Classically trained here! To my ears, the thing Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith gets the most use out of her classical training is her knowledge of orchestration, more than forms.
(If you’ll permit me an irreverent gloss) Orchestration is an aspect of production or songwriting, but also mixing, where you choose which notes in the song that you’ve written, are given to which voice. Some pieces, like Ravel’s Bolero, are more or less entirely exercises in orchestration, since if you listen to that piece, the main source of “interest” is how he gradually builds the melody, giving it by turns to different instruments, and adding other voices as he goes.
One of the reasons Debussy’s violins, and Kaitlyn’s synth choirs sound so lush is because their parts are orchestrated with a few voices playing many different notes to form one texture.
Sadly, most of the classical forms are kind of living fossils—not that there’s nothing to be gained from learning the sonata or the fugue form, but they’re not the deep sources of inspiration they were to Beethoven or Bach, respectively.
Personally, I like to analogize the sonata to the pop song: in both you have two main thoughts (verse and chorus in the pop song) and you develop them however you’d like, but often the really delicious core of the piece is that third thing, the bridge, or the poorly-named “development section” of a sonata.
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