One thing I love about ITS is that even when you’re delving into topics that aren’t necessarily my favorites, you still manage to hit upon something new and interesting to me. I’m passingly familiar with baroque/classical/romantic music, but it hadn’t occurred to me before to think about how the chords we use as basic building-blocks today first arose as more of a side-effect of early polyphonic music than as something that was used intentionally. Pretty cool.

One technical note - I think you might want to play with the balance of the podcast, especially when there’s a lot of orchestral clips as in this episode. I know you don’t want to mix the music too high to avoid clipping, but I found myself repeatedly turning my volume way up - say, to catch subtleties in what the strings were doing - only to find myself confronting Very Loud Kenley after the clip was over. It wasn’t about to blow out my speakers or anything, but it was a bit disconcerting.

Anyway, minor quibbles aside, the podcast is still awesome. Keep it up!

Thanks again for all you do!

applo - You’re right about the expectations thing - it’s way more fun (and exciting) to be surprised, it’s just that, at that period in time, everything that was dissonant was often resolved. When the Romantic Era came along, all was different (which is one, among many, reasons that I like it better :P). And yeah, I wonder who could be next… though, I don’t ever wish to know the answer to that!

Richard - thanks for the nice words too! If you have ideas for shows, then send me an email at kenley@intothescore.com - I’d love to hear your thoughts and suggestions!

i don’t necessarily agree on the point of expectations for a song being met a good thing. i prefer to have my guesses outwitted (a reason why i avoid a lot of baroque music, with its rigorous devotion to a canon of sound deemed “pleasing” by monarchy).

and, yeah, sugiyama is pretty old. i wonder who square-enix is going to have take his spot when he’s gone. i believe the dragon quest title for the wii had an additional composer who emulated his methods.

cheers!