Josh Ryan is Department Chair and Professor of Percussion at Baldwin Wallace University and a well-known clinician within the World Music Drumming workshops. Known for the depth of his knowledge, his musicianship, and the approachableness of his presence, he is well-loved by World Music Drumming participants all-over. Our conversation today is an exploration of the music of Africa-West, the importance of musical embodiment, and the rebalancing of visual-focused musicianship with aural, listening-centered and embodied traditions.
The Music & Peacebuilding Podcast is hosted by Kevin Shorner-Johnson at Elizabethtown College. Join our professional development network at www.musicpeacebuilding.com - thinking deeply we reclaim space for connection and care.
Josh Ryan is Department Chair and Professor of Percussion at Baldwin Wallace University and a well-known clinician within the World Music Drumming workshops. Known for the depth of his knowledge, his musicianship, and the approachableness of his presence, he is well-loved by World Music Drumming participants all-over. Our conversation today is an exploration of the music of Africa-West, the importance of musical embodiment, and the rebalancing of visual-focused musicianship with aural, listening-centered and embodied traditions.
The Music & Peacebuilding Podcast is hosted by Kevin Shorner-Johnson at Elizabethtown College. Join our professional development network at www.musicpeacebuilding.com - thinking deeply we reclaim space for connection and care.
People want to feel something and they're going to go wherever they can go to get it to feel something. They want to feel something visceral and when they can't understand what is happening, they may turn to stories like this to have their visceralness mitigated.
Shorner-Johnson:You were listening to the music and peacebuilding podcast, a professional development network at music peace-building dot com exploring intersections of peacebuilding, sacredness, community, creativity and imagination through research and story. Josh Ryan is department chair and professor of percussion at Baldwin Wallace University where he teaches percussion. Ryan has studied Afro-centric music making within Ghanaian, Cuban and other West African and Caribbean traditions. He is the cofounder of the Africa West percussion trio, a professional percussion ensemble that has released its fourth CD loud fossil as well as a recording with the world renowned percussionist and singer Valerie Naranjo in 2017. Josh is also a well known clinician within the world. Music drumming workshops across the country, known for the depth of his knowledge, his musicianship, and the approachableness of his presence. He is well loved by world music, drumming, participants all over. Josh Ryan was my level two instructor. I recorded this interview in the midst of a heavy thunderstorm toward the end of our world music drumming workshop this past summer at Elizabethtown College registration for summer world music drumming workshops is now open at world music drumming.com. At Elizabethtown College. We are excited to host workshops again this coming summer as well as the launch of our new masters program in musical peacebuilding that is tightly integrated with world music drumming pedagogy. Our website is etown.edu/musicmasters. Our conversation today is an exploration of the music of Africa West, the importance of musical embodiment and a rebalancing toward traditions that are centered in listening and embodiment. As we all experience growing stress and anxieties and children. I can't help but wonder if a path towards centering connection and care is a path toward becoming more fully embodied where we might move out of the anxieties of our heads and into the fully embodied therapeutic experience of weight feel, and sound. Tell me the story of how you as a classically trained percussionist seemed to fall in love with Afrocentric music and then how that connected with world music drumming.
Ryan:Oh, well I have, I am and have been a Western percussionist, which in itself that, what does that term even mean? I mean that can mean so many things, but you know, I went to music school like I, like a lot of people do and was playing snare drum and marimba and timpani and orchestral excerpts and a little bit of drum set at that time and playing contemporary, uh, sort of eclectic music that... Newly composed music and symphonic music and things like that. And then, um, I was fortunate enough to go to a place where my percussion teacher, a very important mentor of mine, Dane Richardson on one of his sabbaticals when I was a student there, went to Ghana in 19, 1993 and when he came back, uh, the music that he brought back with him was amazing. And at that point I would have always considered my strong points as a musician to be, um, well melodic percussion. Uh, I wasn't necessarily as much of a drummer as I should have been. I was more of a melodic percussion player, symphonic percussion player and my, my abilities were a little bit more in the melodic and reading realm rather than the groove and feeling realm. I mean, there were a lot more in that realm and he came back with this music where there with which he, he would set up these ostinato patterns and then play these lead drum parts and it seemed impossible that they could have anything to do with each other, that they would unify for a moment, seemingly drift apart into chaos and then bang, unify again. And I distinctly remember where I was sitting when I first heard him play one of the drum Proverbs. When I first heard Dane Richardson play one of the drum Proverbs. And I thought, I got to learn that. Then as you start to study that, a friend of mine had brought me a video of a group called talking drums, which featured my teacher and mentor and guide Michael Spiro. And I w I watched that hundreds of times. I mean hundreds of times. And then I started a group based on that with my brother Jamie Ryan and Ryan Korb. And then you realize its connection to Africa, Africo-Cuban music, Afro-Brazilian music, African-American music, popular music. It's about controlling time, tension and timbre in the same way that classical music has so well developed a control of frequency and pitch. Well I stayed in Ghana, there were master musicians but there's no music teacher. There's no separate music, salaried music teacher or music major. Yet everyone is completely fluent at stuff. That for me as a person with a master's degree in percussion I really struggled with and it's part of their social fabric that they grow up with. And um, we have, I, this will never happen, but at some sense if, if music teachers in the West are as successful as they need to be, they won't be necessary. Now, I'm not worried for a minute that that's going to happen. But when you see music as it occurs in a town or village setting, and the grandparents partake in the same dense, complex virtuosic music as the kids and music study isn't delayed until let's say the fifth grade, you know, you don't decide to become a instrumentalist in the fifth grade when you ha if you're lucky, you have general music and then you can choose to be an instrumentalist- join band or choir or orchestra or something like that. And you might have to pass some diagnostic diagnostic tests. No, you're participating in the repertoire from birth. Uh, that's a shocking model that I just really like. You know, now you're not playing the master drum parts from birth, but you're tapping your foot to it. You're moving your dance to it, dancing to it. One of your parents is holding you and they're dancing to it. And then eventually you start to pick up some of the instruments and it just happens.
Speaker 4:So to dive into that, learning about music, just two days ago, I heard you describe the difference between an inefficient way of learning music and an efficient way of learning music.
Ryan:Yeah. As we're here, as we're here working with a group of music teachers. I was joking to them and I'm also trying to disarm any sense of frustration because I'm teaching to them, teaching it to them by ear first. Later at the end of the week they get a handout. But I'm trying to work with them to learn sound by sound because as Western trained musicians, this works for us. But we're part of a very strange minority on this planet who do sounds by sight. It works for what it works for. After you've had all of this training to interpret what the symbols mean, you know, um, cause the symbols mean can mean very different things in Bach versus Mozart versus Richard Strauss. You know, versus Brahms. They mean very different things. Then we should of course expect that the symbols that we use, the notation symbols might not mean anything or might not demonstrate anything heuristic or what is valuable if we try to notate West African music. So why not try the way the rest of the world does it, which is let's learn sound as sound cause A that's the tradition. And B, for a lot of these music teachers, that's the way their students are going to have to learn. And so I joke with them that that's inefficient because it's going to frustrate them a little bit. At first. It's going to frustrate them a little. They've, they're all patient. Um, but for some of the rhythms there might be a faster way to get them the information, but that's getting them that information cognitively, not physically or intuitively getting that information as a counted entity in their head and not felt in their body. They need to play both. And in that sense, studying non Western music, studying Afrocentric music makes you a better Western musician. It makes you better at and symphonic music. It makes you better at contemporary music. It makes you better at jazz and rock and roll music because you have cross trained your ear.
Speaker 5:I think therefore I am said Descartes. Our Western heritage emphasizes a strict separation between thinking and embodied action. In our classrooms. We construct rows of stationary desks because we often believe we can educate the mind without engaging the body. I asked Josh about the rebalancing that Afrocentric traditions bring to Euro-centric mind body dualism is the lack of engagement with our bodies. A form of poverty. What is the role of dance as integrated music education?
Ryan:Every culture no matter how big or how small it is is or how hegemonic it is is weird in some way, you know. Um, but we're a society which has musicians that don't dance. I'm one of them. I'm one of that's really bizarre. That's really bizarre. I went to Ghana the first time with the straightest physicality of how to, I didn't know how to move my body. No one ever showed me how to dance to anything cause there wasn't any, you just, some people just sort of made stuff up if they were physically comfortable with themselves. in my grandparents' generation there were still swing and maybe square dances that they could go to where there were moves to be copied. But as we all are, got moved out to the suburbs and music came in through the radio and TV and it wasn't experienced as a group. There was no group movement anymore. So it's really, it was really kind of beat was liberating to be shown some movements. Here's what you do, and I do always say this in my classes, I distinctly remember my first middle school or junior high dance. We were all well-fed kids. I'm sure there were probably some that weren't, but we were fed, vaccinated, sheltered from the cold or extreme heat in our school. You know, the whole thing. But they turned on some, I won't, I'll protect the innocent, but some really bad music and they left us in the gym and nobody knew what to do. Okay. It took me like 20 or 30 years later to realize that is a form either at minimum it's sad, maybe it's a form of poverty. It for me it was because I was so uncomfortable in this situation. I just stopped going. I just stopped partaking into it. And the dance that I've experienced with people or I've seen people do in the, in the parts, it mediates gender, relationships. It mediates personal space. It helps you physically do something like exercise even. Um, it helps mediate touch, uh, when, if there's a part of the dance where you're supposed to touch a partner and suppose where you're, where you're not too, it mixes people, which wouldn't normally be mixed. Uh, it prevents clique-ness. It's, it's remarkable. But my generation, you know, that's the breakfast club generation. You put all those people in a gym and you can imagine how it all separates out and no one knows how to do anything, but everything has its opportunity cost. Do make sure you include that. I'm not criticizing our society. I mean everything has its opportunity cost. Over there, those kids with their social cohesion, they still have had some opportunity costs from growing up in rural. Or growing up in rural Ghana or, or slightly urban Cuba with dance that I, that I've seen.
Speaker 2:I think one of the things that I worry about as a parent is screen time, like on iPads because our fear is that children will more and more kind of live into their heads and leave our bodies behind. And I can't agree with you more about the importance of being fully embodied and how dance seems to be a way of living into that.
Ryan:And screen time is also increasingly the way we get our aesthetic rather than a group social negotiation. Aesthetic extremism is going to find its niche when you can separate and download, it's going to, when you have a group of people out there dancing, sharing a common repertoire, you'll have a shared sense of, of aesthetic values. I'm not saying we have to have a shared set of aesthetic values, but it's helpful to have sort of a Venn diagram of a center. You know, right now we, I don't know if we have that or not. I'm not an expert on those things. But um, but your original question about how world music drumming, you know, the, the program here is that you can't just experience music in your head either. You have to, everything you play has to be physical and moved and felt. And if you never play another note of non Western music again, it'll make you better at classical music. Make you better. I mean, we teach Baroque music in music schools, which has a lot of, it's based on dance music and nobody dances. What's wrong here? Which has a strong heritage in the Caribbean, and maybe we need to go back to that? Yeah, yeah. Right, right. It's ugly head. This is a piece that we all worked on, but my brother Jamie worked especially really hard on it and it takes the folkloric tale between two of the Afro-Cuban Orishas Ogun and Oshun the blacksmith, the swordsman and the the river goddess and beauty and how they mutually attract and repulse one another. Um, and it's part of a three movement piece. Um, it's the second movement and it depicts struggle between these two entities and it to priests it depicts loss and struggle. It starts there with, I hate to spoil the surprise, but it starts there with the, those gong scrapes and everything because I wanted it, you know, how how people, early people used to project their own beliefs onto the cosmos, the stars, and they would see a particular set of stars and say, Oh, that looks like a Hunter or that looks like a a if somebody who's jumping or running or that looks like a bull who's jumping over something. So I kind of wanted to have those sounds as um, the metal vibrating like the background vibrating of the world.[ music]
Speaker 6:[music]
Speaker 7:[ music]
Speaker 6:[ music]
Speaker 1:And into it come these two dueling figures Ogun and Oshun and they duel represented by different instruments, uh, different time fields. And it gets so intense at the end that we have, Ogun's metal instruments going for eight claves, eight cycles, and then, Oshun's gourd instruments going for eight claves.
Speaker 8:[ music]
Speaker 1:and then, and it sort of goes in a swirl downwards, six metals and then six gourds, then four metals, then four gourds, then two metals and two gourds. And then it just kind of bottoms out. And after that, um, because no one ever wins the debate. And these two energies have to learn how to coexist.
Speaker 8:[ music]
Speaker 2:these stories don't seem to have a need to resolve tension. And I think that that's one of the most important things in peacebuilding is this idea to live with paradox and be able to live within the profound tension of stories.
Speaker 1:Right? And one place where one cool thing about, you know, music in general, but this kind of music is that there is an intensity and a momentary release from it and then the intensity occurs again. People want to feel something and they're going to go wherever they can go to get it, to feel something. They want to feel something visceral. And when they can't understand what is happening, they may turn to stories like this to have their visceralness. Um, mitigated.
Speaker 9:[ music]
Speaker 2:Josh emphasized that the heritage of African culture lives and breathes within every corner of what we think of as American music. He says that the tensions within musical time, a pulse with a moment of crisis that moves to resolution are at the architectural of our experience of rhythm within jazz dance, hip hop, pop, and other forms of music. Starting from an exploration of West African diasporas, we spoke of Ryan's instruction of a music theory of Ghanaian music as he teaches world music drumming workshops. We often do music theory as a way of catching ourselves up to understand what in other time periods might be intuitively understood about music. As we approach music through world music drumming, I believe we are called to become fully embodied and as we do such to use our mental capacity for theory to develop a sense of awe of cathedrals of rhythmic sound within Afro-centric music,
Ryan:but it's actually just a breakdown of what people can live every day if they grow up around music. And there are places where people do that. I'm not from one of them. But yeah, it's possible with African music to have a theory course certainly to have an ear training course which would have to focus on rhythm as much as pitch, if not more to have all the history sequence to talk about orchestration. You would have to have an orchestration to have part writing. All of those things apply to the drums. It just hasn't been. That part. That world hasn't been cataloged and analyzed and colonized in that way because it hasn't needed to be. It doesn't, doesn't need to be, hasn't been institutionalized. It would only need to be if we were to start a music school solely based around Afrocentric music, which I doubt that's going to happen anytime soon. Um, so one of the tasks you face as a non Western music teacher is that you have to teach the theory and the history and the ear training and the technique all at the same time.
Speaker 10:I think what I like about how you present music theory is you present it in a way that music theory is not something to constrain music with, but it's something to move into a sense of awe and appreciation for what's happening. Like if I hear the three two clave part understanding that as an idea of call and response balance instills in me a little bit of awe.
Ryan:Yes. The architecture of the mind. Yes. And and how human beings are set up regardless of their socioeconomic status. Totally. Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. What we get a chance to see with the world's musics is the same hardware device, meaning the human brain, loaded up with different software and how it behaves and that is totally cool, but a lot of musicians and music students get caught up understandably so in the syntax of the software, cause they're trying to download it, which we do in music school at dial up speed at, like 1990s dial up speed because we have missed the missed the chance to absorb it. When we were infants and I, since you asked the first question you asked why did I get interested in this as an adolescent percussionist, the thing I was worst at by far was rhythm and groove and that is the thing. This music, Afrocentric requires most and here were people excelling at it and I was having real trouble, so it's a process of playing. It was almost kind of a therapy, like a working, working at it one part at a time, one layer at a time and it was good for me that way.
Speaker 10:That was very similar to what the musicians from the silk road ensemble said when they came to Etown, that for many of them, they were classically trained percussionists and they would do their work in the practice room and then they would do their therapy was what they do in their day job and how much is encountering these other traditions. Yeah, yeah. Fascinating.
Ryan:I mean, I was always really good with reading rhythm and hearing and doing melodic things, but my sense of feeling and groove at age 19 or 20 was horrible, horrible, horrible such that if you'd put me next to a six year old kid, I'm going to have five or six year old kid in the village where I studied in Ghana, I would've flunked. They would've identified, I had had, they had the educational structure. I would have been identified as either not able to participate in the music program or some sort of remedial music program. And you know, the cool thing was is I had the money to pay them to teach me and they did. I was suffering from, or recovering from the mind, body dichotomy. You do music with the mind and maybe the ear, but not every, anything else. It doesn't work that way. It was never supposed to work that way anyway. It just, somehow, with, with it just got, I don't know how, how it happened that way. Just just happened. Yeah.
Speaker 11:[music]
Ryan:Eshu La Roye refers to the Orisha or Saint Elegua, the person who the, the concept that governs the crossroads, the messenger deity in Afro Cuban belief. A Saint that is often sung for at the beginning of a concert or at the beginning of a religious event and that particular track that is an arrangement of Afro of an Afro Cuban beat with sort of an Afrocentric Afro-Cuban piece, set of songs with sort of an Afrocentric take on it.
Speaker 12:[inaudible]
Ryan:uh, my brother did a lot of the, Jamie Ryan did a lot of the arranging of it and myself and our other brother, uh, Ryan Korb play on it. Those are the three members of our trio. And we took what would be traditional songs for Elegua and found different traditional ways of saying hello in the drum languages for that. And also Elegua was associated with the number three. There are lots of, if you listened to it very carefully, there are lots of things that happen three times. There are lots of occurrences of three note gestures. There's lots of permutations of the number three in that piece. And what we try to do in our pieces is have some sort of, we want our pieces to be interesting on two levels. We want people to be able to to, you know, turn it on and listen to it and that was cool and I tapped my foot and I hit that one hit with them and I sang this thing. But also we want people to be able to examine it many times and find meaning.
Speaker 11:[ music]
Ryan:One of the concepts that to me is important about Elegua is, you know, we're all, and again, I use this daily, I'm not criticizing it. I just have to be able to be able to check myself. We're all logging on instantly. We're all pulling up to the drive through we're al getting on the on ramp and hitting the pedal to the metal, getting up to 65 important stories and important, important lessons. Have an introduction. You have to have a sense of we're coming together at these crossroads to open up this story. You just don't start blabbing at something. You just don't start shooting your mouth off. You have to say, okay, we have to, we have to first engage in energy. That indicates beginning and a lot of, in my opinion, a lot of Elegua's rhythms and songs do that. And there are songs for the other saints, the other O rishas, which clearly depict their character, sword fighting, hunting, cured, being cured from disease, the v iolent s ea, and then the c alm s ea. There are different energies to be had, whereas, um, you know, and I, I really like that because there isn't, maybe I shouldn't say this, but you know, we've all attended things like the beginning of the year and this is any school, this is any school. At the beginning of the year conference. Okay. Everybody take your seats. Now we're going to start with an intro. You know, let me, me first introduce our university provost who will introduce the president. No, no. You need a drawn out call to focus. That's what that's for. There. There is a organic human way to do that.
Shorner-Johnson:We have human need to wrap things in stories. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, And that's how we make meaning in the world, yeah, yeah.
Ryan:And, and I, no offense, but PowerPoint can't do that. PowerPoint. It can be used afterwards. But to, to draw our fellow mammals into the herd as they've been, you know, socializing and having coffee and donuts in the lounge, you need something that focuses people's energy. And that's what this is for. Because on that CD Abure is about to come a story and the Eshu la Roye focuses. Everybody on kind of gets everyone dialed in to these rhythmic and elements and okay, you're about to get a story. Cool. But you can't just jump into it, you know? I don't know. But we don't, we almost don't have time for that anymore. You don't have time for a lengthy introduction. I regret it.
Shorner-Johnson:So if we turn to peacebuilding, I'm really fascinated about how we balance the collective we against the I. That gives me creativity, voice, imagination. And I think that there's something really special in West African traditions that speaks to this. And maybe we can start first with maybe a look at Ghanian percussion because Ruth Stone refers to the magic of Ghanaian percussion as being rooted in faceting or the juxtaposition of contrasting elements. And that faceting is the collective layering of sound. Can you speak to how you understand the playing of community within these traditions?
Ryan:Well, you know, you have these different, you have, you have a timeline, you have are repetitive ostinato and it requires, it acquires different meanings based on the parts that are put over it rather than acquiring its meaning from an objective linear measurement, which again is not bad. It works for what it's works for. It works very well for that. But if a particular part is grouped a certain way according to the accent of another part that's played with it, it feels differently. Uh, I think you said you're going to play some clips later. It might demonstrate it this, but if I have this rhythm here,[demonstrates rhythm] the temptation is to feel the beat here. But if I have[demonstrates rhythm] An illusion is created of two meters happening at once and there's that balanced tension and it's one of the things I like about that music, those tension moments are, yeah, I think they're just really cool, but I don't want to put African music on a pedestal. I also think there's moments for community in a Viola sectional. Of course there are, and there's moments for community in a, in a chorus rehearsal, but in this case, what the output is, is different. And then it is, it is time and rhythm itself. There's not an objective beat person, a conductor at the top telling you where to come in. The work is done with your ear. You have to find your way in with your ear rather than with your eye, which I think is important.
Shorner-Johnson:And that may go back to the conversation about how learning this music makes you a better classically trained musician because instead of just simply listening to a hierarchy of dr beat, yes, I have to listen to the conversation that's taking place in my parts. That's exactly it. Yeah, precisely. Um, and it's a different way of living into sound has been the thing that's captivated me the most. Yes, yes, yes. Precisely.
Ryan:And the, the 19th and 18th century way of perceiving time and taking it from a visual cue has taken over a little bit in genres it wouldn't, in which it doesn't belong. We know that with medieval and Renaissance music, that way of perceiving time didn't belong there. And Baroque music, you have the uh, influence of, of dance music in many places and in modern music, what does that word mean? But um, in mid to late 20th century music and 21st century music, that sort of objective beast beat structure, one wonders whether it has a place, whether the ear might be a better tool to create that musical community with them, the eye. Um, and that is especially tricky for a lot of people because we're a very visual culture. Traffic, signs, messages, emails, very, we're a very visual people.
Shorner-Johnson:So how does this ear open up The ability to express myself if we move to the I were to move to the eye and and voicing, you know, our culture struggles a lot with improvisation and giving voice to our own sounds.
Ryan:Improvisation does not mean anarchy. It means structured self choice in sound and it means you, it means in the case of African music, there are moments to improvise. You must learn to speak with your part. In the case of the music that I've studied around the other drum voices that are being spoken and you can speak there, but you can't step on other people. You can't musically shout over other people. You have to balance yourself. The same thing is true, uh, on the, the balafone instrument the Gyil that I play. You can play what you want to play within certain note permutations and certain rhythmic permutations and you begin to study that by, uh, structured parameters. Okay, I've got this part of the timeline. What happens if I insert this note here? Okay, that worked. Let's try this note. And this note, okay, that didn't work so well cause I stepped on that person's note over there. And you learn to gradually assert yourself while measuring, measuring what you play against the group. This is the second movement of our Lobi variations, which ended up as a tribute to the great ah West African musician Krakaba Lobi that we got to meet. Uh, I'm, I'm very fortunate to be a student of Valerie Naranjo the Gyil master an amazing musician, musician on the Saturday night live band and Broadway. And I got to meet her teacher. But about around the same time some other musical events were happening and my grandparents were in their final days and final years. So it's kind of a tribute to, uh, the passing of an aesthetic and the realization that a way of being is passing and it's going to be, it's a real question whether we're going to get it back. And I think the word we used in the liner notes is that there's about that movement. There's a funky mournfulness and again we hope you've listened to it and just enjoy the sounds, but on another level it starts with a Bata rhythm called Oh-do-do-wa. Oh, do do-wa, I is played and associated with uh, the dead, you know, funerals, things, you know, spirits that have passed and our grandparents, my brother and I, Jamie had, had a farm off of Moe road. So it's meant the piece has meant to be kind of nostalgic, look back at things and a further permutation of the theme that permeates, that goes through the piece, that piece Lobi variations. I also wanted to prove to people that you can have a, I wanted to have African music with sort of a westernized harmonic vocabulary in addition to its own harmonic vocabulary. And I wanted to put it in the fast, slow minuet, fast format. I wanted to use it. And that's what that four movement piece does. We tied it, you know, people can decide for themselves if it works, but it's a tribute to peace to Krakaba Lobi, to our grandparents, our teachers and the regrettable change that happens.
Speaker 2:Special thanks to Jamie Ryan, Ryan Korb and Josh Ryan for permission to use the recordings in this podcast. Their group can be found@africawesttrio.com and the recordings can be purchased on CD baby or iTunes. This conversation captures many of the gifts I have experienced through world music drumming, that this approach opens up my love of approaching music as sound before symbol, where I might learn to hear rhythms as interlocking conversations of sound. Simultaneously, I experience new forms of relationship with participants through a week of collective, interlocking musicking. We encourage you to consider attending a workshop with Josh Ryan and any one of the other fantastic instructors with world music drumming. At Elizabethtown college. We are proud to host world music drumming workshops as well as a master's program that is rooted within world music, drumming, and peacebuilding. We are now accepting applications at etown.edu Slash music masters. I will be taking a break from podcasting over the holidays and I wish you a wonderful holiday season. When we return our next episodes, will explore Zimbabwean, peacebuilding and music making with Oliver Mtukudzi, Dan Shevock and ecological care through music. AnaBaptist heritages of peacebuilding, South Indian classical dance and the Hindu peacebuilding ethic of ahimsa, an interview with the U S executive director of peace direct, and much more. I hope you are enjoying listening as much as I am having fun in interviewing and editing podcasts. Have a restful, restorative, and happy holiday season.
Speaker 13:[inaudible].