Tap Dance

Around this June I'll have been tap dancing for 4 years, which is wild to believe. As with most hobbies you probably see tons of improvement when you start, and as time progresses there are diminishing returns to your hobby. Put another way as you get better it takes a lot more effort to get better.

My origin story for tap dance is that my ex girlfriend tried to teach me how to shuffle (one of the basic steps in tap), and she said I was terrible at it. My revenge arc was that I would learn to tap better than her, and than tap on her grave (I'm kidding). There is no doubt that this played some role in the motivation. Nonetheless, I had wanted to pursue some form of dance for awhile, and tap is pretty appealing.

I didn't know much about tap prior to enrolling in the class. I did see that it required tap shoes, and I went out and bought some at an SF dance store. One appealing element of tap dance is that it produces musicality alongside the dance. As a dance classmate would mention tap is the drumming of the feet.

Thankfully my brother was open to trying tap dance, and what's surprising to me is that to this day he is also still taking classes. The fact that we both continue to take tap is promising, because there are some very well known famous tap duos who are brothers.

A very fortunate thing of learning tap in San Francisco that there is a world renown tap dancer in Sam Weber who continues to teach tap there. Sam Weber has a unique style that is heavily focused on technique. Sam teaches people to move in a very ergonomic fashion, and that technique should enable them to efficiently dance quickly. The other day as my brother was perusing Youtube and watching Sam Weber he encountered a comment that mentioned how Sam Weber had been featured on a Mr. Rogers episode. I personally didn't watch a lot of Mr.Rogers as a kid, but it was a treat to watch this episode and see a teacher of mine tap dancing.

In part of the episode they also visit a shoe factory to talk about shoes are made, since a meaningful part of tap dance is the shoes that you use. It was eye opening to see the shoe making process. I also had a personal connection to the process, because my maternal grandfather owned a shoe factory. A few weeks after watching the episode I was thinking to myself what parts of the factory that my grandfather owned resembled the shoe making process from the show.

As an aside my family immigrated to Colombia from Eastern Europe. I unfortunately never get the story completely straight, but I think some grandparents were born in Eastern Europe, and others immigrated when they were pretty young. What I find fascinating is that most of these families started factories of their own. For instance, my paternal grandfather owned a button factory, one of his brothers owned a plastic factory, another one had a toy factory. I don't think that these family members had a history of owning factories prior to arriving in Colombia, but in Colombia something enabled them to be entrepreneurs. I don't understand this, but it would be a fun research project to dive into that.

Anyway tap dancing is hard. Even though I have a musical background, and tap is a musical dance I more so feel that tap exposes my weaknesses from music than builds on their strengths. For the most part I learned music in a very standard way, and that was based on the sheet music. All of the music that we played came from reading the sheet music. Also even though sheet music was the source of how we learned the songs most of the time in music class was spent on honing songs and less on playing new songs. At least for me this meant that my site reading skills (the ability to read a new piece of music site unseen) didn't develop that much. My listening abilities didn't develop either. Since we always had the notes as a queue we didn't need to figure out what notes needed to be played.

Compared to other forms of learning the way music was taught seems weird. We learned to read, but not to write. In other words, we were never really composing our own music. We learned to read, but we didn't learn to imitate. I don't know what the analogy is for reading stories. In a chorus class though you don't need to have sheet music, because you might learn the melody. Additionally, sheet music is more beneficial for instruments because the instruments have a reference for exact notes that you are playing. By way of example if the sheet music says the first note is an A and you have an instrument you can play that note. As for singing unless you have perfect pitch you aren't going to be able to play that note. It is the case that for singing you can rely on the relative pitches of the notes, but that's actually harder to do. You have to have a really good ear, and an internalized sense of the what it sounds like to go from one note to another.

When I was in high school I had a sense of superiority to the people in chorus. To me it seemed that anyone could sing (even though I couldn't and still can't), and it seemed that people in chorus had a more limited knowledge of music. In my mind, since people in chorus didn't need to read sheet music they didn't need to learn about all the aspects of the music and therefore they knew less. This is of course a very limiting belief. For one none of these skills are mutually exclusive. In fact, a common refrain was if you can sing it you can play it. To break this down I think if you develop enough skill then you will be able to easily translate singing to instruments. However, even with limited skills the point is that you can sing a part of the song, and then stumble your way to finding the notes on the instrument, and continue to do this until you learn the whole song.

When I was learning music we kind of had the easy way out in terms of having sheet music. Even if you didn't know a song you could often search for sheet music for the song. When I started learning guitar it was similar you could look up tabs that told you the notes to play. In the case of tabs for guitar not only will they tell you the note to play they are telling you exactly where to position your fingers on the guitar. The interesting part about tabs though is they often don't encode the rhythm the way sheet music does. This means that the tabs are telling you what notes to play, but not at what speed relative to each other, nor how long to hold the notes. If you listen to the song that you are trying to play though you'll be able to determine the rhythm.

The gaps that I have in how I learned music are now following me to tap dance. When I learned to play trumpet I was rarely asked to listen to a rhythm and write down how that rhythm was represented in music. Alternatively, I wasn't asked to say the counts of that rhythm. On the surface to me this seems very easy, but in practice it's difficult for me to do. I could probably also hone the skill, but it's not something I've done.

Sadly it even feels challenge to explain why counting the rhythm is hard. I think this is challenging because it requires considering at least two elements at the same time, and this is the beat of the song, and then the rhythm relative to that beat. To elaborate, you usually describe songs in terms of beats per minute. A beat in this context is often a quarter note, and in many cases you're looking at counting 4 beats at a time. These concepts kind of feel like they have emerged out of the ether, but I can at least internalize them (a bit). Given a song I have an okay chance of telling you if it's in 4/4 (4 beats per measure), and clapping along to these beats. That being said my ability to do this effectively is at least partially associated with many songs being in 4/4 and if the song was in a different time signature perhaps I would struggle.

All this being said if you show me sheet music for something I can:

1. Look at that sheet music and probably tell you the counts

2. I could probably play the rhythm

Ignoring difficulty it's way easier for me to reference the sheet music, and give you the information, and way harder for me to go the other way. These gaps manifest in tap class because you are playing a rhythm as part of the dance, and that rhythm has counts. If I knew the counts I would have an additional means to remember and reference the choreography that we are learning. Sometimes the teacher will dance a piece and ask us to tell them the counts. Generally no one can tell the teacher the counts, and yet it's not something we focus on. Perhaps it should be reassuring to me that other people also have difficulties with the counts. It's not that reassuring for me, because I presume that other people aren't familiar with the conventions of counting.

To provide a brief explanation of the convention if someone is clapping on the beat the counts of those claps would be 1, 2, 3, 4. If they only clapped on the 2nd and 4th beat the counts would be 2, and 4. Simple enough. If you played two equal notes within the first beat that would be counted as 1 and (these are referred to as eight notes). If you further subdivided the notes into sixteenth notes a convention for counting those is 1 e and a. Those counts would correspond to 4 notes played in the span of the first beat. To explain this further, in the time that someone is clapping think of saying the syllables 1 e and a evenly after the clap is made. The individual claps of beats 1, 2, 3, 4 are referred to as down beats. If you played only the second eight notes of each of those beats that would be the and of beats 1-4 those would be referred to as the upbeat. This is a common pattern in reggae.

I often feel that if I explained counting to other people in the class that they would be able to count the beats, but I still feel that I would find it hard myself. Perhaps my classmates do understand the conventions, but they find counting difficult. I apologize for torturing you all with this, because I think this truly could've been explained way better with sheet music, and accompanying sounds of what the music represents with the counts being notated underneath. I'm trying to churn out blog posts though for better or worse.

Anyway what complicates matters even more is that tap dance is based around the Jazz tradition. A key characteristic of the Jazz tradition is swing feel. The most basic explanation of swing feel that I've learned is that unlike the other counts swing feel is about having notes subdivided in unequal lengths. In particular it's characterized by a long sound and then a short sound. I think I am going to lose my readers who don't know music as I try to explain dotted notes. But whatever in music there is a concept of a dot. What a dot does is extend the duration of a note by half it's length. As an example if you were given a half note (2 beats) and had a dot after it then this would extend it by half (1 beat) and the duration would be 3 beats. Notably there are other ways to notate this. For instance, you could tie (draw a line) to connect the notes, and indicate that they are all together. So you could connect 3 quarter notes, or a half note and a quarter note or a quarter note, and then a half note whatever it's 2 + 1, because there is no notion of a note worth 3 beats.

Ugh this is not good (the lack of music notation and better descriptiveness that is), but with that in mind in middle school I learned that swing feel is a dotted eight (so eight note + 1 sixteenth note) and then a sixteenth. This at least accomplishes the long then short feel. Since then I've never heard swing explained this way. Everyone else including in tap dance explains the swing feel as triplet feel. A triplet is when you break up a beat in 3s instead of in half. The swing feel in this case ends up being the first triplet and then the last triplet. Do yourself a favor, and have wikipedia with it's music notation + sounds provide some solace for you. The point here is that the swing feel adds an extra layer of complication. In particular what gets tricky is that the underlying feel of the music is often in 4, but the triplets themselves are in 3, so you have something like a 3 against 4 rhythm.

When I am doing tap I know about these numbers, and these counts conceptually even though I can't count them, and I am not sure it helps me. Sometimes knowledge is a burden. Although if I could count it I am sure that would help. I try to internalize the dance in my body without intellectualizing it too much, but I am not sure that works that effectively either. Compared to my music education what's interesting is that dance as a tradition seems way more aural as opposed to something that is documented. Although when it comes to jazz a common point that people make is that you can't capture the art by writing down the music you have to learn the art form by hearing it, and imitating the greats. Sam Weber's old teacher did create a tap notation, but it's not something that I ever learned. I wonder how I would benefit from learning via the notation.

Despite all these years of tapping I haven't been in a class that has a performance so I also haven't had the pressure of performing to improve. Considering that I have no downstairs neighbors that would get annoyed by me tapping I think it's time to seize the moment and actually practice more than the 1 class I take a week!