Open Letter to AOSA

(AOSA stands for the American Orff Schulwerk Association, the parent organization for music teachers like me. My intention here is not to air dirty laundry or point fingers, but to show how the ideas and practices mentioned here are infecting all our organizations and the way we think about sharing life together on this planet. Hope you find something that resonates.)

When confronted with injustice, I ask four types of questions:

 

1.    Who was hurt by this and how can I help them?

2.    What are the principles and values that stand, often invisibly, behind a hurtful action? How do they make good people do bad things? 

3.    What are the even larger issues behind the principles that often work without our awareness of how they contribute to the damage?

4.    How can we reconcile the conflicts between our intentions and the results that arise in all the dynamics above? Might it be simply a matter of weighing how much of each is needed and healthy and even more importantly, order them into foreground and background?

 

Like a physical disease in the body, this in-depth kind of analysis is essential to proper treatment. If we focus solely on what happened minus all the forces that drove it and continue to damage the organism, it’s a bit like prescribing ibuprofen for a brain tumor. Temporary relief, perhaps, but not getting to the root of the problem.

 

For example, the role of the lawyer in contemporary life. I think most everyone these days understands the need to have the safety net of the law when human relations flounder. But when that net becomes the ground we walk on, things go bad. When lawyer-speak is our primary language of discourse and lawyer-thought the North Star of how we navigate our lives, something begins to rot in the state of Denmark. I believe the compliant acceptance of this as the new reality in all our institutions is one of the big issues behind the issues, the unseen and unnamed driver at the wheel that has us careening into each other like bumper cars in a carnival. 

 

All of the above is much on my mind lately with a real-life situation— an institution I belong to and people I know. While grappling with these complex, thorny issues, I was astonished to read this passage from a book titled This Is Happiness. This remarkable novel, set in a small village called Faha in Ireland, has a main character named Noe, who as a young man, has a life-threatening accident helping the community set up poles to bring electricity to them. 

 

While he’s recovering in his home, a man named Rushe comes in and without a single word asking him how he’s doing, starts straight in talking his lawyerlike talk to make it clear that his company will not be liable for his accident, questioning the afflicted Noe like a grueling lawyer in a major trial. Here’s how Noe describes: 

 

“It's hard not to despise officialdom in all forms. The retreat of human beings behind it diminishes the nature of what we are. I’ve never known a man or woman to be better for the wearing of the uniform. I’ve known them to be different, but not more human. …

 

When Rushe appeared in my grandparents’ house, he brought with him more than his person. In his manner, he brought the State and in doing so, in his standing there, squat, rigid and bull-headed, in his use of a tone and language hitherto unknown inside the stone walls of that crooked house, an easier and more natural way of living was nearing its end. In Faha, and places like it, people had been making it up as they went along and making it up out of no rule book but the one they had been born with, that is an innate sense of right and decency, the rough edges of how to live alongside others having been knocked off not by ordinance or decree but by life. …

 

…the role he was assigning me, I would not serve. There in the kitchen, I felt the stirring of a family trait I hadn’t realized I possessed until right then, but which would inform the kind of life I would end up living, that is, what authority provoked in me was a desire to be an outlaw. 

 

This speaks directly to a controversy afoot in AOSA. It feels like this unthinking agreement to Rushe’s way of thinking is leaking in everywhere— our schools, our neighborhoods, our nation— and diminishing our capacity to be authentic human beings, allows us to barge right into a house talking about liability protection without even asking the person hurt how they’re doing. Our long history as music teachers speaking with a tone and language that once was musical instead of flat and monotone, our delight in making things up as we went along trusting our instincts, is now reduced to committees and rubrics and long overly-complicated documents. We’re losing the ability to just sit down and talk to each other. Afraid to have any real, pleasurable or courageous conversation without worrying if we’re ticking all the right pre-ordained boxes. 

 

I feel its toxic presence in every aspect of our organization— the way we’re handling the apprenticeship program, conference proposals, diversity issues, board decisions. We’re losing the ability to act and think from an artistic way of looking at the world. Knowing how to hold dissonance like an intriguing chord, understanding how to move the half-steps that resolve to consonance. Crafting opposing voices into complementary relationships that create a melodious counterpoint. Using the tension of rhythmic 3’s and 2’s to make a dynamic polyrhythm. There is no artistry in a lawyer’s brief. Just the paint-by-number steps that leave out imagination and lead to the deadly dullness of a pre-fabricated result.

 

To switch metaphors. As the old guy who has been around the block many times in the AOSA neighborhood, it feels like we’re tearing down the old, colorful, unique houses and making generic practical houses that all look alike, with no aesthetic ornamental features, vibrant colors, unique contours. The once “crooked houses” with the warm kitchens giving out heat and enticing smells are now “efficiency units” run by faceless electronic entities. 

 

In so many places, our “easier and more natural way of living is nearing its end” and I, for one, am deeply saddened that AOSA is becoming one of them. The rubrics they are assigning to me, I refuse to serve. The compliance they prefer over the questioning will not be mine to give. I will leave the too-tight shoes they ask me to wear outside the class and stride in boldly carrying forth my teacher Avon’s “barefoot connections.” Likewise, his “possibility teaching,” where we make things up as we go along and trust our instincts to be both extravagantly and artistically wild as well as kind and decent. 

 

No ’drawing-board mentality,” warned Carl Orff. “Don’t Fence Me In!” said Cole Porter. “God Bless the Child,” said Billie Holiday and children, bless their hearts, trust their intuition over the adult’s baffling rules. These are the qualities that drew me into the Orff approach and got me happily playing in its fields for 50 years. They mostly have been—and should be—the North Star of how we think and act and now are clouded over. We now navigate wholly by GPS.

 

Be it in AOSA or any institution, when the law serves to constrict us in its straightjacketed thinking, shut us down, feed our fears, demand our blind obedience, I will happily stand outside the law and proudly wear the mantle of out-law. Then ride off into the sunset with my fellow outlaws, determined to live true and free in the wide-open spaces under the immense stars. I will be beholden to no one out of duty to the roles others assign us, beholden to everyone out of finding our common ground of artistic vision, extravagant imagination and simple kindness and decency.

 

If need be, I’ll ride off alone into the sunset. But I’d rather hear the music of all of AOSA’s clattering hooves side-by-side. Hi-o-Silver!