Switched on Pop - Reinventing Bach

Episode Date: March 28, 2023

If you’ve ever learned classical piano, you probably tried to play one of Bach’s Inventions. The composer wrote fifteen pieces containing the most important fifteen keys in order to teach his son the fundamentals of piano and composition. Today, they remain some of the most popular pieces of piano music. Acclaimed jazz pianist Dan Tepfer recently revisited his childhood music books seeing them in a way he’d never realized as a student: the Inventions are much more than novice piano works. For Tepfer, each of the Inventions not only highlight masterful command over harmony and counterpoint, but also contain moving character arcs that resemble the hero’s journey. A character is introduced at home in place of safety in act I. And then they are thrust into chaos and must overcome unsurmountable challenges in Act II. Finally, in Act III, our hero overcomes their final battle and returns home transformed by the journey. Once Tepfer heard this character arc, he started to apply it to his own free improv. Through studying Bach, Tepfer conceived a new album: Inventions / Reinventions. In this project Tepfer fills in the missing keys from the Bach to complete all twenty four keys (there are twelve major and twelve minor keys) while updating the music with modern improvisation. In this conversation Tepfer walks co-host Charlie Harding through his process of playing Bach and applying it to jazz improv. Listen to Dan Tepfer’s Inventions / Reinventions on StorySound Records Listen to Into It with Sam Sanders on Fair Use Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. It's a bone-chilling 20-degree night in Washington Heights in New York City. I'm in the crypt of a church surrounded by candlelight. There's a piano in the center of the space. Pianist Dan Tepfer is walking towards it. He sits down and starts playing. This is Johann Sebastian Bach's invention in C major, one of 15 pieces the composer wrote in order to teach his son the fundamentals of piano and composition.

If you've ever learned classical piano, you probably tried one of these pieces. There's some of the most popular piano works ever. But that night, Dan Tepfer didn't just play Bach's inventions. This was the launch of his album, Inventions Reinventions, where he also played his own free improvisations responding to the Bach, flights of creative expression that took this century's old music and made it sound brand new. Dan Tepfer is an acclaimed jazz pianist who has performed with such luminaries as Lee Connitz and Farrow Sanders, and after his performance, I knew I had to speak with Dan to understand how he uses these ancient harmonies

to inspire his 21st century craft. There's a lot of musical detail in our conversation, but I believe even if you don't understand every term, you'll come away from Dan's approach with a new appreciation for the mind of a concert pianist, because classical music isn't just notes on a page. It's a living language unto itself, and it still has much to tell us. And box inventions, for Dan, they're not just technically perfect pieces of composition. They tell a story. The story of the hero's journey.

I'm Dan Tepfer. I'm a pianist, composer, and actually sometimes coder, and I have a new record called Inventions, Reinventions on Story Sound Records. Take me to the start of this project. Why did you want to work with Bach and his inventions? The genesis of this project really lies in my fascination with free improvisation. I absolutely love the idea of being able to sit down and make up music from nothing. That's something I've just loved since I was a kid. but there was always something frustrating to me about doing free improvisation, which is that I was just following my nose from one point to another. And I think in music that is satisfying, there's an overarching unity to it.

And for me, there was this frustration with free improvisation where I would just kind of be on this journey from one moment to the next, instead of being like Bach, where there's this, it's like a tree-like structure, where there's a central unity to it all, you know? I put out this record in 2011 called Goldberg Variations Variations, where I play the Golber Variations, All 30 of them by Bach. After each one, I improvise a variation in response. And playing that project led me to dive way deeper into Bach than I ever had before,

even though I'd been playing Bach since I was a kid, because I just realized I didn't understand how it worked well enough. So I started taking harmony and counterpoint lessons, again, as an adult. I'd done a little bit of this in college, but it was very superficial. And suddenly, this understanding of what Bach was doing opened up for me. And one of the things that I took kind of as a test to see if I really did understand the mechanisms behind his work, was to look at the inventions. I remember them as a kid being so fascinated with them and having this nagging question in my mind, which is like, okay, there are so few notes on the page. How come it sounds so deep?

And then the immediate thing they came up for me as an improviser was like, wait a minute, maybe I can use those same ideas, which are essentially ideas about narrative form and music in free improvisation. Maybe it would make sense. Maybe it would finally have that overarching unity that I wanted it to have. What is that form? What is that storytelling structure? So I like to think of it as directly relating to what we now call classical narrative structure. So classical narrative structure is just like this very abstract. basic way of telling a story. And the essential ingredients of classical narrative structure are,

first of all, you need a protagonist. We will first encounter this protagonist at home in a place of safety. That's act one. Classical narrative structure has three acts. And then something happens. There's what we call an inciting event. Suddenly our protagonist is thrust into chaos, into the unknown. And act two is the process of our protagonist trying to regain some form of safety and and stability. And in that process, we'll often be faced with all kinds of obstacles, we'll maybe go on some kind of epic journey. And then typically, act three, we find our protagonist has resolved most of the tensions, if not all, and finds themselves back in a place of safety. And typically, they'll also be a bit transformed along the way.

Okay, so you have a background in free improvisation and jazz. You go to Bach. This music that you had started playing as a kid, and that many people, when they're learning, classical piano, they'll begin with. Yeah. That this music has, in its simplicity, an incredible depth, bar by bar, note by note. But when you pull out, you see that there's this larger three-act structure, and it's a site of inspiration for improvisation. Yes.

I think it would be helpful is to go into one of these inventions and hear how Bach builds that three-arch structure. Yeah. So maybe, you know, one that's absolutely familiar to everyone is the same. C major. Oh, these actually have my notes on them from when I was a kid. No way. That is like my teacher's stuff from when I was eight years old or something. That's amazing. I mean, I have such an affinity for the C major. I played that. It's probably one of the first serious pieces I ever played as a child. All right, so right away, we get a sense

of what this is about. We've heard this melody. First of all, it's a nice melody. It's something that has character, something very recognizable. And then we, we, we've heard this melody. And then we've, we've heard this melody. Then we realize it's being repeated all the time. Right? Repeated immediately in the left hand. This is act one because we are meeting our protagonist and we're also seeing them in different lights, right? That's how it sounds down there.

And that's how it sounds in the dominant. Right. To extend your metaphor, it's kind of like, we're seeing our character walk around their home. Exactly. We see them in the bedroom. We see them in the kitchen. We've seen them three different ways.

and they are five or six notes that can go and travel around. Like they're three-dimensional. Yeah. You know? It's not just a three-dimensional character. Cartoonish character. This is a character that has some depth, that has some personality, right? Yeah.

And even before the beginning of Act II, we actually get this remarkable added insight into what our character is because Bach suddenly turns our character upside down. Here's the third bar of the invention in C major. Okay, what's that? Okay, that's all. same same exact theme but upside down our character can do summer salts around the house yeah like you know it's still our same character but it's doing something funny and something else happens here right so fourth

bar of of this invention an f sharp is introduced okay so we've gone from the from that f which in conjunction with the with the b being in the mode really pulls hard to c major suddenly our f is an f sharp Gone to the black keys. We have one black key. Right. And which in conjunction with the C, this is what's called the tritone, really wants to resolve towards G now.

Okay, so now act two begins. And Bach, by the way, does this so seamlessly. Like, it's nothing like, you know, a classic like pop modulation where you have like, you know, maybe you're in C. Right? It's nothing like that. This is not very metal.

No, no. It's like with Bach, He modulates way before you even have noticed that he's modulated. Essentially, by the time that you realize, oh, we're in a different key, he has actually been thinking that he's in a different key, like four bars or eight bars earlier. Ah, it's foreshadowing in a three-act structure. Exactly. Foreshadowing, exactly.

So here we are in the fourth bar of the invention in C major. How good did that feel to resolve the G? I feel like I ended up, I'm not at my house anymore, but I'm at, like, like my neighbor's house or something. It's like, it's something familiar. I feel safe. Exactly, right? It's safe, but it's like a degree of safety removed from C. Right. Which, like, this is the whole kind of point of this type of tonal storytelling is that somewhere in the back of our memory, even though we now feel like it's felt great to resolve to G

because of the foreshadowing. Right. As Bach is moving between these different keys, he's modulating, but he's doing so very subtly. It feels like our character is going through changes, which is a great pun because we are literally going through chord changes. We are going to some of these darker places. We're introducing some of the accidentals, the sharp notes and the flat notes that don't belong to our key. And we're seeing our character in new light, go through conflict, get resolved for a moment. But actually, there's another conflict. We're really trying to get through all these conflict and all these changes so that we can eventually arrive back home. You know, with the analogy with storytelling, maybe there's a series

of events that felt like they needed to be resolved in a certain way. Like our character got really upset with their mom and they needed to have some deep conversation and they finally had it and they got to a point that felt like it resolved those tensions. But there are still larger tensions in the story that have not yet been resolved. And that's how it feels to me, you resolve to G, but we're still not happy. There's still this lingering memory of you got to get back to C at some point. this lingering question of how are we going to get back home is really important and it's going to drive everything that happens from here. This is essentially from here. It's going to be an exploration of the territory that's around us to see if we can find our way home. So here we are in bar seven

of this invention in C major and suddenly we have a re-exposition of the theme in a very clear way, even though actually the theme has been present pretty much every bar either right side up or upside down. Here we have it really dramatically. Okay, so what happened there? We have our F natural back. Hmm. We've gone back to the white keys. Hmm. Okay, incredibly dramatic moment there.

We got a C sharp. So briefly, we were in something that felt kind of like home. We were in the white keys, okay? But very, very brief. And all of a sudden, we have a new accidental introduced, the C sharp that we haven't heard before.

And not only do we have the C sharp, but then we get this B flat. And now we're actually somewhere else already. So very briefly, we are in D minor. That's what the B flat and the C sharp is telling us. Like this is, you know, now it feels like we're there. Right. We're there. Like we're in thoroughly in the middle of our story and this is a solemn moment. It would be super weird to end there, but the local gravity of where we are wants to resolve there. This is, this is our temporary home base. It's almost like a scene within the second act. It's like we've landed in the scene of D minor. Exactly. It's like, you know, if you're on an epic journey, there has been a warrior

that we had to defeat, and we've defeated the warrior, but we're still nowhere near home. Yeah. And then suddenly, now we're in bar, in bar 12, our chord starts as D minor. Okay. And by the way, the left hand here is playing the theme, but upside down. Okay. But suddenly, we have a new accidental. We have a G-sharp. So we have a G sharp, which is the most important one here, because in conjunction with the D, this really wants to resolve to A minor now. So here we are in A minor. And right away, Bach never lingers. Once you've arrived, never lingers.

We're immediately onto the next thing, which feels like it leaves us to D minor. And it does. Okay, that's D minor. And, you know, this melody seems so innocent, right? I mean, that's like, did we know that this character was capable of that? Did we know that this character was capable of feeling that pathos? I don't think we did. That's a revelation.

We've just learned something new about our character. Then he does this, which doesn't feel like D minor at all. And so actually what's going on here is that we're already back in C. But we don't know it. We don't know it. We don't know it because we're not playing the chord C. but we're very much in the harmonic region of C because it's all white notes. And there, you know, subtly he did resolve to C, right?

But it didn't feel satisfying, right? Right. It felt like it's not the end of the story. All right, so Act 3. And this is a really cool thing that happens here, even though he has just spent some time in C, it's like announcing foreshadowing home, suddenly he's going to go to the 4, to F major.

Okay, so that's very much F major. It's kind of like, it's the final boss. Like, you think you beat the final balls, but they actually get back up. You think you've arrived home. You've gone back to see Majorverse League, but no. We are going somewhere you didn't expect. And, oh, don't worry. Everything's going to be fine at the end.

Like, that happens in every story structure, it seems. Absolutely. And I think that's just the perfect analogy. It's like, you know, in a spy movie, he thinks he's defeated the bad guy. And then the camera slowly pans over to the bad guy and you see his finger twitching. We're not quite done yet, folks. Yeah, yeah. But you can feel that F because of that opposite gravity, you can just feel that we're getting there.

And then suddenly, B natural is back. B flat for a second. Then finally, we resolved to C. And so he keeps us guessing until the last moment. But when we get there, there's absolutely no doubt in our minds that we're back home. And I would like to mention also that all of this is happening within what, like 55 seconds? I mean, it's just, this is actually in some ways my favorite thing about the inventions is that there's this very profound process happening that could support literally novels or like major works. And Bach is showing how to do this in the most microscopic form possible, the simplest form, you know, there's no pretension here and yet the mechanisms are infinitely powerful. Right, because we just have two notes sounding at any given time.

Simple, short. Incredibly short. And this is something you're supposed to learn. as a beginner pianist. Exactly. There's way more going on here in this practice music than just technical exercises.

This has got the three-act structure a way of thinking about composition which you have been struggling with and contemplating as an improviser. Maria, you have a podcast now and you need to start acting like it. What's the first step as a podcaster? Well, you have to ask lots of questions.

I'm Maria Sharpova. and I'm hosting a new podcast called Pretty Tough. Every week, I'm sitting down with trailblazing women at the top of their game to discuss ambition, work ethic, and the ups and downs that come on the path to achieving greatness. I have a few pretty tough questions for you. Okay. Ready?

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We're back with Dan Tepfer. After going through Bach's invention in C major, I wanted to hear Dan's process of improvisation. So how do you go about applying his narrative arc into the world of improvisation? Yeah, so, you know, first of all, I would say that I'm never trying to apply his narrative arc specifically, right? Because it's like, it's more like I'm trying to apply this very, very abstract idea of what a narrative art can be. But it's not going to be his. Sure. It's like in the same way that a Transformers movie in Hollywood, which totally follows this kind of three-act structure to the letter, is not following the same narrative arc as, you know, the Odyssey, which is also very much following this structure.

but they both share the abstract notion of the structure. So for me, as an improviser, it wasn't good enough for me to say, okay, I'm going to develop a protagonist, like maybe I'll find a melody, you know, whatever, like, could be anything. It could be like, that's just whatever, something I just made up.

That's a character, right? It's not good enough to just develop this character because I don't want to just be playing that over and over again. Something needs to happen to this character. And that thing that needs to happen to the character actually needs to be plausible. You know, we've all seen, badly told stories where something happens

just feels totally like it's out of the blue maybe you're watching sci-fi and something just feels like way too easy a shortcut right? Right, you're what we call the DeaSX Machina event where all the sudden the giant super the super ship arrives at the last minute

and saves everybody who couldn't be saved. Totally, we hate that. It's the worst. Part of what makes Star Wars great is that they somehow made the whole the whole world of Star Wars somehow makes some form of sense. Right. They find the secret plans that reveal

the true weakness and they go through all of the necessary things to go and blow up the Death Star, but it doesn't require some Super Jedi at the end, last minute, coming in, and saving us in a way that's unexpected. Yeah, nothing feels like it's out of the blue. And... Yeah, from realizing that, we've literally seen one, Star Wars,

plans of Death Star are being transmitted. That's right. End of Star Wars. The conclusion of those plans turns into the explosion of the Death Star. Our character and all of our themes are handled. Absolutely. And also the character arc of Luke Skywalker is very much going through this starting and safety to chaos and back to safety.

But the thing that I realized is that it's not good enough to have this protagonist. This protagonist needs to be able to move around a world. You can't have adventures. You can't have things happen to you unless there's some kind of landscape for it to happen within. And that landscape can't be arbitrary. either. You know, if you think of what we see in movies or in the theater, you look around yourself, if you're in a desert plane, there might be some mountains in the distance. Those mountains, we know that it makes sense to have mountains like that in that kind of desert plane. And visiting those mountains becomes an option, right? Because they're part of the landscape. You know, to return to Star Wars, yes, they're doing super, you know, light speed travel or whatever. But that's been set up as a conceit of the world, that you can do that. So the point is that there's a unified world here. And in the world of Bach, but not just of Bach, I mean, this is true of like all pop music, pretty much all jazz, you know, before, let's say, 1960.

This is true of all common practice classical music, including all the romantic composers and all that. The world in which the adventure happens is this very coherent, very hierarchical world of tonal harmony, where every chord has a function and purpose. it's like I know where I am in the landscape I can see it there's a map and I'm going to go around this landscape but only within that landscape not the random places that don't belong in the landscape

could you take me through a landscape on a similar theme? Yeah, like do a free improvisation with the same theme. Yeah, I've literally never improvised with this theme. It's crazy. Yeah, I'm going to try improvising with this theme

and I'm just going to start in C major and so the first thing I'll say is that right away if I'm in C major I know that I can only modulate to a few keys, right? I can modulate to D minor, modulate to E minor, I can modulate to F major,

I can modulate to G major, and I can modulate to A minor. That's it. These are like the mountains around my home key of C. This is an incredibly rich world. Just because I'm limited to modulating to those six keys or modulating to those five keys in addition to C major

is not in any way limiting. There are so many options, kind of like saying you're doing a montage of going from like city to mountains and the next like your character can go very quickly from all these different places because you have all of these worlds available to you and then other places you might linger for longer or something like that yeah well that that's the beauty yeah you can linger whenever you want and that's especially because those places that you might arrive at feel warranted great so let's at the scene started act one all right so that to me is like we got we met our character yeah and we we met our character at home. Like, all of that felt like it was in one place, the home key, C major. Okay, but now that I've resolved back to C, I'll feel like, okay, it's time to start act two,

and I'll choose a key to modulate two. So you tell me, like, what key would you like to me to modulate to? I feel like in the Bach, he goes to the F at the end, so why don't we go to F at the beginning? Okay, cool. Okay, so I've just resolved back to C, and then what I'm going to do, is I'm going to visit chords. Now I'm thinking

I'm in F. And what I'm going to do is visit chords that are now diatonic to F, but without resolving too quickly to F. We're going to be in the key of F when you say diatonic. Diatonic, like the chords that literally fit in the scale of F major. Okay, great.

Okay, so, you know, I resolved quite cleanly to F. I think by the time we got to F, it really felt like we wanted to go there, right? And as I was mentioning earlier, one of the things I've learned from Bach is that he doesn't linger once he resolves. Right. And you're not lingering.

If I wanted to linger, I would have lingered before. Right, right. Before resolving to F, grab onto that tension, you know, make the monster that our hero has to defeat be more difficult, you know? Sure, sure. So now I result to F, and I immediately say, let's go somewhere else. Yeah. And so in this case, maybe I'll go to the relative minor of F, which is D minor, which is

D minor, which also happens to be one of the related keys to C major. Okay. that we can modulate to. Okay? So I've just resolved to F, and then I'm going to start using chords that are part of the D minor. So already, I'm starting to go somewhere else.

Yeah, we are thoroughly in the middle of Act 2. Oh, yeah. We're going through so many different experiences and changes as our character. And your character is still here. My character, yeah, it's all on... Right? Everything's the character.

And by the way, you know, I'm being very kind of didactic about it right now, keeping the character present all the time. But one of the things I've thought about a lot in storytelling is your character doesn't have to be in the shot all the time. In fact, it's pretty natural for your character not to be in the shot all the time. Oh my gosh, so you can have you can have B plots and C plots. You can have B plots, you can also just have C plots. You can also just have landscape.

You know, the really important thing in a film is you just pan over to the landscape. And we're just looking at landscape for a while, right? So that's like something I love to do when I'm free improvising is like letting go of the character entirely. So like suddenly I'm not playing thematically anymore. I might just be doing what jazz musicians call blowing over the changes, right? But I'm making up the changes that go along, making up the landscape, right? And so maybe that's, maybe this would be a time to do that. So, you know, what do I do?

I just resolve to D minor, right? And so let's choose another key. Like, let's say this would be a pretty intense modulation. Let's say I want to now go to E minor. Okay. Okay, this is like a real move. And let's say that I want to drop our character for a minute. we've got to D minor

and then I'm just going to drop our character for a minute and choose chords from E minor until it feels like it's time to resolve to that key center. Our character comes back. And so that I think felt really natural at that point to resolve to E minor and the reason for that is that I've only been visiting chords

that belong to that place. As Bach would have prefigured his movement from act to act as well. Exactly. And I felt like it felt good to give our character a break there a little bit and then bringing our character back once we've gone to this new place. Wonderful. So we need to close out.

So now we need to close out. Maybe we got enough places. But typically if I were doing this as a free improvisation, I mean, this could go on for a while. This could be like a seven or even ten minute improvisation. Because there is so much drama to be found in these movements. You know, the E minor feels so different from D minor. There's just so much exploration that could be done there. But, okay, let's say that we've gotten to E minor.

And now I feel like it's time to go back home to what I'm going to do in order to prefigure our return is, for example, introduce the F natural, which over E minor is going to be like amazing. This is like an amazing color. So, you know, like say we're here in E minor, right? But then I go. Oh, yeah. So now I'm on the dominant. I could just go. Okay?

But it feels a little too easy. So I think what I'm going to do now is do something that Bach does sometimes. I'm going to just like create some lingering tension, that idea that we talked about earlier. It's our final boss. Or maybe just like maybe just a feeling of like, okay, I'm going home. But am I ready to let go of the adventure? You know, that's a big question in storytelling. It's like, this has been a lot of fun.

As hard as it's been. Right, I've been transformed. Yeah, I don't know if I want to go home. Right. So like maybe there's a lingering sense of still wanting to be out there. So maybe I'm going to visit the minor subdominant. Even in C major, the minor subdominant, which is F minor, is very much a part of the landscape. A part of the landscape that has a lot of tension in it.

Okay. So, you know, I was just going to G7 with that possibility of the landscape. of resolving straight to C. But instead, resolve it to F minor now. But then our F minor, as stable as it might seem, I go, so because I introduced that D there, makes it an F minor six, which does not feel stable in F at all. Suddenly this tritone here wants to resolve to C minor

or even to C major. Okay? Okay, so suddenly just that small addition of the D natural completely shifts our center of gravity. Okay, and then... And the one thing that I want to do now... You can't leave me hanging like that, man. ...is that because the color feels minor now, it feels kind of like I want to resolve to C minor. I'm going to question the dominant.

I'm on G7 right now, but I'm going to question... I'm going to do a dominant of the dominant. I'm going to go to this F-sharp, or I'm going to go to the D-7 or... or F sharp diminished. So, okay, now super open feeling G7 that feels, okay, now this can lead to C major. Okay? This is just like one of the infinite journeys that I could take. And this is why this is so fun for me because it's like not just falling my nose.

I know this is a beautiful landscape. Yeah. And all I need to do is move around within this landscape and keep the landscape alive, right? Because I'm creating the landscape as I go. So it's like I'm nurturing the landscape. But as long as I do nurture the landscape correctly, it's a beautiful landscape. You know, it's so pleasurable. I just find so much joy in it.

So you've built this whole new skill of this journey that we can go on in a free improvisation. And your project is in a certain way of your own interpretation completing some of what is missing in the Bach. Yeah, I would never say anything's missing in the Bach. I mean, I think of it more in this way. there's never any need to add anything to Bach. I mean, the work is so masterful and so complete in itself. But really what came about for me is, as we've been discussing, I was so inspired by this idea of narrative storytelling. And I learned to do my own form of free improvisation within that same abstract concept.

And then I thought, how about if I played a concert for audiences that made that link? explicit. And then I thought to myself, okay, how can I combine these two things? At first I was thinking, okay, I'll play the inventions, and then maybe in the second half, I'll ask my audience for themes and I'll do free improvisations in different keys. And then it just dawned on me. Wait a minute, you know, Bach left nine windows open. He didn't close it up. There's only 15 inventions, 15 keys. Exactly. He only did 15 keys because he didn't want to do the crazier, exotic ones. You didn't want to. Probably not fitting for a student to go to some of the keys that he chose to avoid. fitting for a very young student, it's just not worth the trouble. Like, let's stick with the most used

keys at the time, not the most exotic ones. And so then, yeah, it just was an immediate kind of lightball. Like, I can play around, have fun in those spaces that he left open. And so you get to do the keys that have not been explored. And in your improvisation, are you thinking, are you drawing material, some of the character, are you referencing his characters or are you building your own characters in those keys? I'm very much trying to build my own characters. Like, the process, for me is, and this is true every time I play a concert. I mean, it's really, very important for me. I sit down at the instrument and I just listen inside and invariably there'll be some melody that comes up if I listen. I've never had it happen that it doesn't. I mean, occasionally I might

be really nervous and stuff feels like there's nothing there, but all it takes is for me to take a few breaths and some melody arises. It could be the simplest thing in the world. You know, it could be like or whatever. It could be anything. It doesn't matter. It could be, I've done entire free improvisations with two notes. It could be like, do, de.

That's completely enough for telling a story, you know? So I'll just listen for this fragment of melody and often it's not just a melody, it's like a vibe, like a rhythmic vibe, something. And that begins my world. And I don't question it. I jump in and develop my character

and follow it on a journey. I want to thank you for sharing the detail and the process that you've gone through to build these compositions, even doing free improv and speaking through it, which is fairly unnatural, the reward is certainly the full work in inventions and reinventions and really encourage people to go and listen to that.

I'll make sure to share it in all of our show notes. Thank you so much for sharing this music with us. It's been an utter pleasure, and you know, this is the first time I've ever actually broken these ideas down, and even first time I've ever really explicitly analyzed Bach in this way. So I'm really glad that you want to do this and thanks for all your insights.

It was the best music class I've ever gotten to take, so thank you. All right, before we go, I want to recommend two things. First, go check out all of Dan Tepfer's inventions, reinventions on Story Sound Records. It's on all the major streaming platforms, and I'll obviously post it in our show notes. Secondly, I implore you to go check out the newest episode of the podcast, Into It, by our friend Sam Sanders at Vulture. They're doing a piece about fair use. It's kind of related to a lot of the story we've been talking about vibe snatching and interpolations.

Right now, at the heart of two big intellectual property disputes are three titans of pop culture, Black Eyed Peas, Andy Warhol, and Prince. Both cases have huge implications when it comes to what constitutes fair use of another artist's work. Sam Sanders talks with Slate's Supreme Court reporter Mark Joseph Stern about why the black-eyed peaties, are going after a toy company's dancing unicorn commercial and why Andy Warhol's silk screen of a prints photograph has made its way to the Supreme Court. Go check it out on Intuit. Again, we'll post it in the show notes. That's on our website as well at switchdonpop.com and we'll post it on social at Switchdown Pop on Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok. Switched on Pop is produced

by Raina Cruz, edited by Art Chung, engineered by Brandon McFarlane, community management by Abby Barr, illustrations by Iris Gottlieve. Our executive produced. are Hanna Rosen and Ashokurwa, or a member of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and a production of Vulture. We'll be back on Tuesday when we take the story from Bach to Shakira. And until then, thanks for listening.