Transcript
Speaker: Hi everyone, my name is Adam Price.
Speaker: And I'm Emily Jane Acree.
Speaker: And you're listening to the Relative Rhythms Podcast.
Speaker: Today we are very excited to introduce to you tap dancer, flautist, and academic Rachel Gane.
Speaker: Rachel is pursuing their doctorate in music theory at Yale, and their focus is on the music theory of tap dance.
Speaker: They have presented at the Society for Music Theory, the American Musicological Society, and the European Music Analysis Conference, just to name a few.
Speaker: We talk about the difficulty of defining the instrument that tap dancers use and how each person's instrument changes.
Speaker: We discuss some of the reasons why there has been such a lack of academic research on tap dance, including the historical reluctance in academic circles to study dance and bodily movement within the context of music.
Speaker: We also talk at length about music notation, using it to notate tap dance, its strengths and weaknesses, and the ethical concerns surrounding the various notation approaches.
Speaker: This is definitely one of the nerdiest episodes we have done and we thoroughly enjoyed it.
Speaker: Please welcome to the podcast, Rachel Gain.
Speaker: Hi, Rachel.
Speaker: Welcome to the podcast.
Speaker: Hey, thanks so much for having me.
Speaker: I'm excited.
Speaker: So, Rachel, you are a tap dancer and you're also a flautist, correct?
Speaker: A recovered flautist, yeah.
Speaker: Wait, tell us about that.
Speaker: What?
Speaker: I just don't play as much anymore.
Speaker: I kind of feel like the more I put my tap shoes on, the less I pick up my flute.
Speaker: So it's probably a good thing that I'm a recovered flautist.
Speaker: So how did you get into these two art forms and kind of which one came first and how did you evolve?
Speaker: Yeah, it was kind of a bit of a non-linear route.
Speaker: I like very much started off as like a dance kid, but like in the like really chill, low-key way, like...
Speaker: ballet about half an hour a week not taking it too seriously and i like slowly started like playing the recorder in school and taking piano lessons then i went to secondary school and i like start taking flute lessons and i'm still dancing and i just get more and more and more involved in like
Speaker: orchestra and things like this and eventually end up going to undergrad to do a music degree realizing I love music theory and like playing flute etc.
Speaker: And like as I went to undergrad I didn't really have opportunity to tap dance because I well the tap classes were at the same time as wind ensemble and it had to be a wind ensemble and so tap slowly like
Speaker: trickled out of my life but while I was still always tap dancing in my kitchen as like a compulsion.
Speaker: So it was always there and then like the pandemic comes around and I by this point moved to the states and discovered what rhythm tap was which I'd never even heard of and it just kind of started an obsession for me and now I can't do anything but tap dance.
Speaker: So your undergrad was in flute?
Speaker: Uh, it was... we don't... in the UK we don't really, like, um, distinguish by discipline.
Speaker: So, like, the best way to describe it was that I was essentially a triple minor in composition, flute, and music theory.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Interesting.
Speaker: But then I... all my grad school has been, um, music theory with a hint of early music on Baroque flute here and there.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Fun.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I'm so curious because I have like a thing about the whole differentiation between cap styles, which is not for today.
Speaker: But I'd love to hear your perspective of like how your training was in the UK, because we have listeners from from all over the world.
Speaker: And then what shifted for you where you all of a sudden discover this quote unquote thing rhythm tap?
Speaker: Like what was that journey?
Speaker: Yeah, I for me.
Speaker: like British tap in my experience, not in everyone's experience, but in my experience and everyone else in my hometown, it was very much like syllabus tap.
Speaker: So every day, every class, we would do the same set of routines that an exam board had set out.
Speaker: You know, I remember so clearly having a riff exercise that was like five count riff, five count riff, six count riff, six count riff, seven count riff, seven count riff, six, six, something like that.
Speaker: And we just do that same thing every day until we eventually moved up a class.
Speaker: And I thought that a wing on one foot or like a turning maxisboard grab-off was the hardest thing you could do in tap.
Speaker: This is kind of where it like leveled out.
Speaker: I was like, wow, this is so hard.
Speaker: And I'd also never thought of tap as music because it was so much like all the other dance styles I was doing.
Speaker: We had the same syllabi for like modern dance and ballet.
Speaker: They all had the same backing track with the announcer on every day, like riff exercise, do do do kind of thing.
Speaker: And so it's all standardized in the UK for the most part.
Speaker: Yeah, really standardized.
Speaker: And so I hadn't even considered that it was music.
Speaker: And I probably should have realized, considering I was not a good ballet dancer and not a good modern dancer,
Speaker: But a pretty good tap dancer, even though I started it later, but also like going to music school.
Speaker: I probably should have realized earlier that tap was music and maybe that's why I was better at it.
Speaker: But yeah, it just like there was no like real jazz and there was no musicality.
Speaker: There was no improvisation.
Speaker: It was just very much we learn these steps and then like once every couple of years we'll put on a show and we'll do a little dance with some like Shirley Temples to a pop song.
Speaker: And like I thought I loved this, but I thought that's everything that tap was.
Speaker: And then you came here.
Speaker: And what was that?
Speaker: What was that transition?
Speaker: You're like, oh, I know Tab.
Speaker: Or, you know what?
Speaker: Well, yeah, I picked up my shoes in the pandemic and I think I just posted it on my Snapchat story because it was like 2020, you know, Snapchat.
Speaker: And my friend who was a PhD music theory student at UT Austin saw my friends, definitely adore them, saw my story and was like, you have to take class with my teacher.
Speaker: and their teacher was Katie Brown, who you all know, who we know a lot.
Speaker: Yes, amazing!
Speaker: And also more Zoom classes with Asha Griffith up in New Jersey.
Speaker: And just suddenly I get exposed to this whole world of jazz and improv and I don't think I even knew what a paddle and roll was before I started doing proper rhythm tap, which you can't do a rhythm tap without a paddle and roll, right?
Speaker: So yeah, I got so lucky that Steph is so much someone who cares about tradition and doing things properly and so sore I was doing tap and knew exactly where they needed to direct me.
Speaker: And so yeah, the rest was history, really.
Speaker: Did you feel then that this was fundamentally something different than what you had learned or did you just feel like it was a different approach?
Speaker: It felt quite different and maybe that was because I hadn't had my shoes on in a little while but yeah it just felt like almost a new genre but like using a lot of the steps I was used to but at the same time I was like taught to dance on my toes and so like even a shift as subtle as that just kind of changed the whole game like it like took me so long to learn to like sink into my heels and like think in a grounded way versus like a lifted way not that we're not lifted at all but
Speaker: Yeah, so it felt quite different, especially like thinking of rhythm first rather than movement first.
Speaker: So you're getting your doctorate in music theory.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And your thesis is on the music theory of tap dance, correct?
Speaker: Yeah, like partially that and partially just like the general musicality and like meaning making and also just all the other tangents I get dragged down because there's a lot of interesting stuff and I want to write about all of it.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Did you go into your doctorate like thinking, OK, this is what I want to do?
Speaker: When I when I started grad school, I very much was doing like traditional music theory, you know, like analyzing the form and harmony of things.
Speaker: it's very much my training and this is my like third round of grad school and so like the first school very much that second school very much that during the second school i like started doing tap stuff but it was like on the side and then when i applied to yale i had tap as my secondary interest and like for um like more like a syntax
Speaker: pitch things as my primary interest and somewhere between me submitting that application and getting accepted and actually arriving here, I had very much fully switched to TAP, which was the best decision I ever made.
Speaker: I feel like we've talked about this before in some of our other interactions, but there's not a lot of conversation in academia about tap dance.
Speaker: There's actually, to be honest, very few places in academia you can even study tap dance as an undergrad, let alone get any deeper with it.
Speaker: Why...
Speaker: In your experience in academia, why do you think that is?
Speaker: So I think, not to get all philosophical, but a lot of people kind of link it back to Plato.
Speaker: Or do I mean Descartes?
Speaker: I mean Descartes, my bad.
Speaker: Still, a philosopher.
Speaker: They call it Cartesian mind-body dualism.
Speaker: So this idea that one, the mind and the body are kind of doing their own thing, but the way it kind of links into this is like the things the brain does are really important and the things the body does is not that important.
Speaker: And this kind of has trickled into like the values of academia, where if you look at the kind of subjects that are really like
Speaker: valorized philosophy, thinking with brain, anything that requires like more brain.
Speaker: But the moment the body comes into things, it's like almost dirty.
Speaker: It's like, oh, we're talking about the body, that thing that's like, it has bodily functions and it does that.
Speaker: And so like, this is really an oversimplification, but there is like,
Speaker: a real pattern of it.
Speaker: And like in my field you really see it in how, let's say if I was talking to you about music, just like playing an instrument, and I said, oh, we use our bodies to make music, you would not bat an eyelid, right?
Speaker: In music theory, since about 94, scholars have been fighting to get the body recognized in the study of music.
Speaker: Interesting.
Speaker: It started with Susan Cusack writing an article in 1994, and it's still kind of an uphill battle where a lot of the research is kind of like a neutral is that you forget about or personally exclude the body.
Speaker: And if you're trying to be progressive or you're really trying to look at things holistically, you do include the body.
Speaker: And again, an oversimplification, but it also is kind of true.
Speaker: But to anyone outside the field of music theory, this sounds absolutely absurd.
Speaker: But in music theory, I hadn't even considered, as a young, growing music theorist, I hadn't even considered that I could include the ways that people make music with their body or respond to music with their body.
Speaker: It was very much, okay, here's the harmony, here are the notes, here's what's on the page.
Speaker: The most disembodied approach.
Speaker: And so for tap to be such an embodied art form,
Speaker: I'm not surprised it's one of the least studied musical forms because if the body's dirty and you can't really look at tap without the body, then yeah.
Speaker: But also racism, you know, a lot of reasons.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Do you feel like that's the same with percussion?
Speaker: I mean, you're using your feet, you're using your arms, right?
Speaker: If you're on a drum kit, at least.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Or organ, right?
Speaker: You got your feet going.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You got your hands going.
Speaker: I mean, I don't... It's funny you mentioned organ because that's actually the thing that set off the Suzanne Custick article, the 1994 article.
Speaker: It's a fun one.
Speaker: Yeah, I think it also partially comes down to genre.
Speaker: If you look at the history of music scholarship in particular, it's all classical.
Speaker: and other stuff's going on, but it's on the fringes.
Speaker: It's very much like center versus periphery.
Speaker: And so I think part of it just comes down to genre.
Speaker: So like percussion is like greatly underexamined in my field, like pitch and form are the most important things.
Speaker: And people haven't quite worked out how to like theorize things like melody or rhythm quite to the same extent.
Speaker: And so for percussion, if it doesn't have pitch, people don't really know what to do with it.
Speaker: That's not everyone.
Speaker: People are doing great work.
Speaker: But again, it's like on the peripheries.
Speaker: So there's all these really interesting bits of baggage that really affect what does and doesn't get valued in academia.
Speaker: This is just the tip of the iceberg, what I'm saying.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: So you're working on the music theory of tap dance.
Speaker: Are you the only person who has done that, has AirBand and other researchers that are interested in this?
Speaker: There are definitely other people.
Speaker: Some of them more active than others.
Speaker: There's like a couple of people who have published and then if you go to like the Society for Music Theory conference, there's like a small handful of us who are like trying to fight the good fight.
Speaker: That's amazing.
Speaker: So one of those people is Steph Bleedus, who I mentioned, who got me into this.
Speaker: Her work's great.
Speaker: Not published yet, but I'm hoping.
Speaker: hoping that will come to fruition soon because people should be reading that um in terms of people who are published there's a really cool article by um christy j wells and allison robbins which um oh it's a chapter it's in like the oxford handbook of
Speaker: dance and improvisation something like that um that it's not technically music theory but it is music theory and it's really talking about like they call it the musician's storehouse that's a concept by paul belina the idea of like if you're a jazz musician or a tap dancer you spend all this time like gathering this like personal archive of steps you can pull on like the lick or literally anything else
Speaker: And so talking about how that comes into people's improvisations, it's a great article.
Speaker: And there's a guy called Brian Harker who looks, he's a Louis Armstrong scholar, and he looks at how tap dancers' rhythms influenced early jazz.
Speaker: You may have heard Lisa Latouche talk about the same things.
Speaker: But yeah, there's a handful of people doing it and not enough, but it's definitely happening.
Speaker: It's a small, a small little movement within music theory.
Speaker: And so do you have you finalized your thesis yet?
Speaker: Can you give us a little?
Speaker: I can tell you what's going to be in it.
Speaker: The nice thing about being in grad school so long is that while I haven't got the dissertation written, I've been writing and writing and writing for years.
Speaker: And so I have a lot of stuff just not in dissertation format yet.
Speaker: Um, so like one of the projects I have two main projects I'm working on right now.
Speaker: Um, one is about taps instrument, um, not to be confused with what Anita Feldman's doing.
Speaker: Um, and also about music notation of tap dance.
Speaker: So, the one with the instrument, I like to think about instruments not just in terms of what they physically are but also what they can do.
Speaker: The fancy academia word for this is affordances.
Speaker: What does an instrument afford?
Speaker: And so, a lot of people say that the tap instrument is the tap shoe or maybe the tap shoe and the floor.
Speaker: I'm thinking of it in like a bigger way that might feel a bit like disconnected from reality and to philosophizing as a lot of academic stuff does, but I think it can like reveal a lot once you've like gotten past the fact that I'm doing the craziest deep dive into tap dance's instrument.
Speaker: So it's I'm kind of like thinking of tap's instrument as
Speaker: an assemblage as the fancy humanities people like to say.
Speaker: So like there's one thing made up of lots of different things.
Speaker: So one of them's the tap shoes, one of them's the floor or actually I'm going to rewind the tap shoes or soft shoe or your sneakers you're wearing if you have the idea of what tapped movements are in your head as you're using your sneaker or your barefoot or
Speaker: a peg leg if you are like Clayton Bates or Evan Ruggiero or someone like that.
Speaker: Or, you know, we've got Mary Six Rupert's hand tap going on.
Speaker: So your tap glove, I've seen people tap dance with like in hand stands with special shoes.
Speaker: So you have the thing that is either a tap shoe or that you're kind of using the idea of the tap shoe in your head as you're using it percussively.
Speaker: Then you have the floor or whatever thing you're dancing on.
Speaker: Staircase, suitcase, these things have all happened.
Speaker: Or whatever you're kicking with, like, the wall you're kicking.
Speaker: Then you have your body, because the body is so much a part of this, and also all the ways that our bodies are, like, enculturated into, like, knowing these moves, but also all the ways that our bodies, like, add meaning to this themselves.
Speaker: So, you know,
Speaker: different people look different and different people have been impinged upon by society in different ways according to various identities and react to all of those impingements.
Speaker: And so like that's kind of a part of the instrument.
Speaker: But also the environment we're in, I'm not sure if that's the best word, but I think a lot about gravity.
Speaker: And so there's one style of tap dancing, which we think of as the norm, which is just standing up on a floor that is probably sprung and we're jumping up and down and you can fit a certain number of sounds in before you come back down to the ground.
Speaker: We also have tap dancing on like sitting down on chairs completely changes what you're doing.
Speaker: I've seen Renee Ali's got an Instagram video of her doing Travis Knight's
Speaker: Mars project of her in a bungee.
Speaker: And so she's like jumping in the air and she has like, she's able to do all this cool stuff with her legs reaching out because she's not worrying about supporting herself before gravity brings her back down to the ground.
Speaker: And so I'm kind of thinking of the tap dance instrument as, or I should call it the tap instrument, otherwise I'm encroaching on Anita Feldman.
Speaker: But the tap instrument, I'm thinking of it as like this combination of all those things.
Speaker: And they're not being like one normal tap instrument, like kind of more of a like disability studies approach of your instrument is what you have.
Speaker: And so like you might have two tap shoes, but that's definitely not like it's not the tap shoes and the norm and everything else is an adjustment.
Speaker: It's just what you have is your instrument.
Speaker: All the things you're doing within this framework is tap because it's still tap if I have my sneakers on or if I'm there for in my kitchen.
Speaker: and then thinking about how we can know what tap is through what that instrument can do.
Speaker: Because really that's what tap is.
Speaker: It's like the the like kind of intersection of what our instruments can do and what the like culturally approved style that has been created by humans over generations is.
Speaker: So that's like one of the chapters I'm working on.
Speaker: Can I, I want to hear the other one, but before I go down that route, I have a question.
Speaker: Do you make a distinction between tap and say other genres of percussive dance, like clogging or buck dancing, flat foot, anything like that from other cultures, or are we specifically focused on black American tap dancing?
Speaker: I'm thinking about Black American tap dancing, but I think that is a really useful lens to think through what is it we're actually talking about when we say tap.
Speaker: Because there are reasons that these are different art forms, and some of it is...
Speaker: the shoes are different, but really it's just like the way we use our feet and like the training we have and the way we think about using the foot.
Speaker: Cause if I put clogging shoes on, I would probably still be tap dancing just in a pair of clogging shoes.
Speaker: Um, you know, and so I, this is why I really emphasize that it's not just that we're wearing a tap shoe.
Speaker: It's like we're wearing a tap shoe.
Speaker: Plus we have the idea of tap in our mind and we're using whatever shoe we are or aren't wearing through the idea of how tap is.
Speaker: So then going back to like our earlier conversation, what you were doing in the UK growing up was tap dance.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But what you're doing now and talking about now, you can say like maybe black American tap dance.
Speaker: Is there a differentiation in your mind?
Speaker: I feel like my instrument has changed in the ways that my body knows how to interact with the shoe and the floor and the tradition have changed.
Speaker: That's a bit wishy-washy and I may change my mind on that.
Speaker: But my current thinking is that my old instrument didn't really have the feeling of the paddle and roll enculturated versus my current instrument that includes my body, like just like sinking into the heel and doing the paddle and the step heel is like now just like a default part of my instrument because instruments are largely how we use them.
Speaker: you know, there's no reason to like not take a guitar and just like only play the side.
Speaker: People do that as an extended technique, but you know, you're kind of not even using it as a guitar.
Speaker: You could go either way on this, but these are the kind of threads of thought I'm following right now, and I'm still midway through following some of those threads.
Speaker: But I think they're interesting threads to follow, even if you could go either way on them.
Speaker: Yeah, for sure.
Speaker: So you're trying to define what the tap instrument is.
Speaker: Yeah, I think I'm trying to define it, but as a jumping off point to do more interesting things.
Speaker: So I think once you've worked out what the tap instrument is, it really opens up thinking about the performances you're watching.
Speaker: Um, I did this big project on Peg Leg Bates and Evan Ruggiero and like thinking about like disablist tap, disablist meaning like, um, like in a style that centers disability, not like prejudice against disabled people.
Speaker: Cause that word has two meanings.
Speaker: So like really talking about if we're not just being like, oh, why is their tap different?
Speaker: Like, oh, they're not doing this.
Speaker: They're not doing that.
Speaker: But rather you're just coming from the starting point of what is their tap instrument?
Speaker: Okay, their tap instrument is one peg leg made either of titanium or woods, depending on which of the two of them you're looking at.
Speaker: And that leg can do certain things.
Speaker: Like one of them is an above the knee amputee, one of them is below the knee amputee, which really changes what they can and can't do.
Speaker: And so just like analyzing their performance in terms of just what their starting point is, in terms of what their body can do, what their instrument can do, how they're enculturated within various forms.
Speaker: And I think you can learn a lot more about tap by thinking from the starting point of the instrument than if we just have this blanket, this is what tap is.
Speaker: because we have so many soft styles in tap.
Speaker: And I do think that's an interesting piece of it.
Speaker: So maybe I go back now on what I said earlier in that.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So I was kind of trying to relate it to percussion or other instruments that use multiple body parts like the organ.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Because even if, say, you had a peg, you would still be using that like you would use
Speaker: your foot and play the instrument the same way.
Speaker: Whereas your thinking right now is that it fundamentally changes the way you play.
Speaker: Like your instrument is different than my instrument.
Speaker: So we, wow, I feel like we could get really heady about this, right?
Speaker: Like, yeah.
Speaker: That's what academia is for.
Speaker: We don't play the same instrument.
Speaker: Essentially.
Speaker: But then there's also like the tension between like the like adaptation approach and the like just your instrument starting point.
Speaker: It's like if you watch videos of Peg Leg Bates, he will do the Shim Sham.
Speaker: And like, he will mimic the, you know, it's really hard to do a step heel on a peg leg because you only have one joint.
Speaker: And so he'll adapt and he'll like change how he's dancing to fit in with the mainstream tap style.
Speaker: But then there are all these like amazing quotes and like videos of people like Gregory Hines talking about how they like really love peg leg style and they couldn't copy it because their instrument couldn't do it.
Speaker: There are things that having a peg leg makes more difficult, but there are also things that makes easier.
Speaker: And there are things that are easy on a peg leg that are next to impossible, like if you have two legs and two shoes.
Speaker: And, you know, there are videos out there of people like Jason Samuel Smith and there are like accounts of people like Chuck Green, like locking their knee, like standing on the back of their heel and like,
Speaker: trying to imitate peg-legged baits because they want to make their instrument as much like his because he had all these cool accents that no one else was using because his body afforded a different set of norms and so he was able to like create a like a tap sound that didn't quite sound like everyone else's because he like combined like
Speaker: what he had with his body and his instrument with like his creativity and together it created this new thing he could have just kept doing what he heard everyone else doing but instead you know this is the nice thing about improvisation we can all do the thing that suits our own instrument our own body our own proclivities and so because he was improvising a lot of time he was just able to not do the adaptational approach and just be like hey my leg is here i don't have my weight on it it makes a cool bass sound i could drop that
Speaker: peg right there and make an accent.
Speaker: The other tap dancers aren't making an accent there, but it really makes sense for my body and I think it sounds cool.
Speaker: So it's like this really cool intersection of like agency and instrument and norms and style and genre that I just find so fascinating.
Speaker: This is the Relative Rhythms Podcast, and you've been listening to our conversation with Rachel Gain.
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Speaker: And now back to our conversation with Rachel.
Speaker: You mentioned earlier about notation as an interest that you're pursuing.
Speaker: I know there have been a lot of attempts at tap dance notation.
Speaker: Some have been more successful than others.
Speaker: I know the concerto by Morton Gould doesn't give any, it just gives the rhythm on a single line of percussive stave.
Speaker: What have you found out and are you trying to develop your own notation or what's going on?
Speaker: Yeah, this is a complicated answer for me.
Speaker: I've been doing a deep dive on notation for about four years now and I'm still finding stuff.
Speaker: I found a new notation system I'd never heard of last week, Greg Valotta's footnotes.
Speaker: Who knew?
Speaker: I didn't know for sure.
Speaker: So I have really complicated feelings about notation because notation is like a word that unless you're sitting in very specific corners of specific departments and specific universities, notation is kind of taken for granted.
Speaker: You know, as a musician, you get your score and you play it and you're like, yeah, these are the notes.
Speaker: And as transcribers, like sometimes you just like hear notes.
Speaker: the music and we're like yeah i think that's a g i'm gonna write down a g i think that's a swung note i'm gonna write a swung note but notation is actually a lot more complicated there are lots of different types of notation lots of different functions of notation a thing um that's like one of the basic distinctions that gets thrown around in music is the idea of descriptive notation versus prescriptive notation it's like charles seger's concept so descriptive it's like you are describing something that happened you
Speaker: watch someone do a thing and you are writing it down, you're describing it.
Speaker: Prescriptive is like a set of instructions or like a blueprint.
Speaker: So I want my musician to play a G quarter note, then an A eighth note, off you go.
Speaker: And these are like subtly different because one of them is like,
Speaker: trying to just give you enough information to do the thing.
Speaker: And so a lot of tap dancers' notations are kind of more along those lines.
Speaker: Like, let's say it's like a note to self that you're scribbling down or you're just trying to record it.
Speaker: It's not always exactly prescriptive, but it's kind of like along those vibes because it's not as strict a binary as it sounds.
Speaker: But you're like, okay, quarter note toe, quarter note heel.
Speaker: paradiddle and 16th notes and so there's that but then if you're doing you know if you're if you're realizing a score that's been given to you that's like a performance score you add so much in right there's like the fact that it probably isn't telling you what to do your arms or like whether to move your foot like 30 uh like 12 inches to the right or like 14 inches to the right there's like so many things that are up to interpretation and there's also like performance practice stuff so like
Speaker: By that, I mean, like, I play the Baroque flute, and if I see a trill, I know it's not duh.
Speaker: I know that in Baroque music it's uh, you start on the top note.
Speaker: So all these, like, little bits of cultural knowledge that you bring to the score.
Speaker: So, like, you might know that this thing's just basic because I should lift my knee for the shuffle, but also I'm doing this certain old step, I should do the arms that go with that step.
Speaker: You know, I should do those arms while I'm doing a kind of, like,
Speaker: heel-walky thing forward.
Speaker: And so there's that.
Speaker: Then you have like the opposite end of this kind of full-spinary where you're like transcribing something that happened and it's kind of impossible to capture all the things that happened on the page.
Speaker: Because, again, people are using their arms.
Speaker: They're moving either 12 or 14 inches.
Speaker: What style did they do?
Speaker: Was Chuck Green doing a cheeky grin as he did the step?
Speaker: Which kind of changes the meaning a lot.
Speaker: And so I think it kind of all comes down to the fact that notation is like...
Speaker: it really falls short of the things it's doing, but it kind of looks official enough that people don't notice the ways it's falling short.
Speaker: We just kind of look at it and take it for granted, especially if you're like comparing it to how music notation works, where we're like, oh yeah, this is what Bach wrote, this is Bach's music.
Speaker: Whereas kind of it's like, it's a version.
Speaker: That's kind of a huge tangent just to set the scene.
Speaker: But what I have been thinking about a lot is there's notation that is meant to preserve something so you can pass it down.
Speaker: There are notes to self.
Speaker: And there's also all the people in academia who are transcribing TAP so they can analyze it or so they can talk about it because they can't necessarily embed a video into their printed article
Speaker: Or they just know that the average person reading the article is going to look at a paradiddle and not know how to process that or like what the heck they're looking at or what they're meant to get out of it.
Speaker: And so I'm I think a lot of people have like feelings about whether or not you should like notate tap to pass along.
Speaker: But the thing I'm like really digging into is people who are transcribing it for academia, because a lot of the time, in my opinion, it's kind of having like
Speaker: like aftershocks that people aren't really thinking about.
Speaker: The way that most people transcribe tap is they write down the rhythms and they write down the steps.
Speaker: And those steps might have like various levels of specificity, you know, like the difference between a toe or a touch or a step or a hop.
Speaker: Like you already have to make all these decisions about how like granular you're getting about this.
Speaker: Even if we had a shared language for all these steps, like toe, is that the ball or the foot or is that a knock?
Speaker: So there's the practical issues, but also there's kind of what it reinforces, or the fancy academia word is reify.
Speaker: And so...
Speaker: If everybody's just writing down the rhythms and the steps, what does that mean for the scholarships that's coming out of that and for the picture of tap that readers are taking away from that?
Speaker: Because is tap rhythm and steps?
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: But also it's tap is huge.
Speaker: Tap is like a five dimensional art.
Speaker: We have the three actual dimensions.
Speaker: We have sound.
Speaker: We have like the dynamics of what we're doing, like in the dance sense of dynamics, not the music sense of dynamics.
Speaker: So like gestury stuff versus like loud and soft.
Speaker: And so I've like really been on this like
Speaker: academic rant for a while about how we really need to think about what notation is and isn't doing and how we need to talk about the presuppositions that are in our notation and really actually not ever just write something and present it as fact.
Speaker: Because notation is deceiving.
Speaker: It's persuasive.
Speaker: You look at it and we're like, okay, oh, they're doing step shuffle, step shuffle, step shuffle, step shuffle.
Speaker: but like that misses so much like there's so much meaning being made in all of the other dimensions of tap like what is that a citation of are you doing this in like a saving glover style or like a soft shoe style all these things are essential to understanding tap and if we keep just like notating rhythms and steps and then analyzing our rhythms and steps we're gonna come to like a totally like partial understanding of this art form that is like
Speaker: crazy complex in like all these ways that people don't even imagine and it just keeps reinforcing this idea of tap is this small thing whilst also um meaning that when someone else like picks up tap research they see that and that's what they're building on and i i'm just really on a um a mission to
Speaker: criticize the use of notation, but at the same time, I think it's kind of essential because it's really helpful.
Speaker: So to eventually create a notation system that I don't hate, that is like the least harmful version of this, but also to put that out into the world surrounded by my rant about how notation can be harmful so that people have something that they can use that is both useful and holistic.
Speaker: It like captures as much as possible.
Speaker: It shows the culture and the meaning.
Speaker: and the little nuances of the body, the little shoulder lift that actually me ans a lot, or how far you're sinking into the ground, how removed from gravity you are for a second, the forces acting upon you.
Speaker: So to be able to notate those things, but also
Speaker: to know the limitations of notation while you're doing it.
Speaker: Because I think a lot of this is just about my awareness of what we're doing and thinking about what our methodology is and what it can do and what it doesn't do.
Speaker: Yeah, that's roughly where I'm sitting in this.
Speaker: Like I think analyzing like the sound that you're hearing as you would like percussion instrument and just analyzing that
Speaker: There's like possibilities there.
Speaker: But then like you're saying, like if you're analyzing TAP and what we think of TAP as all of these things, it's the history, it's the blah, blah, blah, blah.
Speaker: Totally separate, right?
Speaker: But just how you and I, Rachel, know and Adam knows a little bit, right?
Speaker: Like of these things.
Speaker: Surely there is that same context in, say, like the drummer who lifts his drumstick one way and swirls it around five times as a nod to Joe Schmo, who did it before.
Speaker: You know, you see what I'm saying?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Surely there.
Speaker: He was the best.
Speaker: I don't know anything about you.
Speaker: This is what I'm saying.
Speaker: Like, I don't know.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So like the things that I see and I know that's a Bojangles step or I know that was a slide step.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Doesn't there there.
Speaker: I mean, Adam, I'm sure there's things that you do on the clarinet or Rachel that you do on the flute that like are quotes of or nods to or historical context that I wouldn't understand.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And so I think, you know, maybe the question is, is like, what are we asking of notation?
Speaker: Because certainly you could say the same, have the same argument with flute or with clarinet or with violin.
Speaker: Like, how are you angling your body?
Speaker: How are you using your bow arm?
Speaker: Like that you learn or you understand through the development of your instrument.
Speaker: Are they necessary for the notation to provide and or are they...
Speaker: needed for an audience to appreciate.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I'm so glad you said this because I think this is the issue.
Speaker: I think it's partially that we, you probably should be looking at this for all the art forms because like, one of the reasons I'm looking at tap is that I want people to understand it and I love it and it's good.
Speaker: And there's so much that the other reason is that I think that it tells us a lot about other art forms because there are things that it's like a no brainer that you have to look at the body and tap.
Speaker: And then that kind of opens the door for like, the body's kind of important in the flute as well.
Speaker: Like, it's hard to play different volumes on the Baroque flute, and so I definitely use the end of my flute to expressively to pretend that I'm playing louder or quieter.
Speaker: This is like a common thing for flute players, or like you move to like do an accent you can't quite do sonically, and so you trick the audience visually.
Speaker: So there's that.
Speaker: But also there's kind of like the tension between are we analyzing the work?
Speaker: So like, are we analyzing Mozart's flute concerto, which is the score and it's like this abstract platonic, that there's where Plato comes in.
Speaker: It's this abstract platonic thing where it starts with a G then a D and you can realize it however you want because it's the score and we're musicians and we're artists.
Speaker: Or are we looking at Jean-Pierre Rompel's performance
Speaker: of the Mozart flute concerto, this one work, one realization of the work.
Speaker: And then for TAP, so much of it is improvisational that you are kind of doing the latter, where they're not just taking the pre-existing choreography and creating their version of it.
Speaker: All people are choreographing for themselves, and so it doesn't quite make sense to divide between the work that would get written on paper and how they're doing it, because it's self-choreographing.
Speaker: But then we also have things like, oh, this person's performance of the copacetic soft shoe.
Speaker: So, you know, I could write out a score for the copacetic soft shoot.
Speaker: I have to help them teach the undergrads at Yale it because it helps to remember.
Speaker: But then, you know, am I writing it as instructions or am I writing it to say how Brenda Buvelino did it, how Honey Coles did it?
Speaker: And so I think these things get elided a lot in music because in music theory, at least, we're so like work centric.
Speaker: Like this is the work that Bach wrote, the work that Mozart wrote.
Speaker: vote and it's like a kind of subset of the field that cares about specific performances of specific works.
Speaker: And so I'm kind of like coming into music theory bringing in TAP, which has a completely different ontology, another long word, a different
Speaker: like mode of being, a different like default of it's not usually a set work that has existed for centuries and people are just doing their own version of it.
Speaker: And so this is part of why I think looking at notation in tap is really important because a lot of people are notating it as if it's Mozart.
Speaker: But really, a lot of the time we're looking at a performance.
Speaker: You touched on this a little bit earlier.
Speaker: And while we're on the topic of notation, there are a lot of tap dancers who have very strong opinions about notation and think that because tap has historically been such an oral tradition that you shouldn't.
Speaker: notate it or you shouldn't teach notation and um you know there's obviously a spectrum of how strongly people feel about it as a musician who reads music a lot and uses it as a as a as a teaching tool for myself and for my students i see the usefulness in it um
Speaker: But I have talked to many Taft dancers who are very against it.
Speaker: And I was just wondering your take on it, the whole argument.
Speaker: Yeah, if I was going to be flippant, I would say I hate notation.
Speaker: But I think the actual answer is more nuanced.
Speaker: As I'm spending my whole dissertation studying.
Speaker: Honestly, this is kind of coming from a place of me being mad at notation and trying to fix it.
Speaker: Yeah, so I think in general, you know, this is an oral tradition, it's an embodied tradition, this is a tradition of lineages and like there's something to be said about tap being a form where we learn person to person.
Speaker: We learn by looking and hearing and copying and bringing it into our own bodies, having our own embodied knowledge of it and that's like the ideal.
Speaker: I'm not a fan of notation, but I think it does have purposes.
Speaker: And I think like in those purposes, it kind of makes sense.
Speaker: For example, occasionally a friend will teach me their choreo and I just can't get my head around it.
Speaker: And no matter how many times I watch the video, I can't quite work out the rhythm.
Speaker: But if I write it down, I can then get it and get it into my body.
Speaker: So notation can be helpful there.
Speaker: Notation can be helpful as a memory aid.
Speaker: And like people have always been writing stuff down to remind themselves.
Speaker: Samantha Jones, who got her PhD in Ethnomusicology at Harvard, has a really good Irish dance dissertation.
Speaker: And I know it isn't TAP, but if you read it, nearly everything she says about notation is 100% applicable to TAP, down to the terminology.
Speaker: So if anyone's interested, that's a nice little deep dive.
Speaker: But yeah, as a memory aid, it can be helpful.
Speaker: The camp I'm in on the academic notation is I'd rather people didn't do it in an ideal world, but practically it kind of has to exist.
Speaker: And if people are going to keep notating, we might as well do it properly because it has the function of people can't, like people who aren't tap dancers can't look at tap and just know what they're seeing.
Speaker: um it lets you look at something that happened over a lot of time and was really ephemeral and like momentary and disappeared and it lets you just look at it in front of you on the page and like make large-scale connections and notice where things were repeated without having to have your brain switched on in a certain way at the 30 second time stamp and the four minute time stamp
Speaker: It can help you just like zoom out and look at everything.
Speaker: It gives you time to process out of the moment.
Speaker: But also just like if we're writing about tap, which obviously is not the best way to talk about tap.
Speaker: The best way to talk about tap is to be in front of someone with your tap shoes on.
Speaker: But that's not practical.
Speaker: And so if we are in the spot where we are writing about tap and we can have a visual aid that is not a two second video where I have to hope the person is like
Speaker: in training to the same tiny movements of the shoe that I am and understanding in the same way I am, I think notation can be really helpful in like these limited scenarios.
Speaker: And so this is why I'm like really into like the ethics of notation and also like the kinds of knowledge that notation does and doesn't hold.
Speaker: I just finished writing an article and submitting about the ontologies, epistemologies and ethics of notation.
Speaker: Because I think the ethics of notation is a huge issue.
Speaker: This is why I'm so into that, because I think it has a function.
Speaker: I don't like it, but to be a realist, notation does exist, probably should exist, can be helpful.
Speaker: I'm trying to relate it to my work because obviously like if you try and play through like the head of a Miles Davis tune and never listen to Miles Davis or that song, you're never going to be able to play that.
Speaker: That only gives you a small amount of information, but it's certainly helpful in getting a general idea of what's happening.
Speaker: Yeah, it helps you get certain kinds of knowledge, right?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: The kinds that you're actually encoding in what you write down.
Speaker: Right, yeah.
Speaker: And for like transcriptions, it's certainly helpful to kind of analyze and understand what is happening.
Speaker: But again, it's only a small snippet of information and I'm never going to sound like Miles Davis or Charlie Parker if I never listened to them and I never transcribe it by ear.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: It's never going to be the same thing.
Speaker: That being said, I still think it's hugely useful and helpful with the caveat that
Speaker: of understanding that it's only a small piece of the information.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And I think people have a tendency to forget that because at least in my field, we're so used to seeing like pitches and clefts and lines and rhythms and dynamics.
Speaker: And we're like, and this is it.
Speaker: This is the piece because we're all going to take this piece and do our own thing with that.
Speaker: And that kind of reminds me of another thing I didn't mention, which is a lot of people, at least in my field, like Peter Winkler, etc., have this idea that transcription is always analysis.
Speaker: Because transcribing is an objective.
Speaker: It's not a direct translation of I heard a G, I'm writing down the G. You are in a way like listening or watching in the case of tap, absorbing the information you see, deciding what's important enough to put on the page, deciding what you're filtering out, deciding how you're going to represent it.
Speaker: And so in a way, you are making all those analytical decisions as you do it.
Speaker: And so part of why I feel so strongly about notation is that
Speaker: people kind of forget that transcription is a form of analysis because it's not obvious.
Speaker: And so part of me is like, we should make that explicit because I want to know that I'm seeing this through your lens and I want to know exactly according to what are you transcribing this?
Speaker: What are you leaving out?
Speaker: What are you considering important enough on the page?
Speaker: And I think it's partially just like a reminder that it's not objective.
Speaker: and the decisions were made.
Speaker: But also there's a nice thing about when you're reading a transcription, so long as you're not treating it as fact, you are seeing the piece through that person's eyes and you're like,
Speaker: Especially coming from the background of being someone who analyzes music and reads analyses of music and tap.
Speaker: It's really cool.
Speaker: The whole point of an article is to see what someone thinks about this one performance.
Speaker: So the transcription is telling you what we think about that one performance.
Speaker: So I think it's important to know what we're looking at.
Speaker: to know that we're looking at an analysis.
Speaker: And one of the things I talk about in my work is how I want scores to always kind of be like that and always to explicitly not be creating instructions that someone could recreate because that kind of like breaks the ecosystem of tap dance and like
Speaker: how we pass down things.
Speaker: I want, you know, I talked about prescriptive notation.
Speaker: That's like the instructions.
Speaker: I want tap notation, at least in the contact I'm talking about to be anti prescriptive and to always just be talking about what we see versus giving the instructions.
Speaker: Not to like put, not to back you into a corner and like make you put it down on, on, on, on paper or anything.
Speaker: But do you think that,
Speaker: reading music is a skill set that is helpful to students as tap dancers or something that we as tap educators should talk about it in our classes.
Speaker: Like where, where are you along the line on the, on the spectrum of hate it, love it.
Speaker: You're like really making me do all the hot takes.
Speaker: It's okay.
Speaker: It's okay.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: No, I think that like,
Speaker: the priority really is like having an oral understanding of music so like before we do anything else it's way more important to know what one two and three means than quarter eighth eighth quarter um so like i think if we're prioritizing anything like
Speaker: having a sense of rhythm, sense of meter, sense of hyper meter, phrasing, and like, you know, hearing triplet and knowing what that means and how to do it as the priority.
Speaker: I think reading music has like practical benefits, you know, all these tap dancers I hear talking about how they go to talk to the band.
Speaker: and if they could have read sheet music, it would have been easier.
Speaker: And I think there's also the practical element of jazz musicians taking tap dancers more seriously.
Speaker: If one, they can read music and two, they can like create their own lead sheet, for example.
Speaker: and never having to pay someone to do it for you.
Speaker: But these are practical considerations.
Speaker: I think in order to be a good tap dancer, you don't need to be able to read music.
Speaker: Amazing tap dancers can't read music, so long as you have it in your ear.
Speaker: So that's my non-answer.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, same with and this is this is the argument, right?
Speaker: Same with any kind of musician, right?
Speaker: That many musicians never knew how to read music and we study them.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And still don't.
Speaker: Yeah, I think for me,
Speaker: I have used it like almost as a crutch because I played classical violin way sooner and more often than I was a tap dancer.
Speaker: I mean, I tapped around a little bit right in elementary school, but I was practicing my violin.
Speaker: I was way more than I was with tap dance, right?
Speaker: And so I have this understanding and I am so visual that seeing things written out for me is...
Speaker: it opens up so much for my understanding right and i suck at listening and and like being able to transcribe from ear being able to understand like really like i understand so much deeper after i see it which is a weakness i'm working on everyone okay so it just means you're a visual learner
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So it's, I think it's a beneficial tool, but yeah, I think like, as you said, Rachel's like having the other side of it is so important.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Like music notation isn't always like as good at representing things.
Speaker: It's just like scatting.
Speaker: Like there are loads of rhythms that like, let's say we feel like a one, a two, a three, a four.
Speaker: If we write that in music, in music notation, we have a one, a,
Speaker: two, uh, three, uh, you know, we're beaming together the one, uh, but feeling it as one, uh, two, uh, three, like the grouping.
Speaker: So there are, you know, sometimes just like saying it out loud is way more communicative and has way less, um,
Speaker: like mental gymnastics involved.
Speaker: So I look at this score and be like, okay, I see this rhythm that's duh, duh, duh, duh.
Speaker: I think I have to group it like this.
Speaker: I think I need to do that.
Speaker: And also like, you know.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I think that goes back to your, you're talking about your Baroque style, like having this cultural understanding of what this music or dance in this case is supposed to be and sound like, does it swing?
Speaker: Does it have this kind of trill?
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: These are these are cultural things that you need to understand to interpret the music in the proper way.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But also sometimes the music is, you know, so like, you know, and that's just like,
Speaker: one example, but there are loads of ways that like music notation is flattening.
Speaker: It like flattens what you're doing into a much simplified version that kind of gets rid of all the nuance.
Speaker: And so I think it's useful.
Speaker: Sometimes like my friends are struggling with a rhythm and I'll write it out in music notation.
Speaker: And even if they don't read music, just seeing like roughly how I've written it can be helpful.
Speaker: There are also other ways to do this.
Speaker: Why music notation?
Speaker: Why the thing that was developed like
Speaker: starting from the ancient Greeks for a classical tradition.
Speaker: Do we really like I know that jazz uses the same notation, but like there are other ways to notate, like what's wrong with one and a two and which has its own problems, which has like writing it out, you mean versus drawing the picture?
Speaker: Is that what you mean?
Speaker: Yeah, or like there's this like thing called tubs in FNA Musicology, the time unit box system where each like eighth note or each triplet gets a box and you do it in graph form.
Speaker: Like that's a great visual way of doing it.
Speaker: I've written steps out like that for friends.
Speaker: Interesting.
Speaker: you know all of these systems have their own shortcomings none of them is perfect but like you know i could go and learn music notation or i could do something a bit more intuitive on graph paper the biggest thing i think is just like having whether it's this what we're used to kind of like you know the musical stave and all that pictures the dots and the lines or it's boxes like just having a shared
Speaker: language is helpful.
Speaker: And so I think that's like, you know, for tap dancers who are working with musicians, getting to the point of, and again, you don't have to read music to be able to have that shared language, certainly.
Speaker: But getting to the point where you can communicate efficiently with somebody you've never met before and come to the same, like get on the same road together, I think is
Speaker: is what's important.
Speaker: Yeah, and I completely agree with that.
Speaker: And the little devil on my shoulder is saying, why do the tap dancers have to change and learn a new thing when everybody else just gets to keep the skill set that makes sense for their instrument?
Speaker: Well, I think because to be the other devil...
Speaker: I think because the tap dancers that we know and love had that understanding and things shifted.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So like your baby Lawrence could communicate with the musician with that shared language and
Speaker: We can't now.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So, I mean, yes, and.
Speaker: Yes, and.
Speaker: It's a yes and.
Speaker: I think this is like one of the reasons we started this podcast is because of the language barrier, right?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And my argument has always been, well, the reason there's a language barrier in the first place is because tap...
Speaker: through the studio system and capitalism and all that stuff, segregated themselves, not possibly intentionally, but away from where they were for so long.
Speaker: I mean, to an extent, but also like jazz segregated itself by getting eaten up by the institution of the university.
Speaker: Oh yeah, for sure.
Speaker: I'm not arguing that either.
Speaker: You know, jazz kind of formalized itself.
Speaker: There's like the whole thing of the university system and going, you know, I used to go to the University of North Texas, which is a huge jazz school.
Speaker: So I taught those kids oral skills for a few years and
Speaker: You know, they are going through the wild curriculum of like having to be able to hear X, Y and Z and having to be able to notate in this way, have to do their arranging class.
Speaker: They have to do all these class credits to graduate.
Speaker: And so obviously not every jazz musician is going through like the university jazz complex or like the conservatory jazz complex.
Speaker: But at the same time, you know, jazz has kind of like created a language barrier in that it's no longer as vernacular as it used to be.
Speaker: It's become formalized.
Speaker: There's my other cancelable take, but...
Speaker: Before we end it, have you gotten any pushback from either the music academia world or the dance academia world on your work?
Speaker: There was, like very early on, before my field kind of got its act together, some lack of enthusiasm and telling me to go do proper stuff.
Speaker: Not very directly, but kind of indirect.
Speaker: But that was a long time ago and from very specific corners of the field.
Speaker: Honestly, music theory and musicology have been incredibly receptive to what I'm doing.
Speaker: I get onto the conferences that I apply to, people enjoy the papers, people are glad I'm doing this research.
Speaker: in the music world.
Speaker: I've only been to one dance studies conference a few weeks ago, which was incredible and good feedback there.
Speaker: And every tap dancer I talk to, I'm always nervous because I think tap has kind of been wronged by academia.
Speaker: And it's also incredibly easy to wrong tap in academia.
Speaker: There are so many ways to do harm.
Speaker: And so I'm always...
Speaker: thinking about that and like thinking of ethics as I'm working and there's no way to do this that's 100% ethical.
Speaker: I will upset someone, um, but the alternative is not doing it at all.
Speaker: But everyone I've spoken to so far has been very enthusiastic.
Speaker: Tap dancers seem to be like really happy that the art form is like being taken seriously and like receiving attention.
Speaker: And I hope at the very least I'm gonna like give people some more YouTube streams on their work by like people who didn't know about tap, you know,
Speaker: I'm trying to spread the good word about TAP and I've been really lucky to be invited to do guest lectures on TAP at five or six universities.
Speaker: That's awesome.
Speaker: Slowly bringing TAP into not the mainstream curriculum yet.
Speaker: But definitely like having a tap day in courses, like whether it's a class on dance or movement or just like general topics.
Speaker: So I taught in a meter class, which was really cool, like talking about like the ways that tap dancers mess around with meter.
Speaker: And so I think for the most part, tap dancers have been enthusiastic that I'm doing this.
Speaker: But if somebody was unenthusiastic, I'd be like, yeah, fair enough, you know.
Speaker: But yeah, so far it's been positive, which is wonderful because it's so good to have encouragement to do your work because most people in academia have a lot of imposter syndrome.
Speaker: Don't we all?
Speaker: Well, Rachel, thank you.
Speaker: This was incredible.
Speaker: Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker: You've been listening to our conversation with Rachel Gain.
Speaker: You can find Rachel on LinkedIn and on the socials at Gainish Pastry.
Speaker: If you liked our conversation today, please follow and leave a rating or review wherever you are listening.
Speaker: If you'd like to support our work, you can join us at patreon.com slash relative rhythms, where you can gain access to all of our uncut episodes and extra content.
Speaker: Our theme song is For the Love of It by the Adam Price Group.
Speaker: Featuring Emily Jane Acree on foot percussion.
Speaker: Our mid-roll music was Invention No.
Speaker: 8, and our outro music is Invention No.
Speaker: 13, both by Johann Sebastian Bach and arranged and performed by a carousing consort off their album, J.S.
Speaker: Bach, Two-Part Inventions.
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Speaker: Check out our merch on our website, relativerhythms.com.
Speaker: Thanks for tuning in, and we'll see you next episode.
