Wednesday, June 25, 2025

A Life of Meaning

One of my strategies for tricking mortality is to travel. Immerse myself in new places, meet new people, encounter new situations. I can testify that in my 7th week of such travel, it’s working! Today was the end of Day 2 of the Orff Afrique Course and it feels like we’ve been here a month. And biking in France those seven weeks and feels like at least seven months ago. 

 

Today was actually the first day of normal classes and so I spent the morning co-teaching with Ghana xylophone (gyil) virtuoso Aaron and within 70 minutes, both groups played a full-blown piece successfully. I was the Orff side of the equation and Aaron was the Afrique side and since most of the 30 participants are Orff-trained music teachers, it was a perfect balance. 

 

Most (but not all) had of course played the Orff xylophones, but the gyil is a bit of a challenge as there are no letter names written on the bars and even though it is tuned in a pentatonic scale, there are no spaces between mi and sol, la and do, the way we’re accustomed to on the Orff instruments. A different kind of mallet and different grip on the mallet and a musical style that demands coordinating the left hand with the right (similar to the piano) got the brain thinking, “Hmm. This is somewhat familiar but I need to get working making new synaptic connections!” All of which made it a worthy challenge and one they groups rose to. 

 

The opposite morning classes were with Kofi (the Afrique side) teaching traditional Ewe (his ethnic group) drumming and the afternoon was my colleagues James and Sofia (the Orff side) sharing pedagogical ideas of drama and arts integration related to Ghanaian culture. May I give a shout-out to my brilliant colleagues still astounding me with their fertile and imaginative minds?  James had groups creating dramatic scenes using the rhythms of the morning drumming and then had small group act out select Ewe proverbs. Sofia worked with Adinkra stamps using multiple strategies. One involved drawing four different stamps using four different strategies. The first was feeling it with your fingers (no peeking!), the second was a quick micro-second peek at it (no cheating), the third was a partner drawing it on your back and the fourth a partner describing it to you in words. Again, brilliant! And in both classes, the bubbling joyful energy between these 30 strangers now intimate friends was palpable. All power to the arts!!

 

There was time before dinner to visit the hotel’s swimming pool and tomorrow I will but chose to hang out with some folks and chat and teach one of them my favorite solitaire game. After dinner, the Nunya Academy kids came to perform four traditional dances with other Nunya kids drumming and singing and if you’ve ever been impressed with a school Orff music concert (including the ones James, Sofia and I have put on), you might reserve your enthusiasm after listening to and watching these kids. Get your hottest university percussionist and dancers to attempt these pieces and dances and if they’re lucky, they’ll match these kids who ranged from 8 years old to 18. 

 

So that was Day 2. I’ll find a time to elaborate on this idea later, but for now I simply want to report that one of the most extraordinary things about this Ewe (and other African) cultures is that everything is imbued with deep meaning. I mean everything! The adinkra symbols stand for revered cultural values, the proverbs teach the children what’s important, the music translates proverbs into drum rhythms so that each pattern carries multiple meanings, the dance steps are telling specific stories, people’s names are awash with deep meaning, from identifying the day of the week they were born to giving them a name that reflects a valued quality. (Some of the people we have working with us are named Prosper, Justice, Pius, Success, Promise.) The language used to name relationships, where aunts and uncles are called secondary mothers and fathers, fuels the real practice here of counting on a whole village to raise a child. 

 

In short, the whole thrust of the culture—the names, the language, the music, the dance, the art motifs and more— is aimed to promote morality, ethics, community-mindedness, spiritual awareness in each and every one of society’s members. That is something that Westerners awash in lives devoid both of personal meaning and collective meaning might have trouble understanding. 

 

We have sub-groups who gather to try to build healthy bodies, hearts and minds— like the Orff community!— and to resist evil cultural practices and immoral actions performed by shameless leaders. But we are so far from understanding how to shift the entire weight of the culture behind the worthy venture of creating decent, fulfilled and compassionate human beings. More so than ever today. We once loved George Bailey and the community that rallied around him to create a “wonderful life,” but now it’s Mr. Potter and his hard-hearted greed putting profits over people that some—far too many— of our citizens admire. 

 

In Ghana, this cultural thrust of worthy meaning continues unbroken. We Americans have had threads of it here and there, which gives me hope that they might rise again—and indeed, seem to be re-awakening in the form of the millions of protestors recently. Once again, if we need guidance and inspiration, I highly recommend inviting a Ghanaian into your home and listening to them speak in detail about the above examples. 

 

On to Day 3.

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