimate.

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I think it's a string quartet. I'm just that's what I'm hearing. And. Oh, yeah, but it's done in a great chamber hall. So it has the expansive quality. It feels like a really fun way of adapting pop songs, which can maybe be over the top. This is a great way of condensing them and making them feel approachable from an 18th century point of view or in the 18th century where early 19th century, early, early 19th century.

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19TH century, OK. Yeah. And you're not alone. The the vitamin string quartet who made these string quartet arrangements that we're listening to have seen their streaming numbers jump by 350 percent since Bridgton came out.

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So clearly, this classical pop music is resonating with people. It's connecting. Yeah. And I, for one, love it because it reminds us that classical music, which I think we think of, is maybe kind of stuffy and solemn now. Right. Was the pop music of its day. Yeah, right. It was sexy. It was scandalous. It was entertaining. Like take an early scene in Bridgton. It's where the show's two main characters first meet.

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Of course, that's Daphne Richardson and Simon, the Duke of Hastings.

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I don't need to tell you that you're there in the grand ballroom.

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Everyone is dressed to the nines. In the height of Regency fashion is bright, glittering chandeliers shining overhead and the music.

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Well, let's have a listen. Do you recognize that one check? Yeah, for sure, this is thank you, Max. We're on a green day and it's a good choice for a cover, especially with an artist like Ana Grandy, who has updated all the works and made them new with my favorite things. So this is kind of like taking something very of the moment and then bringing it nicely into the past.

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It's such a fun moment in the show, I think, because you might not register at first that you're listening to a cover of this Ariana Grande, a hit.

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You're just so deeply in the world, this historical world.

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And then all of a sudden your brain goes, wait a minute, I know that song. And I think of all the arrangements, this one might work the best. So I thought we could listen to the original Ariana Grande Day song and then think about how it's being adapted for string quartet in a way that really takes advantage of the instrumental capabilities of this specific ensemble. So why don't we play the very beginning of the original Ariana Grande Day recording? What are you hearing there, sort of a blow fi electric piano, it's got this digital hissy crusher thing that's happening to it.

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So many of the sounds of contemporary pop music are electronic. That's right. Or they're manipulated by electronics in some way. Absolutely.

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So how do you take this purely acoustic form, like the string quartet and capture that electronic kiss?

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You use the noisy bow sounds of a violin to create additional texture over just the individual pitches?

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That's what I would do. And that's exactly what the vitamin string quartet does.

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They bust out something called a harmonic, very eerie, little delicate at the very beginning, that almost ghostly high tone we're hearing and almost sounds a little electronic even because it has this like bitchiness in it.

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Yeah, exactly. That's produced by putting your hand down on the string of the violin like you're going to play any normal note, but then you lightly touch the string with your other finger, which kind of interrupts the tone.

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It sends it up into this like super high register. Technically, you're you're actually like changing the sine wave of the note and muting the fundamental tone. So you just hear the the higher, softer overtones. What it does is create this effect that is kind of otherworldly and seems to bridge the very old world of the string quartet in the very new world of Ariana Grande.

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It it also reminds me a little bit of Arianna's voice because she's known for being able to pull off a whistle tone, the highest, highest, highest register. And it feels like it's almost a nod to her vocal abilities as well.

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I love that. Let's move into the first verse of the original. Thank you.

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Next, that it ends. I was sure how much it sounds about Ricky. Now, listen, and even though most of them have been so painful, I'm listening to that.

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And I'm like, wait, how do you recreate a beat drop with the string quartet?

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Yeah, you have this muted drumming in the background and then this very glided away that's kind of going boom, you kind of all over the place. I don't know how you do that with a quartet.

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Let's see what the Vesku does. This is really cool, you have the highest string playing, the melody makes sense, and then the right side there is this lower string which is doing the rhythm of the drums in this kind of like action string like sequence, and then where that big glide thing would come in. Instead, we have another even lower string on my left side, which is playing this rhythm, which is in contrast to the drum rhythm.

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And it creates this sort of dance like quality, which is appropriate because we're in a ballroom in Bridgeton at a dance. Totally.

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Yeah. We don't have an eight eight, but we have a cello. Yeah. Oh.

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And this is like the joy of the string quartet is you have these four voices like you were saying that having a dance with each other, like having a conversation.

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Let's let's get to know these instruments for a second. Let's go from from high to low. We have two violins.

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They're the highest instruments. Then we have the viola that's a little bit lower than the violin. The cello, this is the one you play, it stands up, you put your legs around it. Talk about erotic.

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I mean, what's so clever about the string quartet arrangement of thank you next is the way it cycles through all these different instrumental voices like in that first verse, we're listening to the violin, the highest instrument playing Ariana Grande Days vocal melody.

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But then when we move into the pre chorus of the song, that melody gets passed to the next lowest instrument, the viola, it's kind of a subtle shift, but you can you can hear that a new instrument has taken up that vocal melody.

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And. The appropriate little throat ear kind of sound organ aggrandise got a huge vocal register, so why not bring her melody down into that Fiola range?

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Cool.

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And while the viola is playing, we get more kind of electronic effects. We get these plucked accompaniments from the other instruments.

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The pizzicato. Pizzicato. Yeah, exactly. It almost it sounds like a drum machine, a little bit like a like a cheap drum machine.

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Yeah, I like that. Then we get to the chorus of thank you next. And this is a moment where every instrument is is playing together in this contrapuntal dialogue.

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So sparse, but there's yet so much action happening at the same time. Surprisingly, it really lends itself to the kind of 19th century dances that you would be doing in regency England, Averil. Yeah, all of the sudden, whereas the original thank you next is really good for like getting down on the dance floor, like just popping, locking drop in at Jukin freakin doing the bank, doing the bump, you know, whatever, whatever, whatever moves you got, whatever suits you fancy this string quartet, all of the sudden you can picture everyone doing labu longer.

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Like the most trendy danu of Regency England. This couples dance where you carefully go around in a circle and and pass off partners.

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All we needed to do was just change the instrumentation a little bit. That's all we've done. We haven't really altered the melody of the song fundamentally. And all of a sudden we're in 19th century England doing this couple's dance.

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It's kind of like as the voices in the quartet get passed from instrument to instrument, the dancer dancers also passed from person to person.

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Exactly. And there's one more instrument that hasn't really taken to the fore yet, and that's the cello. Cello and the cello gets the second verse of this song. You know, I feel like I can hear the lights dim low, focusing on one dancer, they're spinning around, the music is is sort of both hyper focused, but really dizzying at the same time, because all of those plucky strings are moving and dancing all around your head.

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It's a smart way to navigate. I think the biggest challenge when you're arranging a pop song for a classical ensemble. Repetition. Exactly. Yeah. Something that is a value in popular music. You groove you you want to hear the same thing over and over again. Yeah.

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And classical music doesn't doesn't you're going to get a little bored if it's if it's just a violin playing that melody from beginning to end. I mean to see what you're saying here because the melody is pretty reduced in the verse. It's pretty simple and it's a phrase which gets repeated again and again. And oftentimes what gives it life is that changing lyrics here we just get very similar notes. Someone like, I don't know, a Beethoven is going to take those little motifs and constantly stretch and change them and mutate them so that each individual moment that you hear those, you're going to do something unique.

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And you don't do that in pop music. Right. The melodic motifs generally stay pretty close and similar to the platonic ideal of that melody.

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Like you said, this arrangement works really well in this scene.

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I think that's because all the things we've been discussing, but also something larger, you know, in this repressed British society, music is the place where you can sublimate your inner emotions and some of your more illicit feelings, some of your more your sexual feelings, frankly.

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And there's a really striking scene in Bridgton where our protagonist, Daphne, explores her sexuality through the piano, which at the time was this instrument that was supposed to be very delicate. It was one of the few instruments that women were allowed to play, actually, because it wasn't very physical and it was thought to be very proper.

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But she turns it into this vehicle of sexual self exploration, touching the keys of the piano as she learns to touch herself and composing this melody, which sort of embodies her own loss of innocence.

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Wow. It's a piece by the show's composer, Chris Bowers, aptly titled When You Are Alone. I like how the music has shifted from a sort of classical language to a much more romantic era language like you could see, like Clara Schumann playing this piano. It is big, it is rich, it is emotive. It doesn't have that restrained, limited quality that the earlier a string quartet might have.

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Yeah, it's a reminder of how erotic classical music could be. How scandalous it could be. One of the key plot points in Bridgton is that there's this gossip monger named Lady Whistle Down.

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She publishes these gossip columns and she creates a stir because she names names in her pieces, which is just like Ariana Grande dated. Right. And thank you next. Right.

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Ariana and her co writers weren't sure if they should be this brazen, including the names of her famous exes in this song, Big Sean P. Davidson. Right. Mac Miller. Right. But she did. And she created a stir just like lady whistle down, if you will.

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Oh, the parallels. And just like Ariana Grande had relationship drama and put it into her music, so did these 19th century romantic composers. And you just mentioned Clara Schumann. She is one of the most incredible composers from this period.

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And she's really good at capturing this feeling of love that is denied unrequited love, love that isn't fulfilled. She is a song called The Moon Rises Silently.

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And check out the final stanza, Charlie. It goes down in the valley. The windows sparkle of my beloved house. But I, in the darkness, gaze silently out into the world that is dark.

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Feel like that could be a flawed lyric on melodrama or something.

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Totally, totally lurid lyric. Yikes, every time you think it's going to finally resolve, instead it takes this left turn like this relationship's not going to happen.

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Well, Chloro had good reason to be in her feelings because her husband, Robert Schumann, the famous composer and pianist, he ended up in a mental institution.

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He had a nervous breakdown brought on probably by the symptoms of syphilis. And all of a sudden, Klara is a single mother of multiple children and she's the sole breadwinner. She's supporting her family through concerts and publications. Amazing. And then a young composer comes into her life. It's Johannes Brahms.

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I didn't know this. This is one. Are you sure this is not a Shonda Rhimes original? No. This is one of the great love triangles of the annals of classical music, and no one really knows exactly how it went down.

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Brahms was an ardent admirer of both Clara and Robert. And when Robert was put in an institution, Brahms helped Clara. He he supported them. He was there. He was he was there emotionally.

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And even after Robert died shortly thereafter, he and Clara continue this relationship that verges right between friendship and love. And no one really knows the exact nature of it.

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Man, you're saying there's no, like, perfect archive of a journal or a letter or anything that reveals the truth? There's lots of letters.

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There's a great article by Maria Popova in her Brain Picking's blog where she she excerpt some of them and they are very ardent.

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Yeah. But I'm guessing this is a period of in history in which divorce and remarriage didn't really was not a thing.

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And in Western Europe, it was definitely uncommon. And we might not have access to the inner lives of of these people. But we do have the music they left. Yes.

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And, you know, once again, the piano is a really important site of exploring love and lust, particularly this genre called forehand piano man.

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Two players on one piano, two players on one piano.

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Exactly. And you can already imagine the erotic possibilities of this arrangement. And the author, Adrian Dobb, has a whole book about the erotic politics of four handed piano in the 19th century. It's called Four Handed Monsters, and it's really fun. He writes about this arrangement that Brahms does of his third symphony for four handed piano. Here's the original symphony.

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So he takes his symphony and writes a version of it for four handed piano. Hmm. And what's really interesting is the way that this piece starts, because there's two pianists sitting next to each other and the pianist on the left, it's their left hand and then the pianist on the right, it's their left hand and then the pianist on the left, it's their right hand. And then the pianist on the right is their right hand. So their hands are kind of interlaced as you begin this piece.

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So if I was sitting next to you, if I was on the right, I would be tucking my left hand kind of beneath and betwixt your right hand in order to play this thing. I don't even know if this is necessary, but it sounds enticing.

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Sounds kind of like the original version of two singers up on one microphone, really close and like that's that's dangerously close, it's dangerously close and it doesn't end there as this piece continues.

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Sometimes he has you crossing hands with your partner. Sometimes you're even playing the same note as your partner, the same key. And sometimes he brings the hand so close together that it seems like they're almost going to touch and then they scurry back away from each other.

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It's like the whole arrangement is this lovers dance this back and forth and you would never really know unless you were playing it.

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And then all of a sudden it has this whole other level of meaning.

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I could just imagine that it feels almost voyeuristic to see this performed in a concert hall. It's much more than just playing the piano.

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Oh, totally. Yeah. You'd be fanning yourself and clutching your pearls watching this.

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And I think it's another great example of how Bridgton makes us realize that classical music isn't just this somber and stuffy historical footnote. It's got all of the drama, all of the the scandal, all of the sexual tension of modern pop music in order to hear it. Sometimes you just have to listen a little deeper and hopefully that's what Bridgton is going to cause people to do.

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Now, this is all well and good, but if you're the composer for Bridgton, you have a tough task ahead of you. Right?

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You have to thread the needle between these classical string arrangements and the actual classical greats between Mozart and Maroon five. Right.

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How do you do that? I don't know. So in the second half, I talk to the show's composer, Chris Bowers, to find out.

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We all have those old records we love to listen to over and over records that bring us comfort or rekindle old memories, but there's nothing like live musical performances to inspire us if you miss the magic of performance. Well, join the club and then check out BCO. Now, Besso now brings the magic of the Boston Symphony Orchestra to you. Now, through the end of April, Boston Symphony Orchestra will release our long, newly recorded concerts for you to enjoy wherever you are.

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And it's more than the music. BSO now also offers behind the scenes storytelling with conductors, composers and musicians. I have to say I find this particularly exciting because my first experience ever getting to go see a symphony orchestra was with the BSO and their gorgeous concert hall and you know for sure, miss it, especially not being able to get to the East Coast right now. And this is such a really fun way to be able to be inside the music and be inside that space.

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Yeah, Boston Symphony Hall is known for having some of the best acoustics in the world, maybe only comparable to the Gobo in Amsterdam and the music vaginalis all in Vienna.

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It's it's up there and I watch the symphony perform. William Grant still Afro-American Symphony through BSO now. And it was just like being back there, being in those old leather seats with Beethoven's name across the top of the proscenium. It was like it was so much fun, so immersive.

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We're back and for the second half of our episode, I'm so excited to be able to speak with the composer of the score for Bridgton, Chris Bowers. Welcome to Switched-On Pop.

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Hey, Nate, thanks so much for having me.

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So maybe we can just go to the very beginning, like you get this Bridgton gig. How do the creators of the show describe this series to you?

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I think this is something like it's not your mother's Regency television show, essentially. And so they they wanted to find a way to nod to that era or, you know, make something that felt somewhat appropriate to that era.

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But it had like a bit more of an edge or a bit more modernity to it.

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Speaking of modernity, something we've been talking about is the use of classical covers of pop songs in the Bridgton score.

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Yeah. When you started composing, were those already part of the conversation? These are underground and Billy Eilish covers now.

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When I first started, actually, it was it wasn't until we got to the first spotting session that I heard one of those and one of the cues, I think it was like an episode one the first time we did the spotting session for that, I heard the Ariana Grande Day cover.

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And it was really a big shift for me as far as the way I thought about approaching the score as well. I mean, I had written a few sketches early on and I had to write Daphne Diamond's Simon's theme for her to play piano, too, as a pre-record. And so I started to get a little bit into the sound and had a few of the themes and things were kind of starting to click. But once I heard that approach to these modern pop songs, I was like, Oh, that's a really interesting thing to kind of think more about.

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Think about rhythms and feels and melodies as more modern elements and then, you know, orchestrated in the more traditional way.

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Now, it's just something else you mentioned that struck me is I didn't think about this, but the main character, Daphne Brigidine, is playing piano like many young women of the English aristocracy would.

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But of course, she's not just playing some classical piece and she's not playing something that the actress is improvising. She's playing something you wrote. So how do you. Yeah. How do you think about creating a melody that's going to be played by a character in the actual scene? Yeah, well, you know, with that one, it was one trying to think of something that could feel complex enough that it would feel nice musically, because some of the references that Chris had with these Ravel piano pieces and Ravel's piano pieces are like deceptively difficult.

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Where you hear this, it sounds like really soft and beautiful. And then you look at it and the left hand is doing this crazy arpeggio the entire time. And keeping that really soft and beautiful is incredibly difficult. But I kind of did something similar here, but wanted the melody to be really simple and clear and have something that she might be able to play. And and they really do an incredible job. I'm not sure how they did it. I wasn't a part of the actual shooting of it.

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But but she's really playing the right notes when you look at the images, which is awesome.

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Yeah. Yeah. So that's yeah. That's a lot. That's a lot to think about. For that you have to connect a lot of dots. Yeah. Yeah. I'm thinking of Ravell like like a piece like Tombo. Yeah, exactly. Which is just sounds like this shimmering, you know, just lovely texture, but when you look at it, you're like, oh, this is really, really hard to be exact.

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And then this theme that Daphne introduces that gets carried throughout the entirety of the show. Yeah. How do you think about transforming a theme like that over the course of a season of television?

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Yeah, I think it's a real joy to be able to do that, especially so overtly.

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I feel like there are a lot of modern shows that don't really want score that's saying too much.

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And usually a theme is like saying too much, especially a melodic theme that's like really, really stating itself. It's fun to be able to have something that's just a really strong melody so that then that melody can be reharmonized in whatever way. And I feel like for me, especially with my jazz background, that's something that, you know, we used to do all the time for fun is like harmonizing some sort of standard melody and finding the most interesting way for me.

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I was always like my favorite teacher, always talked about how important the melody was because the melody is tied to a lyric. So it's not like you can just change the melody however you want to fit a cool chord. It's making sure that the chords you're playing are serving the melody as best as possible. And so I always had fun trying to find different ways to color a song based on the renormalization. And so it's kind of the same thing with this, where the sequence where Daphne and Simon are not speaking for a while and she's finally realized the truth of what he's doing and their theme happens.

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But it's much more unsure and trepidations and it's not really sad or happy, but it's definitely like bittersweet. And so just trying to find ways to do that with harmony while keeping the melody really clear is a lot of fun for me.

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I mean, like me, I imagine this is going to inspire a lot of people to go back and re watch Bridgton and then try and say, oh, there's the there's Dafnis. The stuff is right.

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Yeah, yeah.

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Something so cool about the music in the show is like we were talking about the way it straddles the ultramodern and the historic time period of the show.

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What was that challenge like as a composer to kind of thread the needle between the very new and the very old and try and capture the sound of both of those worlds?

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It's all about finding a groove and then all of a sudden things start to click a little bit easier. And I'm not really sure what all goes into it. I mean, when I think about it in relation to, like playing piano, for example, when you learn how to improvise over a different genre of music, there's or even a different era of music there, all these things that you maybe do or don't do within that era or genre. And if you break those rules, it's very obvious to anyone that knows that that like you're playing a bit differently.

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But once you kind of get into that box, you know, for not not in a limiting way, but I mean, sometimes actually those limits are really helpful because once you have those parameters and it's like, oh, now I can just play within this space. And I feel like it's the same thing with this show is that, you know, at first we tried something really, really modern where I was taking the classical elements and almost making them sound like they've been chopped and screwed and like they were pop productions essentially, and that was too modern.

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And then I tried something that was really traditional, that was much more inspired by Beethoven and that kind of stuff, and that felt a bit too traditional and dry.

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And I think once we found some of those themes and I started playing with like like French composers like Ravel, I like that kind of more impressionistic sound and also a more modern rhythmic approach. And then sometimes even a more like pop, like harmonic and rhythmic approach, thinking of some of the dance sequences and things like that.

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Once we kind of found those sounds, then it became really easy to kind of just like stay within that groove.

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It's such a specific challenge, and I wonder if that was also something that came up when you were orchestrating the song Strange by Celeste for inclusion in the score, how did you think about taking this beautiful pop song and turning it into an instrumental melody in this strange.

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I am still miss. Is in industry. Yeah, well, I mean, one thing is definitely looking at the violin string quartet stuff as like a reference for doing that within the context of our show. And then, you know, the biggest thing was really Hilary Smith, the cellist that's playing it. You know, we transcribe the melody pretty much verbatim the way that Celeste sings it. And some of those things don't necessarily translate when you're playing on an instrument because it's not the same as as an actual voice.

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And so it really is down to the player to figure out how to play that and make it still sing in the right way and make sure the phrasing is like, you know, going back to what I said earlier about the melody is tied to lyrics. And so if you learn the melody based on what it looks like on the page, it might not flow the same way that somebody would actually seeing those words. And so it really takes like playing that probably with the original track itself and all of that.

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And so really we wanted to try to make the arrangement is as simple as possible and and still is like lush and full as far as the string arrangement behind it, and then try to make sure that Hillary could shine as much as possible. And that was also really fun for me because we we actually went to high school together. So we've known each other for like over ten years. And and now she's been playing on a lot of these scores and stuff.

[00:35:23]

So it was really cool to feature her on this. That is something that classical and pop have in common, you know, it's as much about what the performer brings to their interpretation, even if they're not the songwriter.

[00:35:54]

So which is often the case with a lot of pop music. Totally. Totally.

[00:35:57]

So the voices of instrumentalists like Hillary and her cello performance and strange were obviously really key to the identity of this score.

[00:36:09]

What was it like to create these recordings during a global pandemic?

[00:36:13]

Yeah, it was pretty interesting. I think that that's like the best word I can say. I mean, you know, part of me was to say tough, but it didn't feel that tough for me. I think that, you know, there were parts of it that were like difficult as far as writing that much music in that short amount of time and all of that, but thinking about these musicians that are also recording it at home. So we had to record every every musician separately in their home.

[00:36:40]

And then we kind of piece it all together at the at the back end of it. But also, most of these musicians had to layer themselves a few times so that it could sound like a full orchestra.

[00:36:50]

You know, usually we have a three hour session where everybody comes in and they just set up their instruments and play and then they can leave. And with this, they have to be their own engineer. They have to send the files. They have to make sure that all of the tech and administrative side of the recording process is taken care of as well, which is very new for a lot of them. Also doing that during a pandemic with, you know, whatever else might be happening in their lives or in their families and all of that.

[00:37:17]

I was really just thankful primarily that, you know, we had a team to be able to facilitate all of that and all of that stuff. So we kind of work out the kinks before we get into it. And then we would send them all of the music. And, you know, my job is making sure that all of that stuff is as clear as possible for them so that they can play it all separately and we can easily put it back together and then we give them a couple of days to do it so that based on whatever they have going on, they can kind of do it at their leisure.

[00:37:45]

I'm just kind of stunned by the coordination that goes into goes into that.

[00:37:49]

And it's and it's blowing my mind to think when I'm watching that show and I'm hearing these lush, full orchestral arrangements, that they're made up of people scattered all over the country, maybe performing in their living rooms and sending it to you.

[00:38:04]

That's just that's just wild.

[00:38:06]

Yeah. Yeah, pretty crazy.

[00:38:08]

You know, I might be making a stretch here, but one of the things that Bridgton has been really recognized for is the progressive casting choices and probably specifically as opposed to shows like, say, Downton Abbey or something where shows like that, I think have sort of defended their all white cast by saying, well, it was it's authentic to the time period that shows were, you know, very segregated spaces in 18th century England and thus were being authentic and recreating that.

[00:38:40]

Yeah.

[00:38:40]

Whereas Bridgton kind of doesn't care about authenticity in that same way. And it's really refreshing and innovative to see this diverse cast.

[00:38:51]

And for the most part, no one's really commenting on it. It's just it's just there. Yeah, it's very striking.

[00:38:58]

Is it possible to make a kind of parallel to that all white world of authenticity in TV shows and the whiteness of the space of classical music?

[00:39:14]

Yeah, it's one of those things, like you said, where the history of it looks a certain way. And so you kind of assume that that's what it's supposed to look like with classical music. I guess it's a bit different because it's something that's still evolving or there's still are new classical artists or different things like that.

[00:39:29]

Like, you know, with a show like this, we're recreating something. And with classical music, you're hopefully bringing something new to even if you're playing an older piece, you want to try to bring some sort of fresh approach to it. You know, and I think that the lack of diversity in that space is something that has to do more with like education and like, again, like visibility. And, you know, everything about with my own education as a mostly a jazz pianist, I mean, I studied classical as well, but I feel like most of my real time was in like the jazz spaces in education.

[00:40:05]

But I was still one of the few black kids and like the jazz spaces. And I think that has more to do with, you know, the access to great music education than anything else. But in that kind of creates something where you don't have that many people of color that are like, you know, getting to higher levels or at least like the higher level institutions or different things like that. Yeah. So, yeah, it's definitely an interesting issue for sure, but I feel like it's exciting to see how much it's shifting, even like, you know, me being the composer on a project like this or thinking of, you know, many of the other composers of color that I know that are like doing.

[00:40:40]

Really awesome work right now. Right, Chris, thanks so much for joining us. Yeah, thank you. Appreciate it. Switched-On Pop is produced by Nate Sloan for Armstrong and Me, Charlie Harding remix edited and engineered by Brandon McFarland. And this week, Bill Lance. Our artwork is done by Iris Gotlieb and Abby Barr is on the Digital Keys social media stuff. Our executive producers are Nishat Croal and Hanna Rosin, and we're a production of Vulture and the Box Media Podcast Network.

[00:41:13]

Reach out at Switched-On Pop on Instagram and Twitter to tell us your favorite Bridgton Classical Pop mashup and tune in next week. Every Tuesday, we're dropping new episodes. You can find them anywhere you listen to podcasts for at our website. Switched on pop dotcom. I've got to say, this is a lot of fun. I'm definitely going to be thinking about and classical music very differently. Thank you for this. And we'll be back again next week. Another episode on Tuesday.

[00:41:40]

And until then, thanks for listening.

[00:41:52]

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[00:42:04]

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