WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - Story Behind the Song: A Composer Who Values the Opinions and Reactions of Children

Episode Date: May 12, 2026

Join Lilly Faye Kraemer as she interviews award-winning composer Andrew Maxfield, who wrote a sequel to Prokofiev's "Peter and the Wolf," titled "What About the Duck?" Hear his inspiration behind the sequel and his composing process where he uses specific intervals and makes a visual map of the sound world. 

Hey y'all, welcome back to Story Behind the Song on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. I'm your host, Lily Fay Kramer, and today I am joined by the composer Andrew Maxfield. I recently attended a Hillsdale College Symphony Orchestra concert where they played Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf, and then they followed with the sequel titled What About the Duck? And Andrew Maxfield composed it. So I'm super excited to have Andrew on and hear his composing process. Welcome, Andrew. Thanks for having me.

Of course. So to begin, can you first tell me how you got into music, what your primary instrument is, and how you got into composing? Yeah, so if you go back far enough, I've been doing music, give or take for 40 years because I started playing piano when I was five years old. And when I was a little kid, nobody told me I wasn't a composer. And so I just assumed I was from day one. and I guess I was because I kept on making my own songs. From that point, though, I actually did all sorts of training. I was a composer, sorry, pianist first, and then I learned how to play the guitar when I was a teenager.

Then I went to music school as an undergrad and as a master's student, and I did a PhD of all things in music composition. And more importantly than the degrees, I've just written page after page after page of music and worked with some really terrific mentors and collaborators and ensembles. And if you do that enough and you don't stop, eventually you make a little progress and get closer to being the thing that you tell everybody that you are. Wow. So when you wrote, what about the duck, the sequel to Peter and the Wolf, how did you tackle writing in the same style as Prokofiev,

but also adding in some new nuances from your? and how did that process look? Well, writing a sequel to Peter and the Wolf as an idea happened very organically because when my older son, the one who's now 13, back when he was about five or something like that, I was playing all sorts of recordings of Peter and the Wolf for him. And for listeners who don't know, the story of Peter and the Wolf is sort of sing-songy and happy and fun, but it ends with a tragic twist because this wolf, who's sort of the antagonist of the story,

swallows a charming duck hole. And at the very end of this piece of orchestral music, the narrator tells all of the innocent little kids in the audience that if you listen carefully, you can still hear the duck swimming around inside the wolf because he's swallowed it whole. and if you would listen very carefully, you could hear the duck quacking inside the wolf because the wolf in his hurry

had swallowed her alive. And I don't know. I don't know about you, but for my kiddo, he finished listening to Peter and the wolf and he almost had tears in his eyes. And he looked at me and he said, Dad, what about the duck? And I thought that's a great question.

And in a way, sort of a funny insight, this mainstay of the orchestral repertoire for young audiences leaves on this like really weird note. And so I thought to myself, yeah, what about that duck? And is there more to the story that's worth telling? And fortunately, I have a terrific collaborator, a woman named Ruthie Prelman, and she's an incredibly gifted writer and storyteller and especially a good creative collaborator, like just a very fun person to volley with in terms of ideas. And I asked her what she thought about that idea, and the lights kind of turned on for her. So she did her work first, which was coming up with a storyline that kind of answers that very basic question.

Well, what about this poor duck that got swallowed by a wolf? And Ruthie's answer to that is a really funny story about how mother duck comes knocking on Peter's door, where he lives with grandfather, summoning them to come help her rescue the duck. and so from that point forward Peter experiences sort of like the call to action in a hero's journey and he goes back to the zoo back where they have the wolf and kind of negotiates with the wolf

to go down into the belly of the beast to rescue the duck oh by the way when he's down there he finds grandmother little twist on the plot no wonder grandfather doesn't like wolves and then Peter with a little bit of goodwill and ingenuity

helps the duck and grandmother escape. And then after a few more exciting twists and turns, they come out of the belly of the beast. And in a story of kind of whimsical redemption and so forth,

Peter's reunited with grandmother and grandfather. The duck is reunited with the other ducks, and then the wolf gets to return to the wolf family in the distant woods. So it's kind of a little bow on top of the package that honestly I think a lot of little kid listeners were hoping for for years.

But it's a fun way to finish up the story. So the thing that makes Peter and the Wolf kind of a perennial favorite of orchestras when they do their young people's concerts or family concerts or educational or outreach, these are all kind of synonyms, is the fact that in Peter and the Wolf, Wolf, not only do you hear fun instruments playing fun music and you hear a story, but the instruments themselves kind of represent characters in the story. And so famously, the flute represents a bird. And then you have the clarinet being this kind of skulking, slinky cat. And then, of course, you have the oboe being the part of the duck because oboes sound like

ducks, no offense to any oboists in the audience. And then the bassoon is grouchy old grandfather and Peter. Peter is represented kind of by all of the strings as a section or as a collection. But when you put that all together, what you get, and I think this is the kind of the genius masterstroke on Prokofiev's part, is that it constantly gives young listeners and grown-up listeners points of connection into the music because it gives your imagination something to work with

in some ways it's I mean it's different but you could also say it's a little bit more than just going to hear something as austere as symphony you know hearing symphony or like a Prokofia piano concerto or something like that those are beautiful, but they're very austere.

They're kind of absolute musical arguments. And you, I mean, I love listening to concert music like that. I think a lot of people do. But I also recognize that sometimes it feels like you're not sure where the handholds are or where the door is into what the music means. Unless you're coming from a music background, it can be a little bit weird. but Peter does not have that problem because there's so many entry points in this story that whether or not you have any background of classical music,

you are a human being and therefore you have background with a story. And so in the case of Peter and then connecting the dots into the sequel, which is what you're asking about, because Prokofiev defined the personnel or the lineup, the characters in his story with certain instrumentation, not only did I want to continue that as a basic idea where instruments represent characters, but I wanted to make sure that it felt like we were still in the same galaxy. Like I don't want my music to sound like a Prokofiev knockoff. But if I wrote a sequel that had no connection or seemed nonsensical or was so dramatically different or indifferent to Prokofiev, I don't think I'd be doing the audience any favors.

And so when we realized that the story, when Ruthie and I realized that the story is about rescuing the duck, it was like, okay, well, the duck will continue to be represented by the oboe. That totally makes sense. Peter and grandfather are still involved. So we've got the strings and the bassoon. And, of course, the wolf is central to the story. I mean, the French horns represent the wolf. Well, we're introducing some new characters, specifically grandmother, and also the kind of mother duck character who comes to ask for help.

And so of the instruments that were already involved in Prokofiev's piece, the trumpet was in the composition, but not assigned to a character. And so I decided to characterize the trumpet as Mother Duck with a little bit of a funny wah-wa plunder mute on the trumpet that gives it that kind of Charlie Brown talking quality. A little cartoonish, but cheerful. And then the question of grandmother, that is where the marimba and the percussion instruments come in. because one of the things I wanted to be true is that any orchestra that plays Peter and the Wolf should find it very easy to play the sequel also,

one right after the other. And it's not easy if you have to hire additional musicians and if the lineup for one piece is totally different from the lineup from the other. And so I said, well, what else can we do with the same lineup? And because you have a percussionist playing in Peter and the Wolf doing, some symbols and a snare drum and things like that.

That percussionist actually can hit just about anything. Percussionists are really good at hitting stuff. And so without adding any additional people, we can add additional instruments and the mallet instruments. So in that category, you have things like the marimba or the xylophone or the vibraphone or the glock and spiel, these kinds of pitched mallet instruments. that was open terrain and I thought well perfect we're going to have grandmother so I'm going to create this kind of groovy fun unexpected part for the instruments that we haven't used just yet

that's so fun and what I love about what about the duck is the narration it just it follows so nicely from Peter and the Wolf and with the narration I think it's just very tangible for a young audience to be able to recognize because it guides the instruments and it creates like an internal picture in their minds for them to follow the music even if they haven't been exposed to a lot of classical music. So I really felt like it flowed very nicely together. So how did what did the process look like after you got the narration and then did you compose after? Were you more collaborating at the same time with the lady you partnered with? With Ruthie.

With Ruthie. So there's a lot of different ways to compose, and my process changes from piece to piece because I feel like the process is actually part of the creative approach. But when I'm writing anything that has words, whether they're spoken by narrator or sung by singers or a soloist, the words are front and center in my mind, because I'm asking myself, not only like what did they mean literally,

but also like, well, what kind of, what do they mean figuratively? What images do they evoke? Also, what do they sound like, the actual sounds of the words? And are they easy to say? Are they easy to hear in an audience? There's a lot of stuff that you have to think about when you're trying to get words from a speaker or singer into the minds and hearts of people who are sitting in a hall.

and related to the words, you kind of zoom out and say, well, what's the story? What's the arc of the story? And so kind of like a screenwriter turns a story a story into a script and then a script into a storyboard. I really use a process that's quite a lot like that. And down to the literally having a like a large,

whiteboard or a big like cork board or or you know kind of poster board where I'm putting up post-it notes and rearranging things and I'm really creating a storyboard and then with the storyboard as kind of a underlying structure then I do kind of weird stuff like I'll take pens and pencils or colored pencils and things like that and I'll draw what I call sort of a narrative map. It's a little bit like if you imagine outlining the contour of a mountain range, just the top where it meets the sky, right? You see this kind of like these undulating curves. And when I think about writing music, a few things are true. One is, you know, that it has a beginning, moment's zero, you know it has an end, and you know that somehow you have to get from the beginning through the

middle to the end. And it sounds basic, but you got to start with basic stuff. And then I ask myself, well, what is the feeling from moment to moment on this kind of narrative curve or this like energy curve or something like that? Do I want like a rising sense of tension and then a surprise? Or do I want it to feel cool and coasting with a surprise tension or what, you know, those kinds of things. Like what is the kind of experience that I want people to have as they're sitting there and countering the music? And once I get that sorted out, which is a lot of like head scratching and sketching, you know, then then I might run the risk of actually using some notes. But the funny thing is that the music in a lot of way come, the music is a little bit more. more like, you know, framing and drywall.

But you start with a blueprint. And so the blueprint is like story, architecture, pacing, narrative shape, all this kind of stuff. And then eventually you kind of hang the notes on it. And then in that case, my goal was to write something that felt like a coherent partner with Prokofiuf, but not a copycat. And so I analyzed his music quite a bit. I looked at the kinds of harmonies that he was deploying. And I played with them and played with them and played with them until I felt like I could create a sound world that was legitimately mine, but that it had some similar features.

So that it felt like when you were walking off the edge of the Prokofiev, you didn't. fall into a chasm, but instead you kind of crossed a rope bridge into the next part of the terrain that felt like an inevitable destination and just the place you wanted to go. So when you're thinking

about Prokofiev Sound World, what, I guess, what kind of terrain did he use and what did that look like in your composition? Yeah, well, Prokofiev wrote so much beautiful music and if people have only

listened to Peter and the Wolf you know you need only search Prokofiev on Spotify to explore a little bit farther and wider you know he was coming into his own in the mid-20th century early mid-20th century and music

classical music the vernacular music was changing really rapidly in that moment all over the globe. And so in Russia where he was and outside of it too. And basically the kind of banner level, marquee level explanation is that from about the, oh, I don't know, mid-1600s until the beginning of the 20th century, everybody was basically stoked on major and minor chords

and feeling pretty satisfied with what you could do with major chords and minor chords. That's a ridiculous simplification, but it's actually not so far off. And so, you know, the language of, they call it functional harmony. They call it common practice harmony. There's a lot of like geeky stuff we could get into. But the point is that it was like the language itself was so interesting that there were enough stories and jokes to tell for everybody from about the mid-1600s

until tail-end of the 1900s or sorry, tail end of the 1800s turning into the beginning of the 20th century. But by that turn of the century, I think a lot of people, composers, listeners, ensembles,

artists, everybody's feeling like, yeah, I think we've kind of, yeah, we've sort of told all the jokes and told all the stories that these major and minor chords have offered to us. Is there anything else? And that's where you start saying, what can we do creatively with the language itself? Can you expand the boundaries of the language instead of just using the language creatively inside of its own boundaries?

And so Prokofiev, his music, I think it's fascinating and beautiful because you can hear him playing playing with major and minor chords. But it's a little, instead of, you know, sometimes you hear the word atonal. And then people have varied and usually weird responses to that word. But what I would say is that his music is tonal, but it's kind of like tangy tonal.

It's tonal plus. It's tonal in a way that's shifty and evasive and it's shifting. between chords rapidly, and sometimes ambiguously, and it's not particularly grading. You know, it doesn't sound modern in a way that confuses listeners, but it's really inventive. One way to think about what a composer does is to think about what a sculptor or a painter does. So if you're making a sculpture out of marble, let's say, clearly, The material is marble, and your tools are the chisel and a hammer and whatever,

but you're removing bits of marble to make a marble statue. And you can see the marble, so that's really helpful because we all get what the material is. And painting, you know, the surface is a canvas, and you're putting paint on a canvas, and everybody can see it, and it has this kind of polite habit of sitting there on a wall, so we can all stare at it. music tends to be a little bit weird because it doesn't stay put and you can't see it. And so sometimes it's, you don't remember what the material, like the material is that you're sculpting with. And there's kind of two ways to think about this.

One is that I like to say in music that the canvas is time. It's like how you spend time. We're painting in the air and the canvas is time. But then to use the sculpture analogy, what is the marble in our case? Well, it's intervals. I know this sounds like really dumb and basic, but intervals are what make music. And an interval is the distance between two notes. You know, you add to that a sense of pulse and rhythm and meter, which is sort of how they're paced over time.

But what you have are intervals. And so when I took Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf's score, I looked at each of these themes. And of course, the problem is that they're iconic and everybody knows them. Even if you don't think you know the piece of music, chances are if you hear a couple of measures, you'll find yourself humming or whistling and like, oh, yeah, I did know that. I've heard that before. And so I looked at them in terms of their interoper. interval content.

And then I said, hmm, using some of those distinctive signature intervals, can I make something that's

totally new and unrelated? And it's, you know, it's like, can I make my own statue out of the same type

of marble or something like that? And that's, I mean, it's kind of basic, kind of wonky,

but that's, that's how I do it. That's so interesting. Have you, What has been the reactions of the young audiences that the sequel's been performed for? How has it been received? It's been received really well. And my favorite response was I was just standing, minding my own business in a lobby of a big orchestra hall.

And after the concert, this kind of grandmotherly looking person clutching the hands of two little people walks out and they're all smiling. And she says to her kids, not knowing that. that I'm anybody. She says, I didn't remember it ended that way. That's hilarious. And that makes me happy because it's clear, clearly the material was constructed smoothly enough that she didn't even know

that she had just heard a sequel, I think. But then the other, you know, I feel like kids are, the most honest critics and the toughest audiences of all. And I love writing for young audiences. I mean, listen, I've written for, and that's fine, but I've also given room and bored to my own kids for the last 13 years. And one of the gifts of being a parent is spending time with kids, and they're so weird, and they're so candid,

and they actually tell you what they're thinking, and they ask weird questions, and the minute that you're boring, they are like staring out the window. And grown-ups have the problem of having better manners. They'll tell you something's nice when it isn't. Kids won't do that. And so in the hall, when I've watched this piece be performed,

and you know there's the narration in the sequel is deliberately a little bit funnier than Prokofiev. So I think I'm not sure Prokofiev was trying to be funny. I think people would call it sort of charming and timeless and folksy and there's probably a lot of good adjectives that describe it, but not laugh out loud funny. But Ruthie and I felt like to add a sequel after you've been listening to 25 minutes of Peter, it would do. the audience of favor by picking up the pace just a little and by giving people permission to smile and laugh. And so we did that on purpose. You know, there's, there are some funny lines in the sequel. And, you know, when Peter's going into the belly of the beast passing the heart and the bass drum thumps and passing the lungs and there's this like breathing sound and then the the spleen

or the whatever it is appendix and there's this like weird. doy sound and the narrator doesn't even know what that organ does and the entire hall laughs because it's sort of a funny line and so I feel great when I'm sitting there in the hall and I look around and the kids in the hall are leaning forward on the edge of their chairs and they're smiling because they get it and they're riveted to a story and they care about what happens to the characters and they laugh when there's a reason to laugh and then they cheer when there's a reason to laugh and then they cheer when there's a reason to cheer. And those are kids who are going to want to come back and hear orchestras play for the rest of their lives, if all goes well. I would 100% agree with that.

Well, that is all the time that we have for today. Thank you, Andrew. So much for joining me. This was incredibly interesting to hear behind the scenes what goes on for a composer. Thank you for coming on story behind the song. My pleasure. Thanks for having me.