 Welcome to you all. This is part of the Festival of Ideas, this event. The Festival of Ideas has been running so as for since the 29th of October. This is number 10 out of 12 events we're doing. The theme of the festival is thinking through music and we've done a wide range of things. We've had jazz jam sessions, we've had interviews with various people. Hi David, nice to see you, but could you turn your camera off just for the moment? Thank you. We've had panels on a DJ summit, five DJs talking about what it's like to DJ. We've had panels on dance, we've had panels on relationship between film and music. We've got a concert with Balaké Kikisisoko, the great Marley and Cora player coming up next week, but today we're having a very special discussion. I should have said my name is Casper Melville. I'm the director of the Festival of Ideas and I'm sitting here at SOAS, the University of London in the centre of London. I know many of you will be spread all over the place and I think it's worth saying that we've really enjoyed in the festival and this year getting back to face-to-face events. It's been wonderful not to have to mask up or do everything virtually, but I think we should recognise what media theorists like myself call the affordances of technology and we wouldn't be able to do what we're doing right now if it weren't for those glorious folks at Zoom because we're spread around the place. I think one of my guests is in London, not far from here. Another one of my guests is sitting in a corridor just over there. I think one of the others is in Berlin and one of them is in the United States. So we wouldn't be able to do this if it weren't for digital. I really appreciate you joining us for this discussion. So what we're going to do is this. We're discussing, well we've given it the title, Decolonising Music Education. I think it might, at some point, we might pick up that word, decolonising and have a think about whether that's a useful word, whether it's a term that we feel comfortable with. But generally speaking, we're talking about the relationship between race and music theory and music education and we're coming at it from a number of different angles. So I've assembled a quite wonderful group of guests for you to listen to and also to talk to. And I'll introduce you to them now. We'll get to know them more when we talk in some detail. So first of all, Phil, you all down here, I don't know where he is on your screen. He's my bottom right here. It's from Hunter College. He's a musicologist. He's a musician. And in many ways, his writing has been the inspiration for this panel. And we'll talk in detail about the piece of writing one particular essay, which has had a big impact in musicology circles, but also wider than just formal musicology across everyone who teaches about music and cares about race and music and questions of white supremacy and justice and diversity. So welcome, Phil. Thank you very much for joining us. Moving around, we've got Catherine Schofield. Hi, Catherine. Catherine is a senior lecturer, I'm going to say, at King's in the music department, formally at SOAS, one of ours. I think your expertise, Catherine, is in India, the Indian region. You're always posting wonderful pictures and it looks like Indian music from the past. Yeah, Mughal India and Colonial India. Mughal Indian, Colonial India. Wonderful. Very welcome. So you're the ethnic musicologist, representing ethnic musicology here. And then we have Kaya Malami, also a SOAS alum. And in the blurb for this event, I called him a music technologist, technologist, but that's not really a fair summary of what he is. He's a musician. He's a producer. He's been across lots of different genres, electronica and punk. He's a highly regarded oud player. But he has been meddling with music technology and some of the things he's been doing I think are very concrete and fascinating examples of exactly the kind of white racial frame that Phil has identified as being embedded within music education. And last but by no means least, Nate Holder, who is sitting, well, on my left as I look at it, but also just over the corridor from me. He's come to SOAS because he's got a gig just down the road in the Peter Express. Straight after this talk, or perhaps even before the talk finishes, depending on how far we go, how long we go. Don't worry, I'll be going down to the show afterwards representing everyone who's here. So thank you, guests. And if we were in a room, I'd get everyone to give you a big round of applause, but you know, virtual applause or that kind of clicky things. So let's start, Phil, if we may with you, since it was you who kicked this whole thing off in my mind at least. You wrote an essay, I think it's 2012. And sorry, 2012, sorry, 2020, two years ago now. And in this essay, you identify what you call a white racial frame, which structures the way in which music theory is taught. I want if you could just, I know this is a bit, you know, obviously people go out and read the school and it's, you know, it's full of amazing things. But perhaps you could just summarize, maybe start with why you felt that you wanted to write this and maybe give us a sense of your background, which has led led you to the point where you felt you had to write it. Absolutely. Thank you, Casper. And thanks everyone for having me. It's great to be part of this estimable panel with Nate and Catherine and Chiam. So I think I'll start by saying the four words that I began a plenary talk in November of 2019, because that will essentially let you know what white racial framing is in a very real sense. I began a talk that I gave in November 2019 with four simple words. I said, music theory is white. And in so doing, I violated the white racial frame that we have in the United States. I'm supposed to use and we have all been taught by whiteness, usually white men themselves, to use coded language to not identify whiteness. That's one of the big tenants of whiteness in any white supremacist system. If I had used such coded language, I would have started with four different words, slightly different. I would have said music theory lacks diversity, which was the agreed upon way at the time two years ago to say music theory is white. But you don't say white. Of course, if music theory were 95 percent African-Americans, it would also lack diversity. But it's not. It's 94 percent among tenured faculty. That's just a fact. And they're the people with power. So people could tell right away that this was going to be a different talk. And after that, I did publish this long article that Casper referenced, and that came out in June of 2020. And that's called music theory and the white racial frame. But just a little bit of background, if I could then. I'm a cellist. And you can see a cello right over there. I have three cellos in my room here. And I am black. My dad was African-American, but I'm actually mixed race. My mother was from Norway. And there was my little Norwegian flag right there. And she never became a U.S. citizen. She was a proud green card holder of these United States of America until she passed in 2010. And by some miracle, my parents did stay together since they were married in 1967 years before loving the Virginia, essentially got rid of the anti-miscegenation laws that forbade blacks and whites from marrying in the United States. That was 1967. At any rate, the reason why I got into music in just a few sentences, my dad, African-American dad, was very committed, in fact, to white racial framing. And that's one of the most important parts, I think, to take away from a white racial frame. That language is, by the way, from Joe Fagan, a very famous sociologist at Texas A&M University, a great American and an elderly white man, by the way. And my dad, who was black, was very committed to white racial framing. He believed that the greatest author was Shakespeare, that the greatest composer was Beethoven. And he would have vehemently denied that these things had anything to do with race, which is another thing that whiteness teaches us. You're not supposed to link the greatness of our Michelangeloes or our Shakespeare's to race. You just can't do that. It's above race. It's the non-racial greatness and exceptionalism and all of that stuff that we have been taught is so operative with people with names like Shakespeare and Beethoven and Brahms. So taking that impetus from my dad, I began playing the cello. And I ended up going into cello and classical music. I spent years in Russia training. I'm a Russian speaker also. In fact, that's where I met my wife, who is a dual citizen with Russia in the United States, as is our 13-year-old son. We don't need to go down the Russia rabbit hole right now. That's probably too painful for me anyway. But I did spend seven years of my life in total in Russia. And that was all part of the white racial framing. Of course, you know, Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich and Prokofiev are very much part of our music academies, certainly in the United Kingdom and as well in the United States. But I did go through some troubles in my career. Most significantly, a 10-year battle for two years. I had to fight to get tenure at my university. This was 2014 to 2016. And consequently, I did emerge victorious after two years. But there was a lot of anti-blackness going on at that time with the person who was in power for our department he's since retired. And because of that, that's why I went down this path of race scholarship in a more significant way. I'm not naive. I always have known that racism is a thing worldwide. But that's really what pushed me in that direction. I should also mention that I'll do one shameless plug for a book that I have coming out this spring at the University of Michigan Press, which is a summation of all of these ideas, an extension, if you will, of that long article that I wrote. It's called On Music Theory and Making Music More Welcoming For Everyone. It should be available in March or April of next year at the University of Michigan Press. No more shameless plugs. So at any rate, I began doing this work to dig into the dirt of music theory and figure out why, in fact, as the American Society for Music Theory tells us, 94% of tenured faculty, that which is to say faculty with power at our music institutions and conservatories, are white. That's their number, not mine. And furthermore, these 94% white people in the society desperately talk about diversity and inclusivity and how they want to make these changes. Well, for 20 years, I watched that and I realized that nothing changes. In other words, 20 years ago, it might have been 96% white people with tenure. And over 20 years, it became 94. So I think it's pretty clear that that which was said in these white frameworks that they really do want to bring in people of color and more women and other minoritized groups was just actually not true. So that's really what the goal of this work is, is trying to figure out why that's the case. A couple more points about the project and what I was trying to do. I very much wanted to focus on the United States and music theory. I was born in Long Beach. I'm a US citizen only. And I'm a music theorist. I have a PhD from Yale University, one of our finest music theory programs for PhDs. And I limited it to that. It's really important. It's really amazing to me how quickly it went beyond the United States and its borders and beyond the field of music theory. I think maybe the country first and foremost that has commented on my work outside of the United States would be, well, probably Canada first and then the United Kingdom, maybe the United Kingdom first and foremost outside of the United States. And I often have to say, I'm not writing about England. You can comment all you want, English people. That's fine. But I don't know. And I've had people comment quite agitated, sometimes consternated. And it's quite easy for me to say, I'm really only talking about the United States. But of course, these arguments extend beyond the United States and they extend beyond music theory. Now, with respect to music theory, it's really important to point out. And I think Catherine will talk about ethnomusicology and I don't want to use the word complicity in white racial framing. That might be a little bit too strong, but it's involvement in white racial framing in our music academies. But it's really important to note that in the United States, music theory broke off from musicology. Of course, all of this comes from Musikwissenschaft, the German concept of musicology, and then the vergleichende, which is the comparative musicology, which became ethnomusicology, the systematisch and the historisch branches, which became loosely speaking music theory in the United States. That would be the systematic musicology, as opposed to historical musicology. And I make that point because so many people outside of music theory have commented on this work. And again, I have to say, I'm a music theorist. So you can say what you want about ethnomusicology, musicology, but I'm looking at this as a music theorist. Sorry to interrupt you, but just one issue, which is always interesting for those of us who are well outside the classical music world, which I am, which is that music theory lays claim to music, as if it's the theory of all music. But in fact, it's a rather specific form of music, which lies in the heart of music theory. Yeah. And that's that music. Yeah. Yeah, that's exactly right. So music theory in its United States sense is a very rarefied field, which acts exactly what Casper said, it does lay claims to make these broad assertions about music and how music works in the grandest scheme of things. And the final point I'll talk about here, because this was a big part of the paper was the figure Heinrich Schenker, who loomed large in that paper. Now, this was a I called in the in the long article, a fervent racist. And there's no question that he was, if you simply read what he wrote, he was very prolific in terms of just writing prose. And he was extremely hateful and angry and anti submit, he was Jewish himself, yet he was quite anti Semitic. There's some very anti Semitic writings that he wrote. He was an inveterate racist. Yes. And he was anti woman. He had many sexist comments. And I simply pointed out, but I highlighted the anti black and the racist comments in that talk. And then in that paper, very strongly, Heinrich Schenker died in 1935. And he died in Vienna. So I guess he died on time in that sense. So people have used his ideas came to the United States in the late 1930s, the first person who who would promote them was called Hans Weisse. And then other figures like also all of us, you know, Jonas Ernst Oster and others. And they have promoted his ideas something as as almost biblical in music theory. And it always struck me as strange that it did strike of a cult almost the way that we were supposed to follow this figure. I always did very well in my Schenker analysis classes. I've taught it myself at the graduate level. But it always seemed a little unseemly to me to just completely erase all of the the racism and the hate and the anger, especially because Schenker very clearly said himself, please don't erase the racism when you teach my musical ideas. They're part of the same system. That's such an important part of what you say there, because it's not just that you're saying, here's a person who had this kind of dark secret that he was a racist, it's that you draw parallels between the racial thinking and the thinking about music around this question of kind of hierarchy. Can you explain that a little bit? Yeah. So exactly. He was very clear when he was saying that he wanted to put these two things together. He had a very unified worldview and certain figures, conservative figures have questioned my linking of his hierarchical racial thinking with his hierarchical musical thinking. And many people have misquoted many things that I've said. That's very common when somebody just disagrees on a kind of gut level, but they can't really say, they can't say that Schenker didn't praise Adolf Hitler. He did. Here's what he said. And it's almost as if I get treated as if I raised Adolf Hitler. Yes, I have been called a black anti-Semite. That's just part of doing this work, right? It's part of the silly response. But to get back to the hierarchical question, Caspar, and I'll finish up, it's extremely important to realize I've never said that hierarchies don't exist. They're the nature. They happen all over the place. And if somebody would like to point them out and make an argument, fine. What we cannot do with Heinrich Schenker and what we have done in American music theory is we have separated his belief that racial hierarchies and musical hierarchies were part of the same system. And it's not by chance that his 12, yes, only 12, that was the number he had, there were only 12 true genius composers to Heinrich Schenker. In his mind, of course, they were all white cisgender men. We don't really even need to say that. I often do like to point out, however, that one of them was, wait for it, Domenico Scarlatti. Thank you. It's just great, right? Because no, it's not Tchaikovsky. It's not even Wagner. In other words, people that our white racial frame tell us are in fact the genius great composers. But even Schenker himself didn't have them on the list, but he had Domenico Scarlatti, which already kind of points to this ridiculousness. But the disambiguating, the separation of Schenker's horrific beliefs about people versus his somewhat useful ideas about music, admittedly, has in fact caused a situation whereby in the United States we have created very hostile environments in our music classrooms for people who do not identify as white cisgender men, preferably straight, right? There's something about the system that has been created, which continues to exclude, despite all the rhetoric about diversity and inclusion and all of that stuff, it continues to reproduce the whiteness at the heart of the system. That is exactly what white racial framing is, right? That's what Joe Fagan has written of several books I'm on. So thank you. I'll stop now to let Ted talk about that. Thank you very much. And we're going to get back, I hope, to the responses to the paper, because I think it's been quite fascinating and to see what it's lashed out. The point I'd love to make, Phil, just this reminds me very much of when I was a postgraduate student, I did a course with Paul Gilroy, a goldsmith when he was teaching in the sociology department. And he made us read Heidegger and he didn't want us to stop at the point, which is a fact, which was that Heidegger was a Nazi. He wanted us to read the philosophy and figure out if there was some connection between the nature of the philosophical thought and the racism, the overt racism. And I feel that what you're doing is very sort of similar. That's what it reminded me of. Thank you so much. I should just say, just for those of you watching that poor old Nate, I stuck him in the classroom, which has got these lights, which just seem to go off whenever. So he is there, he will talk and when he talks, he's going to put his light on. But for the moment, Nate, you don't have to keep getting up and doing it. I'm really sorry about that. It's not his fault. It's O.S. Catherine, we've already heard about ethnomusicology a little bit about the origin of ethnomusicology as when it broke away from music theory. So to be very crude, music theory, classical music, staying with the Western art music tradition, ethnomusicology or musicology developing into ethnomusicology, it's comparative. Clearly, ethnomusicology knows that not all composers are white, right? Because you're looking at music from India and Africa and Middle East. So there's no problem with ethnomusicology, right? It doesn't suffer from these same things. Well, hi, everybody. It's quite lovely that I'm the nice white lady on the panel, because ethnomusicology is the nice white lady of music studies. It is, of course, complicit in whiteness and complicit in patriarchy in all sorts of ways. But before I get onto ethnomusicology, I just wanted to respond a little bit to Phil's essay and to his work on Schenker, because of course, I went to Conservatoire. I was a viola player in Australia, and we did Schenker. We had an American music theorist, and I love Schenker, because Schenker just works. It's really easy if you've got a kind of a mathematical brain and so on. But it only works for a very specific repertoire. And it's basically those 12 composers plus other people writing in that very specific kind of 1780 to 1900 style Europeans, right? So this is a really important point. And I left Western classical music largely because I was bored with being a viola player in a chamber orchestra where basically you get to beta. You don't do the 1780 to 1900 stuff. But I fell in love with Hindustani music. And I remember my professor, Richard Wittes, who was at So Us, I asked him once why as somebody who was really keen music theorist and continued to be a music theorist, continues to be a music theorist, all his career, as well as being an ethnographer. I said, what got you interested in Indian music? And he said, well, I found the Raga really compelling, and I just did not see why it should not be subject to the same kind of equality of treatment in terms of music theory and understanding it from the point of view of its patterns and its compulsions and its phrases and its tensions and so on as Western art music. And that it should be on an equal platform, which I loved. But the other point I wanted to connection I wanted to make about with Shanker is that the first time I hadn't done Shanker since the early 90s and the first time I read Phil's piece, it was just like, oh my God, he was a horrific racist, horrific racist. And I hadn't known that. And it reminds me, I spent a lot of time online as a historian of colonialism and of empire, you know, arguing with people who say, oh, empire wasn't that bad. There were good things about it, but the railways, you know, hashtag, but the railways. And, you know, my argument is that anybody who thinks that empire wasn't racist and was largely benign, etc. simply has not spent enough time reading the primary sources. And this is really true of the primary sources for the beginnings of comparative musicology, which are, you know, are essentially biological racism, but placed in this very kind of systematic, systematic, you know, supposedly empirical frame, which, you know, the white racial frame, but in this case, the colonial frame. And so, musicology, you know, historical musicology, the history of the people with history, i.e., us, and comparative musicology, if I click into music business shaft, were actually invented at the same time and split at the same time in 1888 by a German, possibly Austrian, but Germanic music philosopher called Guido Adler. And this split has been maintained ever since. And comparative musicology eventually evolved into a slightly different discipline of musicology after the horrendous result of World War II, you know, which was the, you know, the ultimate in eugenics, which had been the driving force behind a lot of comparative musicology. You compare the rest of the world's music today to find the historical roots from the most primitive, primitive music to the most sophisticated music, which of course is Western art music. And because the history of Western music is embedded in today's musical systems, anyway, it became really apparent through long study of this material that this just simply wasn't true. And that, so to say that Hindustani music, the music I study in North Indian classical music was the same as the music of ancient Greece in evolutionary terms, was just simply not true and bizarre and really they had no relationship and etc. And this led to an understanding that the music of the world needed to be treated as essentially equal and equally interesting and very much informed by anthropology and looking at music as part of a whole cultural system. If I could Catherine, that's a great point, this whole equality and putting things on an equal playing field. It's extremely unnerving for in the white racial frame to do that for the simple reason that it upsets the racial order of things, right? The historical racial order of things. Also, in terms of white supremacy, it also upsets the patriarchal order of things in a very similar fashion. Something that's always struck me is that the Society for Ethnomusicology in the United States, for example, is about 50-50 women and men, which historically the American Musicological Society and the Society for Music Theory were not. And I think this doesn't necessarily say anything, but it's an interesting thing to think about. And so ethnomusicologists have always kind of seen themselves as the good guys, right? We're the good guys. We're the ones who recognize the equality of the rest of the worlds, except when you notice that most of them are whites and the level of kind of smuggery is kind of slightly breathtaking. And there's always been this kind of real kind of tension about who ethnomusicologists actually are because there's always this sense that they've kind of broken away from musicology by downplaying history, downplaying music theory, focusing on anthropology. But then what you do with historical work on non-Western culture. So there's this weird kind of split. And the basic problem as I see it is that if we are going to decolonize music studies, we would actually have to destroy the split between musicology and ethnomusicology. And if one thinks of music theory as currently being part of musicology and ethnomusicology as being on the other side of the split, as it always has been, that split needs to kind of be erased. And we need to be thinking about history of all of the world's music, anthropology of all of the world's music, theory of all of the world's music. But the problem is there is so much invested institutionally in maintaining the split, especially in somewhere like the United States, where people get hired to music theory possessions. And when they're hired to music theory possessions, they're not hired, if they are, correct me if I'm wrong, Phil, but they're not hired if they're theorists of Indian ragas. That's right. They don't know about music, proper music. So that music theory is specifically white in that case. But just before Phil's article got some attention from the Shankirians, which I know somebody else will talk about, there was a big stone thrown in the pond, the complacent pond of ethnomusicology. It's really, really important article by Danielle Brown, which is an open letter on racism in music studies, especially in ethnomusicology and music education. And her point was that there is this very kind of complacent sense that ethnomusicology is fine, not racist, et cetera, except it perpetuates racism by basically putting all the white people, it's white experts. And being confronted with one's whiteness is actually really can be really quite threatening and painful and very hard to kind of sit and listen. And this created a huge storm in ethnomusicology online and on the Society for Ethnomusicology list, which eventually led to the resignation of the of SEM's president. But what she had to say was absolutely true. And I just just to kind of finish off, I just want to read a little bit from Gage Averall's letter in support of her saying, let me just find it. People should think about why leadership in SEM is not attractive to scholars of color, because there's very few scholars of color who so far have risen to the top of the Society for Ethnomusicology. It's very wide. It may have something to do with tokenism, but also with the lack of a pervasive change in attitude in our society, a society that's supposed to be about non-hierarchical dialogue of world cultures. But that still tends towards the representation of the rest of the world by a privileged white Western intelligentsia, and Professor Averall says, of which I am very much a member. SEM's recent statement of support for Black Lives Matter enters a very crowded space of virtue signalling that unless it is accompanied with a deep change in how the society thinks of itself will be heard as just more good intentions, which can be toxic without real change. And that was really the kind of, you know, sort of upshot of that discussion. And just to kind of put it very briefly in context, the EDEMS report was published last week, which is the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion and Music Studies report on basically the state of what music education looks like in the UK, UK higher education. And they found that only one sixth of British Asian, people are students of British Asian backgrounds and compared to the rest of the university cohort are in music studies, sorry, 2%. And that remains the case all the way through to kind of professor level. Half the numbers of Black British students who you'd expect with, you know, compared to the demographic, start as undergraduates and it diminishes and diminishes and diminishes. So rather than set the, the British Asians just basically saying it's the same 2%. It diminishes amongst people who are Black and mixed race to the point that there are no Black professors in music studies in higher education in the United Kingdom. And that is the real issue to me. Cassian, thank you. I mean, if we can come out of this meeting by destroying two disciplines in one go, let's do it. I really appreciate that. A couple of things I want to just say that please feel free to use the chat while we're talking. We won't, you know, put questions or comments or anything like that. After we've kind of reached a natural end to the discussion that we're having, we will open the floor and we'll encourage you to ask those questions and turn on your camera. You don't have to. We can read them out from the chat, but feel free to use that, use that. In fact, I was going to go to Kiam next, but I think because of what you just said, Catherine, I think I want to hear from Nate right now. Nate, he's just going to go and turn on his, oh look, I can see myself in his camera. That's weird, isn't it? Hello. He's just turning on his light. The reason I wanted to go to Nate is because you made this statement about, you know, the lack, basically the lack of black teachers teaching music, the lack of interest or apparent lack of interest of black students. And Nate is kind of on the cold face of that a little bit. Nate, perhaps you could tell us about the book that you've just written and published and what you're doing with that and your interaction in schools and then maybe link that to what Catherine and Philip said in terms of, you know, the whiteness of music education, what you see on the school level. Sure. All right. As both of you are talking, it's been fascinating. I've been making a few notes and I'll come back to things that you both said. But yeah, just to pick up what you just said, Casper, the book that I've just published is called Where Are The Instruments West Africa. And it's a book for, say, two to five-year-olds, two to six-year-olds, to really introduce them to instruments from West Africa. Because there's this idea, and I think we see it in schools, we see it in education, why do you think that the only music that's taught to young people is pretty much, from West Africa, anyway, is pretty much jambay drumming, which is, you know, like an add-on to everything else that children study. And so the whole point of this book, very simple book, was not only to introduce instruments from West Africa that many of you might have heard of, and some of you may not have heard of, such as the Oloon Loon, for example, on the Quora, on barra drums, and all different kinds. But also in the way of presenting what these instruments are and where they come from, it was really important to make sure that these instruments were shown to be part of specific countries, even though, obviously, for colonial reasons, we don't know, it's difficult to pinpoint exactly where some of these instruments were from, but, you know, it's generally assigning different certain instruments to certain countries, and being very specific about where these countries are and giving background to these countries, so whether it is talking about a specific natural resource or a natural, for example, the Pink Lake Rhett Bar in St. Gaul, for example. So giving young children, not only the instruments, but also giving them context into the continent and this specific part of the continent itself. Because oftentimes, for many young people, the ideas of West Africa, or even Africa in general, forget about West Africa, right? It's Africa, as the country, Africa, is often, you know, one of poverty, it's one of war, it's one of famine, it's one of disease, it's one which is, in many different ways, doing much better than the UK, especially right now. Yeah, no doubt. So what's really interesting, and like I said before, before everyone came on with Philip Ewell's work, I wrote a poem called, If I Were A Racist, and to be honest with you, I don't remember if I saw your article before or after, but it was pretty much a similar time I published that around June of 2020. I remember that poem. Oh, wow, okay. And I think this, it was a, in some ways, a frustration of mine, I think for years of thinking about these things, starting from when I was an undergrad, and I decided to, even though I didn't get any help, unfortunately, I decided to write about music from Barbados, which was me in some ways exploring my heritage. Were you, sorry to interrupt, Nate, were you a music student? I was a music student, yeah. And when you said you didn't get any help, was that because there was no expertise available to you in terms of- Exactly, exactly. It was just a matter of, you know, me trying to figure out and trying to learn a bit more about my own heritage by realizing that we're talking about a very specific, Barbados is a very, very small island, we're talking less than 400,000 people on the island. But it has very interesting, and I use that word loosely, colonial history, even to the point where it was made of a public last year, and which is in many different ways, like start to spark other Caribbean countries becoming republics as well, also who already are. But in that process, it started to, and then, in looking to some of the things that you were talking about earlier, start to see how some of the historical writings about Barbados specifically, and specifically about the music, some of the derogatory ways they talk about, you know, the Africans and their barbaric music, etc., etc., and these were things that, you know, I'm 21, 22 at the time, never come across, never told, and I think this is one of the really interesting things about white racial framing, if I can use your term, is that we're not taught these things, right? These are things that we think for many of us, we learn because we try to figure out as opposed to being in class and, you know, hearing this language kind of banded around. We don't hear it, it doesn't come up, and I think part of what I'm really passionate about is helping young people especially, because I think in different ways adults are, we're already lost, we're already thinking, but it's about younger generation helping them to understand that, just like for me, it was important, and it is important for you to explore your own history, not necessarily just from a racial standpoint, but your identity, and you can do that through music, right? It doesn't have to be in spite of music or it doesn't have to be outside of music, you can do it through it, and so even though I didn't get that much help in terms of, you know, the content and how I started to frame my dissertation, which ended up being a look into why there isn't much written about talk music in first place, and what was interesting in that actually, the person who, the only other person who'd written about this type of music extensively was a white woman from Newcastle, so in effect it was the only person of Barbadian heritage to have written about this music from Barbados, right? And then in a really weird twist, I went to Barbados and I presented and I talked about its music, and I asked to get my, you know, to get the, do you put papers into the museum, the National Museum, and I said, yes, but only if you have a PhD, and to me that, you know, again, there's so many different threads and so many different things that go off into you, but again, this talks to me about how knowledge is valued and what knowledge is valued, you know, you have to have a PhD to be able for your work to be of sufficient quality to be in a bar in Barbados, right? So there are so many different, like I said, some different threads to pull on, but essentially I think what we, some of the things that we're looking at anyway is just how whiteness has been so undetected, kind of like this, you know, carbon monoxide, which is, it's just there, and we've, you know, we can't detect it, and we haven't been able to detect it until, I think, not even fairly recently, but it hasn't been given the platform I think it needed to until fairly recently, and it took, I don't think it even took, I think it took George Floyd to be murdered, I think it took a worldwide pandemic, people to stop and for, to be frank, white people to not be able to do what they normally do, to be able to actually see, okay, actually there's these brown folks and black folks are talking about something that we actually can't, we can't, we have to see it, we have to pay attention to it, because I can't do, I can't not blank out and do what I normally do, right, so I think that's, yeah, anyway, thank you, Nate, that is wonderful, and we need to share that poem with you, as I've seen it, and it is wonderful, and I'm sure it's on the internet somewhere, I imagine, and thank you everyone, Catherine and Kiam have been sharing the reading, I'm so thrilled that people are asking for reading, it's not the usual way around, so I just want to bring Kiam in here, now of course we can take what Kiam says very seriously, because he has got a PhD, congratulations Kiam, that was just recently, PhD, what you said you were still worth listening to before that, but well done, I know it can be quieter, I want to sort of bring this, you know, well, one of the reasons I was so excited to bring you together with Phil and Catherine in this conversation, and Nate, was that what, I mean you and I have been done in events before where we've talked about your work, so I've got a little handle on it, and it seems to me the most concrete example of the kind of thing that Phil was talking about across music theory, so can you just, first of all, just give us a little sense of your, a potted sense of your kind of musical background, because it's quite, I think it's quite material, and then tell us about what you discovered, or why you did what you did with music technology. Thanks very much Kasper, I just want to say a quick thanks to everybody, your all massive inspirations, especially your work Phil, you put me on a couple of interesting paths while I was doing my study, so I'll share a couple of those anecdotes in a minute, and thank you again Kasper for the invitation. Quick note about me, so my family's from Iraq, from Baghdad, I was born in Damascus, in Syria, I started playing the violin age eight, we moved to London as refugees when I was nine, I got into punk rock, I started playing drums in metal bands, and then aged 23-24 around 2005, I enrolled myself into the ethnomusicology program at the School of Oriental and African Studies, I think it's worth saying the full name, and did, yeah I did the BA in ethnomusicology followed by a master's, and then I just took some time out, so I started playing the Rood, I started studying and researching Arabic music around the same time, and then once I'd finished the masters I took some time out to just perform and travel around the Arab world, and during that period my interest in rock music, my interest in electronic music maintained even though all of my energy was going into studying Rood, I studied Indian tabla, so as I studied Gamelan etc etc, so there was always this parallel thing going on, and one of my interests all the time was music technology, and using digital tools for making music, for recording music, so as an engineer, as a mix engineer, as a recording engineer, I was always involved in those kinds of projects, but I was always very frustrated, and to just ping back to Catherine's mentioning of her studies with Professor Widdes, I also studied Indian classical music with Professor Widdes, and I remember him talking about Shankarian analysis with regards to Indian classical music, so that was my first introduction to Shankar actually, which is kind of strange, but my frustrations at the time were like I couldn't use digital tools that I knew that I was using previously and that my friends were using, neither to learn the music that I was interested in nor the music that I was being taught, so whether it be the music from the African continent or the music from Eastern Europe or the music from Azerbaijan or Iran, or obviously Southeast Asia or South Asia, none of the tools were malleable enough to allow any kind of interaction with those musical cultures, even from an analytical and a music theory perspective, let alone a creative one, and so I put all of those frustrations aside and I concentrated on my acoustic studies, and then finally, a few years ago, the desire came back again, because I realized that one of the major problems we have as young people, not so young now but younger earlier, and this desire to connect with our heritage or with musical cultures that we have any kind of affinity for, whether we belong to them racially, biologically or not, is that many of them have somehow become irrelevant in the way that they are executed today, irrelevant in the sense that they don't have a direct relationship with the way that people live their lives today. Across the Arab world, Arab-speaking region, in Iraq, for example, the musics of those countries that were held in such a high regard in the 50s, 60s, 70s, today just cannot compete with everything else that's going on, and so I was really interested in this idea of actually being able to express myself rather than through my acoustic instrument but through some of the digital instruments, and then what I realized very quickly was that I was still up against this wall where Western art music theory is the fundamental groundwork, it's the fundamental design principle of almost all sonic technologies that we have at our disposal today, whether that be desktop audio workstations like Ableton Live or Logic or Pro Tools that people might be familiar with or drum machines, synthesizers, everything somehow stems from this fundamental design principle which is Western art music theory, and by that we're talking about the equal division of time and the equal division of pitch, and because I'm an Oud player, it's a fretless instrument because I studied the Maqam music of the Arab-speaking region and the wider Middle East, I'm very interested in tuning as well, and I found that tuning as a subject was actually a wonderful key to interrogate these tools, and through my research I obviously came across Phil's music theory in the White Racial Frame article when it was published, when he did his plenary presentation, and for me it absolutely typified this problem, that there is a supremacist perspective in music theory, in music education that Western art music is the most sophisticated, is the most advanced music in the world, and therefore its fundamental principles need to be the groundwork upon which everything else is built, and the problem with the music logic, the music tools, the sonic technologies that we have at our disposal today is that the majority of them don't allow for any other explorations except through hacks and workarounds which are incredibly frustrating, and there are a few that do have some of those capabilities, but even those capabilities are very very limited, and very often they're not meaningful, and I use this word many times and people tend to get a bit confused what I mean by meaningful design, and ultimately what I'm talking about is the ability to engage with something in a way that makes sense to the culture or to the knowledge that somebody has and wants to expand upon. The other flip side of this for me has always been this relation between culture and experimentalism, and for me culture and experimentalism are not mutually exclusive, but that's very often the idea that we are fed through the discourses and discussions whether it be within ethnomusicology or within music theory. There's somehow like, you know, if you want to do something within a musical culture that is an Anglo-European, and you want to break some of the rules, then somehow you are defacing or, you know, allowing for impurity to infest this musical tradition which should be preserved and looked after and, you know, should be documented and archived and etc. etc., whereas if you're experimenting with noise pedals and, you know, screaming out of your, I don't want to say rude words, then that's absolutely fine, you know, and this schism for me was very very problematic. So rather than being, rather than being received as an angry Arab critic of music technology, I decided to actually create a tool or a pair of tools that would allow me as a musician and a composer and a researcher and an experimentalist the opportunity to play with some of these ideas practically speaking. And what that led to was the design of two browser-based tools called Lima and Apotome. I'll share a link in the chat to them in a moment. One, Lima allows for the creation of tunings and the immediate interaction with them as alongside accessing tunings that are in a database which is being updated all the time. And Apotome is a generative music environment that is based on those tunings. And so for me having the capability to have a musical idea or a hunch or a desire and then to just be able to open my web browser next to my email and dive into an idea and hear it and feel it immediately without having to deal with workarounds and hacks and things not working etc. was really, really liberating. And I'll be very honest with everybody, I haven't stopped using it since the day we started building it. It's become a fundamental part of my workflow and a fundamental part of my research. And I just want to touch on one tiny thing which relates to Phil's work. When I was sharing some ideas on Twitter, Phil mentioned a phenomenal book to me called Black Athena by Martin Bernal and this is a phenomenal book in which Bernal basically dissects the fabrication of ancient Greece as the cradle of civilization. And the reason why it was so pertinent to me and to my work is because when you do any research about the subject of tuning, the first thing you come across is the ancient Greeks and particularly the figure of Pythagoras. And whenever you research anything about Middle Eastern tunings and the Macam system etc. the first thing that you get is that, oh this was all developed based on the works of the Greeks, it was translations of Greek works which then allowed the Arab theorists and philosophers to develop their own ideas. And so I started researching some of the Greek theories and Pythagoras etc. in order to try and understand how these links happen and what these ideas share. And thanks to Phil's recommendation of this book, all of a sudden the supremacy became blatantly clear. You have a huge amount of Oxbridge scholars and German scholars from Gottingen and elsewhere in the 19th century onwards, all literally proposing the idea that Greece was the cradle of civilization to the ridiculous point where one of them even says that it's impossible for the sciences and philosophy and mathematics and everything else to have developed from anywhere else other than Greece because nowhere else has a temperate climate that the only place that has a temperate climate in the world that would allow such philosophical development of the human mind is Greece. And this is crazy especially when you get into things to do with archaeology and for example the issue, the idea that the statues and the beautiful buildings in ancient Greece which are today seen as white marble structures were not originally white marble, they were actually colored. And the pigments that were used represented the skin color of those people that were from there and that moved around there. Another really interesting thing that I found out was everybody knows Pythagoras as being Pythagoras of Samos, which is an island supposedly in Greece, but if you type in Samos into Google Maps and start to zoom out, you'll see that it's slap bank against Turkey. And then through reading some of Pythagoras' biographies, I realized also that Pythagoras was born in Saida, Saidon in Lebanon. So all of these not even Greece. So all of these and not only that, but that he was told by his teachers in Greece in Samos to go to Egypt to study because he was so bright. And on his way, he went to Lebanon, studied in Biblas, all the temples, went off finally after 10 years to Egypt, studied all over Egypt. And then while he was there, he was taken by an army to Caldea, which is in Mesopotamia, continued studying there until finally he returned to Samos age 55. He'd spent 26 of years of his life across Lebanon, modern day Lebanon, modern day Egypt, modern day Iraq, studying in the temples with all of the mathematicians and the philosophers and the priests. So this idea that there is some kind of purity to a musical construct is just an absolute fabrication. And that supremacy which the heart of which lies in those ideas about race and about which part of the world geographically was more capable of nurturing that kind of mentality reflects exactly what Nate was saying earlier and exactly what Phil's been saying that these are supremacist racial problematics that we have inherited. And the fact that we've inherited them without questioning them is why we are at where we are at today. This is why, as Phil mentioned, we can't say the words that music theory is white, but we'd have to say it lacks diversity, right? Because ultimately upsetting that status quo means in a way those who have been perpetuating this whiteness somehow seem to lose their sense of self, their sense of culture, their sense of where they came from. And when I've been talking about these issues and sharing my work and doing workshops, etc. And there's also been a reasonable amount of pushback, particularly to an article that was published in Pitchfork magazine called Decolonizing Electronic Music Starts with its software. And many people were like, Oh my God, now, you know, where are we at with all of this woke nonsense? Ableton is racist. Is that what you're saying to me? And it's obviously not what I was saying. What I was always trying to say is that these the remnants of colonial logics are embedded within the tools that we use to think about to analyze and to create music, let alone the musical theory itself, right? And so this for me is the issue. And this is why I've been trying to kind of work against. Hi, and thank you so much for that. And you raised so many interesting things. It reminds me of so much, but the way ideology naturalizes itself or naturalizes history, and becomes unspoken or, you know, Stuart Hall writing about the way that whiteness is the kind of organizing principle of the racial hierarchy without actually being visible at all. It's just nowhere to be seen. Now you mentioned pushback to your article, Kyman, you're also earlier on when we were talking mentioned pushback to Phil. So let me just let's just note where we are. So we've been talking for about an hour, a little bit more. I realize actually, we should have scheduled this for about four hours because we've got a lot to get through. But I do want to hear I do want to get involved with with questions and things like that. So but I do want to hear from from all the panelists again before we do that. So maybe moving moving quite rapidly, I would just just to look at what's happened in the intervening years really, Phil. I mean, the end of your article from two years ago, you made some recommendations. I wonder if those recommendations, any of them have come come to be. But also I think there's been just like Kyman was mentioning with his with the article about him, some pushback and maybe you just tell us how the the forces of the white racial frame have responded to your your work. Yeah, that's a great question. Just with respect to the recommendations, generally no, I would say, you know, it's difficult to follow through on some of these structural changes that that are required. The pushback was severe. It was vociferous to my work. There was an entire journal issue devoted to not just not just answering some of the claims I made in a very short talk, but also denigrating me and denigrating, frankly, blackness. It was a very anti black enterprise. This was the volume 12 of the Journal of Schenkerian Studies, which is something I unpack in that in that book that I mentioned earlier that I have coming up. I might say it was it was absolutely libelous some of it. Yeah, it was they published an anonymous response. It was entirely not peer reviewed. And so that's the reaction, of course, one of indignation, just apoplexy, I would say the white racial frame got apoplectic when it gets challenged. So, you know, in terms of making some changes, I think Catherine had noted that there's an investment in the structures and institutions of whiteness are deeply invested in the status quo, right? It's power that they have and they want to maintain power. I can't even blame them. That's just kind of human nature in the sense that people who have power want to keep it. I understand why that is among humans. One would hope that if a human is faced with ethical and moral considerations that they could say, oh, in that case, I should probably change and relinquish some of this power. That would be the right thing to do. But that hasn't happened, certainly in a large sense in American music theory. The one thing that I would highlight in discussing pushback is what I have called a lot recently in recent lectures, the difference between DEI work, that's diversity, equity and inclusivity. You have a different initialism that you use there, but we all know what we're talking about. In Canada, it's EDI. There you go. And that, of course, especially after George Floyd was lynched in May of 2020, that's become extremely important to musical institute. It's become important in the world and certainly in the United States writ large, but it's also reflected in our music institution. So there's a lot of Black Lives Matter activity, et cetera, et cetera. But I've very much challenged that directly in a talk. I often say that DEI activities are the oxygen that white male structures need in the 21st century to justify their existence and maintain power. And that they do. When you actually come in with cold hard data and ideas for directly confronting whiteness and maleness as structural elements, which will entail dismantling some of those elements, that, by the way, is called anti-racism and not DEI. There's a very clear distinction. We should all keep that distinction in mind. That is when white male structures can get very apoplectic. And I note, not insignificant that not everybody in those white male structures is, in fact, a white cisgender man. The second in command in a white supremacist patriarchy obviously is white women. They're the second most invested in the whiteness of the system. Here in the United States, well, I won't mention any names because I feel like I'm going to swear if I do, some of the politicians, white women, who are not very nice people. I'll just leave it at that. But they're quite out there and they're quite prominent. So it's extremely important to bear those things in mind as we're pushing against these systems. It is a struggle. There's no way of getting around that. It's not something that's just going to happen organically and it's going to just be all peachy keen and everybody's happy. It's just not going to be that way because when power structures see that they might lose some power, they can kind of lose their shit. Sorry to swear there, but yeah, that's a pretty mild word. I'm sure over there too. But they do, they'll lose their shit. And that is when, but that's also when you know that you kind of have, you've made a good point. And you probably are on the right track of anti-racism in confronting these things. You know, the whiteness in the United States has become in a sense a global understanding of whiteness. I mean, our understanding of whiteness started in the 17th century. The first time it was written in legislation was in the Virginia House of Burgesses. It was a bunch of English men, right? And that was 1691. And Rebecca Engertz has a great book called The Baptism of Early Virginia, How Christianity Created Race. If somebody might want to put that in the baptism of early Virginia, if somebody can put it in the chat, Rebecca Engertz. And that colonial settler, those definitions of race created the concepts of whiteness that very much even extend to a large extent in England and continental Europe. But I hasten to add that white supremacy itself, of course, was a European invention. Let's just have a group nod on that. It was most certainly not a United States invention, white supremacy. And as I sometimes point out to European colleagues on Zoom calls, I'll tell a little secret here. The people who created white supremacy in the United States, they were from Europe. It is a little awkward, right? One thing that strikes me while I'm listening to you, we did use the word decolonizing in our kind of introduction of this event. And what you're saying very much sort of accords with work that I'm aware of, let's say, in relation to film studies, my colleague Linda Wadovy or Clive Noonco is doing this in relation to the BFI, the British Film Institute, or Unamik Sahar in relation to the creative industries, which is to suggest that as you say, that diversity initiatives and a little bit of tinkering around the edges and the odd few more black people in some kind of position, isn't just not going to do the job, but it's actually part of the problem. It's part of the problem. In fact, like I said, it's the oxygen that these structures need to justify their existence. Here in the United States, it's all about Florence Price right now. You might know that name. She was a composer. She wrote symphonies and string quartets. And now we're like, oh, that solves the problem. And I'm like, no, it doesn't. I like her music quite a bit. We need to understand why she was never put out there to begin with. And that is because she couldn't possibly have been up there with Beethoven and the others, because it upsets the racial order of things. I mean, it probably also includes telling the story of someone like Anina Simone, who's rude into classical music, was blocked by the school that didn't accept her. So there's a need to go back over that. But in terms of changing structures, Catherine, you told us a bit about the letter that went into the ethnomusicology. And what's the current state of play? Do you see any sign of a kind of changing structure of that having an impact? Or is is it still a few? I mean, I think it would be really interesting to follow up on that, because for the last, I mean, I think for the last two years, in fact, COVID teaching in a sort of 80 hours away with, you know, plus homeschooling, my son's just come home and he's just turned the TV on because the football's on. And then, you know, finishing my book. So which means I'm actually, you know, sort of probably not best place to answer this question really. But I mean, I think two years is too short a time to see any change. I think the, I mean, the issue for me is really that there shouldn't be an ethnomusicology and there shouldn't be a musicology and there shouldn't be a music theory. There should be music studies. And that is a radically egalitarian field. And, you know, I shouldn't say to Phil, well, I'm sorry, Phil, you have to study mixed race music. You're not allowed to study white people's music because you're not white. And, you know, I shouldn't be able to say to Nate, sorry, Nate, you can't study Indian ragas. You can only study the music of Barbados. So, you know, there needs to be, it needs to be much more egalitarian. But actually, I mean, I actually like to hear more from Nate, actually, about the issues with music education because none of this gets solved until we have more black people and people of color in position, which may, and it's a very long pipeline. It's a very long pipeline. And by the time you get to secondary school in the UK, it's really too late. So I know Nate's probably turning the light on. I really want to hear more from you about... Thank you for that, Link. I think that's exactly right that we need, I mean, since Nate has already said that it's much too late for all of us, because we're all adults. In terms of accessing children, Nate, what does it look like at that school level? And what do you think it would take to try and make the kinds of structural changes in music theory and ethnic musicology and music, you know, technology, you know, with the kids that you're, you know, seeing or working with? I think first and foremost, I have to say, I'm not a, I'm not in classrooms every day. So I just need to put that out there. So my view is, it's almost, well, it's not almost, but it's kind of from the outside looking in, in a sense, I'll just make that clear. And even funny enough, I was, I guess, conferred the title of professor a couple of years ago for a temporary, a temporary post. So I guess potentially the only one in the country at the moment. I don't know what to say about that. It's somehow it's cool and somehow it's not cool, right? I think one of the things that, you know, I think part of what I do is, you know, like many others, be critical of what we see, right? And sometimes just looking between the lines at certain things. So there was a document that came out, the New National Plan of Music Education that came out early this year. And one of the things that really struck me on that was they, for one, you know, after everything that's happened over the last couple of years, there was no mention of anti-racism, right? There was no mention of, of, of really of diversity in any sense really. It was quite, I guess, what we come to expect from the UK government, trying to keep everything at arm's length, right? It's a very kind of bland document, especially when it pertains to, you know, EDI issues, right? But one of the things that really struck me, it said it had a quote about, about the UK music industry and it mentioned soft power there. And it's no one really picked that up, but I looked at that and saw, hang on a second, to me that this is, they're trying to tell you something here, right? And I think it relates back to something that you've written, Philip, about, about this idea of neutrality, because I think there's this, this idea that, you know, the reason that we're studying is all nutrients, we're happy to spy on them. Yes, we can add Thomas Price in the mix, and that's great. And I make an argument as an article, I've written for a book that's coming out, I think next year, talking about how you, talking specifically about black women, how you can't, or shouldn't treat black women the same, shouldn't treat, treat Thomas Price the same way that you will treat a Wagner or you'll treat a Tchaikovsky or you treat a Beethoven, for example, because it, you shouldn't, if you do, essentially what you're doing, you're adding diversity, but you're not, you're not doing anything else, right? You're diversifying, but you're not actually looking at who these people were and the house on the wires and the wares and all of the, all of the other questions that surround them, even just existing in the first place, right? But this, going back to this idea of soft power, it just struck me that what we're dealing with here is a system, which is trying in different ways to create a group of people who think about music in a particular way, who can feed into the music industry in a particular way, so that, you know, the UK's soft power will reach more people around the world, right? And I think in some ways that's, that is, that's how deep it gets. It's, it's, it's so much more than, yes, let's, let's study the music from, from here and from here. It's like, actually, it's a way of getting people to think and be and interact so that you feed into what the UK wants to do in the world, right? So, in a sense, it's another form of colonialism that's happening that we're not even aware of. But every now and again, you hear phrases and they put it in there and we realize, actually, it's, this is not a benign, just we're trying to, we're trying to make things better for everyone. It's like, no, let's try, in some ways, it's, let's try and get everyone on board to our agenda so that we can push it to the rest of the world. Build the creative industries and, yeah. I just had a long conversation at a conference with a friend of mine who teaches at Durham in the UK and he told me about that pipeline of music, A-levels and all this different solemnization systems that are quite standardized throughout, not just the UK, but in, in former colonies. You know, in the United States, it's much more fragmented. We, we have all kinds of different things going on in our K through 12 before college, right? But yeah, exactly what you were just saying, Nate, that those roots are so very deep in a place like the United Kingdom in terms of how you, in other words, we humans, should be thinking about music and then getting it into that 12 tone, equally tempered universe, Steinways and Boesendorfers and all that. And then what, what Keim was, was talking about earlier, how it is just this, the, the, I think he said the foundation upon which other musical ideas are built. And that's just utter nonsense, obviously. If you're just, I mean, I imagine at a place like Stolas, you, you mostly, everyone here on the Zoom, Zoom gallery will agree. But we all know that those structures are there. They're very, very deep in the system. And, and I think it makes sense. It's understandable that when that power gets threatened, that's when people get very unnerved. I think Catherine had talked about some of that, the being unnerved aspect of it, which I thought was so fascinating to hear, you know, the term anti-racism being part of the discourse here as a kind of alternative. It's actually an older, I mean, you know, it was much more common to talk about anti-racism in the 1970s and 1980s in the UK as a commitment to actually focusing on racism rather than questions of diversity, or can't we all get along? And, and, and you all seem to agree that that, you know, we, we need something of that strength, something which is going to be that, you know, confrontational, I suppose you might even say to some people who were like, well, what's race got to do with anything? Well, aren't we all past that? And Casper, I'll actually take a little credit as an American for that. That's probably on the heels of our 1960s legislations went back when the United States government could legislate stuff. We can't do that anymore. But, you know, the Voting Rights Act was 64, Immigration Act 65. That's when we first allowed non-white people to legally immigrate into the United States. That was 1965, just a little FYI for my UK colleagues. And it was 1978 when diversity was born. That was the Allen Bakke case, Supreme Court case. It was the University of California versus Allen Bakke. He was a white military veteran who wanted to get into medical school at the University of California. Davis, he didn't. There were, there were a quota of minority students, ethnic minorities who were let in. It made it to the Supreme Court. It was a very messy Supreme Court case. That's precisely when diversity was born. That's when people, the Supreme Court concluded that the US has a state interest in creating diverse institutions. But little known is what they said you cannot do in 1978. And that is, you cannot directly address racial injustice in any way. So they essentially killed at that point anti-racism. The US Supreme Court, in the Bakke decision that was 78, they said enough, enough of our 1960s civil rights, enough of our Martin Luther King stuff he was murdered in 1968, right? Enough of that Title IX legislation that was 1972, enough. In 1978, the white framework of the United States said enough. And that's when they stopped addressing racial injustice directly. It's a very clear legal case. And I'm sure that that had repercussions. Thank you for that clarification. It's great that you've got these tips at the tip of your tongue, Phil. I can see that you're working on your book. Oh, happening. Thrilling things happening in the chat. People are buying people's books and what not. And I thank you for that. That's all really exciting. I'm going to get to the audience and questions very soon. So if you want to ask a question, you can either post it in the chat or you can just say that you want to ask a question in the chat. We'll use the chat function rather than hands because it's easier to see who's in what order. So please feel free to just indicate that you'd like to do that. And if you'd be willing to turn on your camera and your mic, we'd love to see you as well. It can be, I feel a bit like talking into a void, although we've got a nice group of people here. Before we do that, I just wanted to get a sense of what you think has been, I mean, this is a perhaps invidious question because I'm asking you to talk about your own, the impact of your own work. But I wonder, has these programs that you have put out into the world, because you've made them, I think, free to use, is that right? And they're browser based. Have they been decolonizing electronic music? Is there evidence that things have been changing? What's the take-up been? Do you feel good about that? I just want to bring up two points with regards to that. One, I think the issues that Philip and Nate were both talking about in terms of music education and the idea of anti-racist work are not only a UK, US, EU problem. It really is a global problem. Alongside the white supremacy, you also have white adjacent supremacy, which is really, really problematic. And what I've seen across the Arab world, the Arab-speaking region, excuse me, what I've seen across conversations with people about Southeast Asia, et cetera, the reproduction of these problems is equally as strong there. And this is something that for me is incredibly painful and dangerous because you realize that these ideas about music education from the smallest things, like children's toys, and I think of Nate a lot when I come across these ideas, children's toys are all major melodies, simple European, Anglo-European songs. That's all children's toys are based on children that grow up learning how to sing Baba Blacksheep or whatever. What's the other one about the stars, which I can't remember at the moment? Twinkle, twinkle, little star before they learn to sing or learn anything else. And this is really problematic because in my view, it doesn't have to be that way. Most of those toys just have tiny little computer chips, and those computer chips can be programmed in any way. This is one point I forgot to make earlier, which is the issue with my work that I came across is that the technology itself wasn't the problem. It's the way that the technology is being implemented, which is the problem. So that's one thing. With regards to my work, ever since we've released these tools in January 2021, I've been doing workshops and online sessions and giving lectures and seminars all over the place. And one big project I got involved in was called Nusasonic. This was initially a series of online workshops, which led to a compilation album of original works. I worked with musicians from across Southeast Asia, Philippines, Myanmar, Indonesia, et cetera, et cetera. We had a series of online workshops, then everybody produced their own electronic music track using the tools and using that way of working. We just did the same, but in a live iteration in Vietnam earlier in October. That was absolutely phenomenal. So I can't say much about how they're being used and what kind of impact they're having, but I do know that within the circles that I move and the conversations that I've been having with people, the ideas have had impact and people are becoming more and more cognizant of the fact that they are somehow self-colonizing. And back to your initial question about this idea of whether decolonizing is the right word or not. I think it's obviously been very much a keyword recently and I've been leaning more towards thinking about decolonial work, right? Practice itself rather than to decolonize some things. I don't think we're ever going to be able to decolonize things. We just need to have a decolonial approach, but I've also been thinking a lot about Edward Gleason's concept of creolization and how things should be allowed to creolize and to be creolizing all the time. So creolization is the idea of allowing different cultures to interact, but without having a definite plan and therefore allowing for results that can't be predicated in advance or predicted in advance. So I'm leaning more towards those kinds of approaches and I think a creolized music studies curriculum, a creolized music programming, a creolized creative industries would be far more generative than just trying to root out some of these change one model for another. Thank you, Kain. That's fascinating. We've got loads of questions, so let's open it up. So like I said, if you want to ask a question and I call on you, please feel free to put on your camera and your mic and ask that. I should just say that Isaac has posted a question which he says is no point in unmuting for, which is just to say he's looking for books and reading on approaching music from the kind of lens that we've kind of sketched out here, a decolonial lens. So academics, unleash yourselves onto the chat. Please do that. But in the meantime, let's have a question from Shane. Shane Veals, do you want to turn on? Yeah, hello. Greetings from Apec and Flat. I think this is a brilliant panel, so thank you everyone. So for the panel, does Spotify help or hinder? Can I start? Yes, please. So I think it's a really good question. It's probably a bit of both, but if I can add something from, you know, mildly empirical, I had an Indonesian student a couple of years ago at Master's level and she did her dissertation on Spotify and what was going on with Indonesian popular music. And her argument pretty well backed up was that Indonesian musicians are beginning to sing more and more in English rather than in Indonesian because of the Spotify algorithms that is just a great reach if you sing in English, which I think is a terrible shame for global diversity. And yes, there's just one small thing, but I'm sure other people have better informed opinions. I imagine Kai will give the most nuanced answer, I'm sure. But just briefly, I would opt for the probably more harmful than hurtful simply because the structures that are creating the Spotify's of the world clearly are functioning from that white racial frame that we've been talking about. Of course, as a musician, long ago I would, when streaming services started, I'm like, well, I know what I want to listen to. I will never succumb to this. And now I simply push, play and lap everything my computer tells. I lap it up like a dog. So we are now living in that streaming world of where it's just you push and you go and then you're going to kind of be pushed in these directions. Anyway, Kai, I'm sure you have something to add. Yeah, I just wanted to say, Spotify is like Google. If you don't know what to search for, then that's the problem. I think everything is available, whether it be Spotify or YouTube. I mean, just today, I was helping some researchers do radio program researchers, do some research about Iraqi rural music, et cetera. And everything was on YouTube. There's no need to go into libraries and everything else. But you really need to know what to search for. And knowing what to search for means that you need to have some kind of environment around you that gives you, one, represents these music in an equal way and treats them with the same amount of respect. And two, gives you a hint of where to go. World music was supposed to do this, but all it did was repropetuate the same nonsense that everybody's been fighting against. And whether that be on the concert stage or in the publications of a music press or in the compilation albums they released or in all the record labels that they influenced. So unfortunately, I think for audiences, it's still quite hard because you really have to make the effort. There needs to be an active process of research. There needs to be an active process of conversations with those who are well-versed in those music in order to be able to try and have some access. But the beauty is that you now no longer have to spend, you know, 50 sterling on some rare vinyl and get it shipped to you from wherever you can find it straight away. So that's one plus, I guess. Thank you, Brian. I mean, Nate. Oh, yeah. Sorry, I'm still in the dark. All right, we can see you. We can see. Kind of just one thing, kind of talking about that, but not really. I think another large part of all of this is how whiteness and economic issues that it's caused and is causing in the world as it relates to music education, as it relates to the industry, as it relates to scholarship as well. I think that's something which I think often we don't talk about because, again, I think this talks to the power and it talks to the resources and the finite amount of resources that we have on the planet. But I think that is definitely something to talk about and to explore more and to expose. So Spotify, helpful or harmful, I think it's a bit above. I'd say that there's more harm being caused in place, especially in, you know, hesitate to use the word, you know, the West, the phrase the West, but especially in countries that didn't profit from colonialism, let's say. There's probably a lot more harm happening there than there is in the other places. Indeed. I should say, thank you, Mohamed, for your comment. He made a comment saying, I am Indonesian. I can confirm that's true, what you said, Catherine. So I hope you gave a good mark to that dissertation. It was obviously onto something. I should say, from my perspective, I teach a lot about Spotify. I'm quite fascinated by the kind of internal politics of the issues and how it works and how it's perceived. I'm a big Spotify user, but what worries me is that in the empirical sort of investigation that I've done, which is strictly looking for records that I own and seeing if they're on Spotify, I worry that people will think that Spotify is comprehensive when it certainly is not. What is actually really interesting is when you find old records that aren't on Spotify, there's a story which is about licensing, copyright, ownership. It opens up a whole research agenda for you, but it's certainly, well, you know, it's not true that it's all there. And that's the worry thing. Thanks for your question, Shane. Great to see you. Thanks. So, Jack, you've got a question. Do you want to turn on and ask it? It may be more than one, Jack, but it's the Jack who said they wanted to ask a question. Hey, Jack. Hi. Thank you very much for hosting this and for their unspoken. My question probably would be more directed at Professor Yule. And I kind of say this from the perspective of someone who's just come out of an undergraduate in music and did a lot of analysis in that. And it'd be kind of what you think, is there validity in analytical models that have almost taken their basis from Schenker or in fact some of the Schenkerian ideas? The one that immediately came to mind would be like Eugene Nama's implication realisation model. So yeah, I just, any thoughts about that? And yeah, thank you. Oh, you're muted, Phil. Thank you, Jack. He's the one who wrote beyond Schenkerism, I think, right, Eugene Nama? And that's probably where that came from. So yeah, ramifications of Schenkerian analysis, I think essentially is the larger question here. And on the one hand, Heinrich Schenker, who was a very, very fine pianist and quite a good musician and a good vocal coach, which I very much appreciate, right? Not a soloist pianist, but a musician pianist, let's say. You know, you can sum up his linear thinking, his prolongational thinking by simply saying, you know, play through the phrase. I mean, I've taught a million music lessons and I've taken even a million and a half as a cellist and coachings and, you know, who among us hasn't said, you have to play through the phrase, you know, get the big picture. I mean, there are a million ways of saying that in any culture, right? You know, music is a temporal art and you shouldn't be thinking about one second to the next second or two second chunks, four second chunks keep going, right? Big picture, phrase, all of those things. So in that sense, there's really nothing that special about Heinrich Schenker because that's what he was doing in a harmonic sense. He was thinking about connecting harmonies, sonorities in a larger sense throughout the span of an entire movement of a composition. So in that sense, he wasn't that special, but he did a lot of work with interesting music. And I think that there are people who have built on his ideas that are actually, you know, doing some interesting things. Eugene Nommar, I don't know that specifically that what you're referring to there. I just know the book Beyond Schenkerism, which maybe I read like a lot, it's a pretty old book, I think. But with that said, just the, I'll now argue with myself just a little bit. With that said, there are many applications of Heinrich Schenker's methods that are extremely inappropriate in American music theory. The idea of applying his methods to certain jazz artists, that became popular 15 to 20 years ago, because embedded in that activity was this false notion that you could somehow raise up jazz artists to a mythically higher level of music analysis and music sophistication and frankly, musical humanity. That's what was embedded in that activity of applying Schenkerian methods to certain pop musics, to the Beatles or other pop artists. And that's just wrong. That's nonsense. It's silly and it has to be called out for what it is. There's nothing to raise up to. There is no mythically higher standard. That's the flaw in that system. And you have to call it out when you see it and when you hear it. Thank you for the question though, Jack. It was a very good question. Very fascinating point you make. It's funny. One of the other events we did for the festival ideas I interviewed Fumi Okiji. I don't know if you're familiar with her book, Phil. She wrote a book called Jazz as Critique, where she engages Adorno on the question of jazz, because Adorno is so dismissive of jazz. And some of these same areas. Adorno, again, was someone who never looked at himself in the mirror and considered questions of race and brought them to bear. Oh, that's nice, Catherine. Is there a cup of tea for me there? Oh yeah, if you'd like a cup of tea. Sorry, I was on another train at the minute floor. We have another question from Stuart, I think. Stuart, are you there? Yes, hello. Can you hear me? How are you? Hi, very well. Apologies for the views of my kitchen shelves. Thank you so much for all of this. So I saw you, Dr. Yall, in Adam Mealy's video. That was where I first came across you and your work. It was quite a wonderful video. I can assure you that the issues you brought up with music education is not just a thing in the United States, I think back to my own undergraduate where I had when I was learning horrifying stuff. And there are people now sort of working, myself included, on diversifying music curriculum. I'm particularly inspired by Bovatura de Sousa Santos, his epistemologies of the South, and bringing in kind of non-Western perspectives on music into the classroom, which I could talk about for hours, but I won't. My question was, how do you have these uncomfortable conversations with people? And this is for the wider panel in general. Without people trying to shut you down if they get quite defensive about the white racial frame and the legacy of colonialism, how do you kind of try and have the proper conversation in a constructive way? Because I've run up into this quite a few times. I can answer how I handle that. Generally speaking, if I feel that someone is coming from a bad faith position, I don't. I don't engage. That, in fact, has been one of, one thing that I think I've done pretty successfully over these last few years is I simply will refuse to engage with people I feel are coming from a bad place. And I'm a Black American, so I have a kind of a sixth sense when it comes to these things. I kind of just know, like literally a few days ago, that Norman, what's his face who writes something like called slip diss or something, you probably know about it because I think it's in the UK, wrote something and he mentioned my name. Like, I don't even know his last name and I don't want to because he's apparently trying to engage me, but he's not, right? He's clearly, he's going to defend the Beethoven side of things. I hear he's not a very nice individual, but I don't know him and I doubt I ever will. So I mean, that might not be the most helpful thing to say, but it's just honest from my side. If, however, you feel that someone is not coming from a bad place, but they're coming from a conservative place and you feel you could have an honest conversation with them and debate some issues, that also has happened with me. The one piece of advice I would give to everybody here is don't allow what I call the white male frame to, don't play on their playing field, on their pitch. We'll use the soccer term here, the football term. If you walk onto the pitch of white racial framing and try to argue, for example, that Joseph Ballone was every bit as good a composer as Franz Joseph Haydn, you lost that argument before it started. You can't do it. It cannot be done. There's no amount of data that anybody could give to say that Joseph Ballone, who you probably all know was a black composer who lived in the 18th century, who wrote music that sounds like Haydn. You won't convince somebody that it was as good as Haydn, even though that person could probably not distinguish the two if you played them two excerpts from the middle of a symphony, right? You have lost the argument before it started if you walk onto their pitch. My advice is don't, but if you feel the person's coming from a good place, say, hey, walk on over to my pitch and let's play by my rules for a little bit. In my rules, we're not going to talk about bar 57 of a third symphony. No, no. We're going to talk about the impact of a racialized system whereby we actually have been taught that there's something about this quote unquote Western system we've already talked about, how this is just a mythology of the late 19th century, by the way. The West was invented only in the late 19th century. Let us not forget. And let's talk about some of these legacies of these injustices. And then let's actually have that conversation, the conversations that we're having here, for example, and if that person is open and not coming from that bad faith place that like that Norman wants his face is, you can actually then have a conversation about bigger issues and leave Joseph Boulogne and Franz Joseph Haydn alone. They died over 200 years ago, right? So that's about as good as I can get. But that's a really good question, Stuart. Thank you. Fabulous question. And I'm going to just jump in here because I'm aware of time. And in particular for Nate, and I should because Nate's going to have to bounce in a minute because he's got a gig down the road, which I'm going to after this event. And I can't wait. And Nate can tell us what the band is. But there's someone here who's got a question for him, which I thought we don't want him to go without having a last thing to say. So I think the name is C. C. Little. Are you there? C. Hey, hello. Hi, Casper. Yeah, so I had a question kind of as a secondary school music teacher. This is something I, you know, run into a lot and figuring out how to move the the Key Stage three curriculum specifically. Because if we have students coming into year seven who can't read any music, and then we are expected, then they are expected to access GCIC and potentially A level music curriculum. How do we still create? How do we create a more equitable, anti-racist curriculum with regards to everything that Phyllis said in his article, but also that fits into the expectations that the school has, the national curriculum has, and then exam boards. This is something I care about very much because my son is in year eight, so he's doing Key Stage three right right now. And I'm astonished that he has to play the keyboards when he's never played the keyboard. He's a sax player, but and he can read music, but they make him play the keyboard, which is hard. Sorry. But that was Nate and I interacted. No, no, it's fine. Nate? Oh, absolutely. I'll try to be really quick. For one, I think, I think it's going to take a long, long, long time to be honest with you, if at all. So I think part of the focus of my work is creating resources that can be accessed outside of that. So whether it's my podcast or it's the books that I do or even some of the articles or whatever, it's for me, it's looking at like right now, yes, we're going to put pressure on some of the exam boards. We're going to work on trying to change things, but while we're trying to change things, personally, I just I feel like I need to make sure that there are resources out there for young people who want to learn about different things, but they haven't, they're not going to get it in school right now. They want to explore different styles of music or they want to figure out how to, how can I incorporate rap into my into the saxophone, which is something I'm into, right. So creating these things that sit outside of school so that they can access these things. And if they go and do GCSE, then great. And wherever you get great or good on you, if you don't go and do that, there's still stuff that you can access and still stuff you can learn from and install creating these resources, also trying to create these resources, which are totally embedded within ideas of anti-racism and totally embedded within ideas of decolonization and all these different things, rather than just being like, oh, here's something on Florence Brass going to read that. It's like, well, no, let's, let's dig into who she was. And let's, even if there's something on Mozart, all right, fine, but let's, let's, let's look at Mozart for who he was as a privileged, a privileged boy growing up in a, in a, you know, born in 1956, if I remember correctly, in a country that's, you know, not really, it's not in the throes of war. He's, he's in, he's in, you know, he's, he's got a piano in his house where you think about war equivalent at that point in time. You think about the privilege of that in love itself and his father, who was a great musician himself, who's written books and so on. So you've got this perfect storm of someone who's in an environment which is in some ways perfect to create someone who from a very young age, it's going to be amazing, right. And then just opposing that. And there's a whole thing that I did before on the link between Mozart and the Haitian revolution, right, knowing that these things are happening in a very similar time in history and, and, you know, Joseph, Joseph Boleyn, and then you have like Tucson, Tucson, the material from Haiti and just how Mozart, we often take these, especially these, these white men, right, we take them, we put them in a bubble and we say, well, they're great and they make this music, but, you know, I think part of it is zooming out and illuminating these figures and saying, well, actually, they were part, they were human beings in this part of the world, this particular point in time. And I think this is even something, and I'm going to stop now, but this is something I think Christianity has to wrestle with as well, where Christianity kind of pulses this thing of this is, this is how the world is, whereas, you know, the Bible is taken from a very specific point in history, a very specific point in time, right. Anyway, but it goes on and on, but there's, I think I really want to read more into stuff like this. I think I've been looking at a lot of a few theologians who talk about whiteness and talk about how, you know, you can't divorce whiteness from Christianity. And when you start to look at the, you know, Christianity as a colonizing force in themselves, and you look at music, you look at all the different things that you start to see links between all of these things. So yeah, I'll leave it at that. Thank you, Nate. And then thanks for the question. It's a great question. And I love that idea that contextualizing this stuff, you know, historically putting them on the same timeline, thinking what's happening at the same time as what, you know, going back to what Kayam was saying about, you know, tracing the journey of some of these people, which actually contradicts the way they've been sold. So we're almost out of time, but Robert is joined, Matthew, I'm aware that you're, you've got a question to ask, and you'll be the last question, but Robert just wanted to make a comment, or maybe you have a question to join in about, about education and kids. Yes, exactly. Thank you so much. This has really been a wonderful, wonderful panel. I'm chiming in from Germany. I've been teaching music here for now about six years from ages 10 to 18 approximately. And one of the problems I see is number one, of course, also with my with with older colleagues, not being willing to really relinquish power in a sense, not in power and being in the curriculum, of course, I'm not willing to say, okay, I'm going to change the curriculum, which means leaving something out that's been that way for 20, 30 years. It's really excruciatingly difficult for them. But at the same time, the this racism and also this whiteness is perpetuated by simply a lack of material lack of resources. Because I mean, honestly, as a teacher, I don't have a huge amount of time to do a lot of research, to prepare the material to have to to really break it down for for for children for teenagers that makes it it's really, really difficult for me. And then when I also think back to my to to to my own university education in Berlin, I had one semester on Turkish music. And two semesters on jazz theory. That's it. That's it. So my even my background is really limited and now trying to rework that trying to prepare that on my own is it is really difficult is really hard to do when you're not when you don't have the university resources anymore. And so this needs this is something that really needs to change from the ground up. And I agree with what what Nate Holder said, this is going to this is going to take years is going to take decades of real work from the ground up. And for me, I'm lucky enough to be at at the moment be the in charge of the of the the music at my school so I can start reworking the curriculum slowly but surely especially since in three or four years, my older colleagues will both go retire, exactly. Thank you, both retire. So I have the I have the the the chance, the ability to do this. But honestly, that's what it will take. It'll take a lot of generational change and years and years of work material being I mean, if I have a look at the material that I have at my disposal, it is, it is shocking the way not with the way music is described and the way it is, it's terrible, frankly. Can I jump in there? Robert, thank you. It's really, really great comment. And it's I've heard this from a number of music teachers who are primary school, even secondary school level. So what you've highlighted here are two major issues. One is that musicians that end up becoming teachers themselves don't have the diversity of musical knowledge in mind because they were never given the opportunity to study it. Number two, that absolute lack of materials that exists. You're right that it's a project of generations because ultimately, if you want to bring up an entire new generation of music teachers that have this knowledge or at least some access to it, they know where to start for them to be able to develop things. That's one thing, but I don't, I wouldn't think that it's that big of a project when it comes to creating materials that allow educators, a semblance of confidence that they can pass some of that information on. The issue with that I've seen particularly in the UK is that other musical cultures end up being presented from within the white frame of the UK or your European mindset. So you'll get something like, hey, let's talk about Indian classical music. So today's class is called Curry and Tabla. And so we're going to talk about, this kind of stuff is incredibly problematic because it just continues to reperpetuate these issues. So I think what needs to be done is an approach to creating these kinds of resources that does not demean, that maintains this equality of representation, you know, because it's just too difficult for people to get out of their mind. So that's a big one. Thank you. And just to say that Robert, Georgie Pope, who's my good friend and colleague at SOAS has posted, she's got a music charity and she's working on some resources. There's a link there. There's various people, we can call it plugging if you want, but putting relevant books in front of you, whether they were written by people on the panel or not. So grab those. And you know, this is going to be a collaborative and a collective resource gathering, hasn't it? So I'm absolutely, absolutely. It's completely inspiring. And when I came across Professor Ewell's work two years ago, it honestly blew my mind and it opened my eyes to something that I had suspected, but I had never seen. I had never, it's just, and it really absolutely. That's the thing, isn't it? I mean, nobody talks to us about why you're uprightness. That's it today. It's not something that people tell us. You're going to benefit from the way the world is organized. You know, there's this other stuff out there which is being done. It's become, you know, it can be shocking really. If I could just, if I could just say, we talked about pushback. There was pushback, not just to the talk, but to the article which came out afterward, the one that we're discussing here. I unpacked that in the monograph. They tried to suppress the publication of that long article. It was a big battle behind the scenes. It was the white racial frame of music theory doing everything it could to suppress publication of that. And I explained that over the course of five or six pages. So that part, that's also part of the narrative, right? Now I have a book. I bet all of those people are really into free speech too. I mean, you know, this is not separate. What we're talking about is not separate from the wider world, the world of politics and look how hard, you know, as it were the white racial frame in, in America in general or in the Western world in general is going to fight. They are going to fight to the end because they feel this is their life or death. You know, we are giving up. We're being replaced, etc. Time for one more question. Matthew, before we go, let me just say this. This has been so fascinating. It's been a kind of culmination of, you know, of something I really wanted to happen. But I hope this isn't the end of it. And I would summarize it like this. When I was a PhD student working on, you know, I work on kind of dance music and Afro diasporic music. And I just remember picking up a book in the library which called itself the Grove Dictionary of Music. And there was no entry for James Brown. And I thought, well, how can that be? Isn't James Brown music? So what we're doing is we're going to destroy music theory. We're going to destroy the music college. We're going to bring it together under music studies. And we're going to get a dictionary with a proper dictionary. He's got music dictionary of music with James Brown in it and all the other music. And it's going to be a very large book. I would like to, will you join me please in whatever way you like to thank my amazing panel, Nate, who's just getting ready for a gig and is running straight on to stage. And I'll see him in a minute. Catherine Schofield, Kaim Alami, and Phil. I couldn't thank you more for writing what you did and the work you're doing. I can't wait to read your book and consider yourself part of the family. And let's work together more in the future. So just thanks so much. It's been really fun. Thank you for this, Casper. Thanks everybody. Just to let everyone know this has been recorded. I'll make the recording available to you all so that you can use it in whatever way you like and spread the word. Thanks a lot. Cheers. See you all right now. Thanks everyone. Thank you. Bye. Thank you. Have a nice evening. Thank you.