The Universal Heartbeat

Having taught in almost 50 different cultures, I am perpetually an outsider searching for some universal heartbeat that we all share. According to modern misguided thought, it is culturally inappropriate for me to presume to teach people in other cultures about teaching music to their children. And I agree that it potentially could be seen as the legacy of colonization for Western classical music, for example, to be taught in China. Yet when people listen to Yuja Wang or Lang Lang play piano, I don’t think anyone objects. 

 

At any rate, I’m after something very different here. I believe there’s a way to offer something valuable to diverse cultures that doesn’t lean on an ethnocentric viewpoint. Both my own experience teaching in so many different places and the fact that there are Orff Associations in some 45 countries worldwide testify to this. But without care, teachers from abroad— and so far they mostly have been teachers from Germany, Finland, Australia, Canada and the U.S. doing this kind of work— can indeed impose Euro-centric repertoire and even educational assumptions and ideas. It indeed calls for some careful thought.

 

So on this trip, I thought I’d put these issues out on the table and share my own approach with the participants. After acknowledging an imbalanced meeting of the cultures springing from imperialist and colonialist mentality, I came up with five approaches in my workshop to help turn it another direction. As follows:

 

• Using original English rhymes: For better or worse, the British Empire left its imprint on the world with English far outdistancing Esperanto as perhaps the most universal language. In the face of this, many children in diverse countries are studying English and if this is the case, improving language skills through chants, rhymes, poems and songs is an excellent way to support English as a second language. It also opens up Orff’s idea of using language to teach rhythm and rhymes to create original compositions. In my teaching, I choose short rhymes with much repetition, rhyme and often alliteration so children can gain access to the music of language while also learning music through language.

 

• Using rhymes from many cultures: So far in this course, we’ve learned some rhymes/ songs in Spanish, German, Italian, Shona (Zimbabwe), Japanese. Each brings a different kind of music to the activities and leans towards certain rhythms over others. 

 

• Translating rhymes: Some rhymes lend themselves to translating into the mother tongue of the culture visited. Some not. If the rhythm is too different or style somewhat dependent on the original language or the needed rhyme is wholly lost, it doesn’t always work so well. But in this course, it worked just fine with several short texts and added a distinct flavor to do in both English and Mandarin. 

 

• Finding similar rhymes in pattern or topic. Beat-passing games, partner claps, rock-scissors-paper games and more tend to be universal and after learning one in English or Slovenian or Turkish or Spanish, it is a good challenge for the group to dig back into their own childhood and find similar games. Likewise with rhymes that share similar structures. I’ve found four-line rhymes structured a a b a or a b c a to be quite common. Finally, a song about food or numbers or animals in one culture can call up similar ones in another.

 

• Home culture material/ Orff process: I am aware that teaching Jazz in New Orleans, Mother Goose in England, Lobi/ Dagara xylophone music in Ghana, humanistic material promoting respect in Thailand, etc. can seem from the outside as arrogant, presumptuous and culturally inappropriate, an outsider bringing “coals to Newcastle.” And yet the modern misguided notions that would have me drink the Kool Aid of “staying in my lane” would reduce my “constituency” to zero— who would qualify to be in my affinity group as a as a New Jersey native with Jewish Belarus ancestors living in San Francisco and brought up Unitarian, then practicing Zen Buddhism and playing Bach, Count Basie, Bulgarian bagpipe and Brazilian samba, amongst other instruments and styles? Three things help me refuse that invitation: 

 

1)   While rightfully acknowledging my lack of qualification to represent the culture, language, musical style, the what of a music education program in a particular place, I am wholly qualified to share Carl Orff and Gunild Keetman’s ideas about the how of the process, modeling creative ways to introduce, develop and extend any given material. That is at the center of the notion that Orff Schulwerk has something to offer in multiple cultural contexts, an idea, as mentioned, wholly affirmed by the existence of over 45 Orff Associations worldwide and the people from some 25 cultures who have attended our SF International Orff Course over the years. (Much of that work of adapting to specific cultures can be found in the book I published through my Pentatonic Press, Orff Schulwerk in Diverse Cultures: An Idea That Went Round the World, with some 70 authors describing their work in adapting the Orff process to their particular cultural situation.)

 

2)   When possible, working side by side with graduates from the SF Course who teach as insiders but also have experience in Orff Schulwerk is both a grand pleasure and an appropriate pairing of skills. In this course, my translator/ former student Cao Li is teaching traditional Chinese folk songs and we both, alongside the participants, are investigating what makes sense to blend with the Orff process models of movement and games and drama and body percussion, as well as elemental styles of arranging on Orff instruments. 

 

3)   The fact that so many places invite me back is testimony that this approach has indeed transformed their teaching. In some cases, it actually has steered teachers back to the roots of a folk culture they haven’t wholly known as they’ve studied in Western-style universities or Conservatories or been brought up by American pop music or their own culture’s version (K-pop/ J-pop/ Bollywood/ etc.)

 

It felt good to treat these matters seriously and share it with the participants. But truth be told, the response from the group seemed to be “We weren’t really thinking about any of that.” Indeed, I told a joke at the beginning as we explored the pentatonic scale on the xylophones that Carl Orff had invented this scale. Rather than outrage or amusement, they just seemed a bit perplexed and then giggled a bit when I followed with “NOT! I think China knows something about this scale!!!”

 

At the end of the day, I taught a few folk dances from Israel, Russia and the Czech Republic, again apologizing a bit for the Eurocentric repertoire and inviting anyone who wanted to later share similar dances to do so. They listened politely, but once the dancing started, the room erupted into unbridled joy and laughter. They especially loved the Czech polka mixer and kept practicing the steps on their own after the class was officially over. 

 

It was a reminder that amidst all the well-meaning tiptoeing around about cultural appropriation, it was the universal heartbeat we all share that is the most important story. “Music is music and dance is dance and let’s not overthink this” they seemed to say. “Just come on out and dance!”

 

And so we will, for three more glorious days.