Coals to Newcastle

Even as my teacher hat is hung for the moment in the back of the closet and my China trip feels like a lifetime ago, there was a little article I began at the end of my last course, trying to capture a bit of what I said to the teachers there about why I was there and what I might have to offer. Here is that first draft. 

 

Historically, the town of Newcastle in north-eastern England was a great center of coal mining. “Bringing coals to Newcastle” became an expression to suggest that you don’t try to sell things to people or gift them with what they already have. It would be like being invited to dinner at a florist’s house and bringing flowers or a baker’s house and bringing bread. Or giving an Orff workshop in China teaching the students about the pentatonic scale! 

 

In my recent workshop in Guaying, China, I indeed talked about the pentatonic scale as Orff used it, but acknowledged that it might feel like bringing “coals to Newcastle.” After all, Chinese music has used the pentatonic scale for centuries before Orff was even born! I went on to ask what an American music teacher teaching a music education approach developed by a German composer has to offer a music teacher in China without imposing a European-American mindset on a culture with its own unique and deeply-rooted culture? In fact, a culture that had writing and noodles and fireworks and more, long before Marco Polo’s visit! Is an outside teacher invariably bringing “coals to Newcastle?” 

 

Yet speaking on behalf of Orff’s legacy that I put into practice with children and adults for 50 years now, I suggested I do have something to offer. At the end of that workshop, I talked about it like this:

 

• Play, Sing & Dance. Instead of viewing music as playing the right notes on the instrument of your choice, Orff suggests multiple ways to develop your musicality. Games, body percussion, vocal percussion, speech, songs, folk dance, movement, percussion instruments, barred instruments, recorder, drama, integrated arts and integrating whatever instrument you play in an exploratory, improvisatory way. 

 

• Oral transmission—the body, voice and ear. We speak before we read and write language. Music should be the same. 

 

• Play first, rules second. Games are the child-size door through which to enter the mansion of music. The rules will reveal themselves through the art of play rather than the adult-imposed rulebook. 

 

• The mastery of the piece is the beginning of the next possibility. The teacher creates a perpetually fresh curriculum by asking, “What can we do next now that you know how to play the right notes at the right time? Can you play it in different tempos, different keys, with different dynamics? Can you re-compose different accompanying parts, change the scales, play it on different instruments? Can you dance it, notate it, create a little drama around it?” Etc.

 

• Improvise, compose, choreograph. Within the structure of the piece, can you improvise? Create a newly composed section? Choreograph a dance?

 

• Adapt and adopt to your native repertoire, applying all of the above and creating new arrangements on the Orff instruments. When learning a game or an instrumental piece or a song or a dance in a workshop, find a parallel one from your own cultural background. 

 

• Music learned in community to create community to sustain community. Note how everything we learn in the workshop is developed inside the circle (literal and figurative) of community, how everyone learns all the parts before specializing, how we create new variations collectively in both small and large groups. How what happens in the music room can expand out to the entire school community in celebrations, ceremonies, rituals. 

 

• Music as a path to human development, looking for the particular genius and talent of each and every child and openly praising, encouraging and blessing them. Consider that we are not just leading out the musical promise of each child in a caring, humanistic way, but also leading out their own caring, humanistic selves through the vehicle of music. 

 

If you compare the above to classic Chinese—or American or European —education, you see there is so much to consider differently. No more students reading before they’re speaking music, learning by rules instead of playing their way into understanding,  being forced from the outside to practice for perfection rather than inspired from the inside to pursue for pleasure, putting precise mastery of all the notes given  before playful exploration of the notes not given, shaming children for not meeting your standard instead of praising them for discovering their own standard of authentic expression, learning just their own instrument instead of all the parts, mechanically playing from written notation instead of singing what they hear, playing what they sing, moving what they play and sing, spending hours alone in practice rooms instead gathering in community circles. 

 

In short, even if it appears that an outsider offering an Orff course to an already vibrant musical culture is bringing “coals to Newcastle,” the fires we light from those coals ignite the students' musicality, warm them and bring them together in new and valuable ways.