Good Morning Vietnam

Like any red-blooded American boy growing up in the 1950’s and 60’s, I was obsessed with war movies. Loved the explosions and the tough good guys vanquishing the enemy. I remember seeing the old movie (1945) Pride of the Marines and afterwards rode my bike for an hour circling the block singing The Marine’s Hymn at the top of my lungs. Later, I had my Dad paint a portrait of Andrew Jackson (the one on the $20) bill after reading his biography somewhere around 4^th grade. Hung it in my room and his was the first face I saw when I woke up and the last one I saw before turning to sleep. Of course, I knew nothing back then about the Trail of Tears and the enslaved human beings he owned as property.  He was just a valiant general who won the battle of New Orleans and that was enough for me.

 

Somewhere around 5^th grade, I read The West Point Story and had a brief fantasy of setting my sights to enroll when I was of age. I began a regimen of waking early and doing more push-ups then I was really capable of and generally trying to install some iron discipline in my small body. I think that lasted about two days and I gave up on West Point forever (though ended up having lovely family time and walks in nature as an adult staying at The West Point Inn). 

 

Fast forward some 6 or 7 years and now I was reading Thoreau, Whitman and Emerson, alongside The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Catcher in the Rye, Catch 22.  Instead of war movies, I was switching to films like To Kill a Mockingbird, Rebel Without a Cause, Inherit the Wind, The Defiant Ones, The Graduate, each and every one siding with an underdog questioning “the Establishment” and moving against the grain. All to Bob Dylan’s soundtrack Masters of War, Blowin’ in the Wind, The Times They Are A-Changing alongside the Beatles, Janis Joplin, Joni Mitchell, Simon and Garfunkel and so many others. 

 

So when I reached the age when I could be drafted to fight in a real war, the kind I relished as a child, I was less than enthusiastic. I was beginning to understand any war was not as glamorous as those TV films and this one in particular was one that the U.S. was in for all the wrong reasons and that what soldiers were going through was yet more hellish than the proverbial and eternally true “War is hell.” By the time I was about to graduate college, the lottery kicked in and the war was winding down and I was lucky to never have had to make the choice that was no choice at all for me. I refused to be fodder for a senseless war. And aren’t they all?

 

Why am I writing about this? Because I’ve woken up in Ho Chi Minh City, the old Saigon. The lesson is not lost on me that this means something so much different now than it did back in 1973. And gives me hope that things that once were horrific can now be attractive and welcoming. While my beloved flawed country is mired in its own horrific downturn of the Wheel of Fortune, this helps feed my faith that this, too, shall pass. 

 

Meanwhile, 60 Vietnamese music teachers await me and I hope to invite them into the place where strength is tenderness and vulnerability, where explosions of joy await, where we will greet children armed with love and compassion. 

Two Kinds of Silence

Silence is golden in the spiritual realm and silence is complicity in the political one. We are all without exception inextricably enmeshed in both worlds and as such, have choices to make. We can choose to shut off the roaring river of our device distraction and settle into the deeper silences of the soul. We can choose to speak out when the evil afoot is unleashed without our consent and if enough of us do it, join that roaring river of dissent so there is hope to wash away the toxic waste threatening our survival. I believe both are equally necessary. (This photo my "golden silence" moment in Hong Kong.)

 

Many have made the choice to leave Facebook as a way to protest the Zuckerberg and his cronies' empire and I wholly respect that decision. At the same time, my personal choice is to use this venue to speak out further and wider than I can with my personal e-mail mailing list. While we still have the freedom to voice dissent, use it as much as we can. Alongside reminding each other to claim our beauty amidst all the ugliness. I, for one, am constantly inspired by various quotes and posts I read on Facebook and also learn much useful information that I can’t stomach doled out by mainstream media. I’m also encouraged that many acquaintances who generally haven’t voiced “political” opinions are now speaking up and speaking out. More, please. 

Wrapping Up

After a refreshing day off on Tuesday, Wednesday was back to work. The morning was at the Norwegian International School in the New Territories of Hong Kong and another spontaneous autograph-seeking from 5^th graders after they felt the joy of their first jazz improvisations. Also fun “Roses are Red” game with 1^st graders and an arrangement with 4^th graders I haven’t done in a while “Yes, Sir, No Sir.” And then an unexpected three-hour break which began with a meal at a country restaurant. 

 

Hong Kong, especially the neighborhood where I am staying, is NewYork City-style urban. Dense, intense, the man-made canyons of steel and tall buildings and the constant hustle and bustle. So it was a supremely refreshing moment to relish some quiet and bird song and long out over the distant green mountains and water. Another too-many-dishes-meal and I will pay for it all when I step on the scale back home. But nice company and then a drive out into the countryside, including a stop by the water’s edge where we all saw a little snack shack and thought “Ice cream!” It was appropriate for the relatively hot summer day. 

 

Finally, off to the Education University of Hong Kong, with a view of a giant Buddha and 45 college students gathering to get my version of music education, Orff-style. As usual, the first 30 minutes without me speaking a word, but crafting an energetic and complex body percussion piece which they then performed to a recording of “Smoke on the Water” (a new little shtick I created last summer in China). They participated fully, but when it came time for the discussion, I would ask simple questions to be met with stunned silence and confused stares. “You’re asking ME what I think about it? That’s not how we do things here.” I’ve known about this over-reverence of the teacher in Chinese culture for a while, but actually have not felt it in my recent visits. But these University Students were so reluctant to share even a simple little response verbally (and it was not a language issue—English is at a high level here). I was playful, as I am, saying, “Come on, people! Give me something here!” and by the end they opened up a bit and also got more bold trying improvisation on the xylophones, both Orff style and jazz style. I rarely work with University students and loved the opportunity, yet another “new territory” in the New Territories, as it were.

 

Today, one of my generous hosts offered to take me up the tram to the Peak and do the hour walk around the top. And so we did and it was lovely. She had to go to work in the afternoon, so I took a ferry to Kowloon and walked along the water’s edge by the Avenue of the Stars, kind of a Hollywood and Vine scene with handprints in metal and the names of famous Hong Kong film stars, none of whom I had heard of. My issue, of course, and a reminder that there are millions of people in the world who never heard of Brad Pitt and Taylor Swift and would be singularly unimpressed if they saw their handprints and name. Took the ferry back and then the tram and now getting ready to go off to a jazz club, having walked a healthy 8.5 miles (not kilometers!) today.

 

Tomorrow, another mini-tour somewhere and then off to Vietnam. The life of this traveling man. And the title of my next Post, dictated into my phone on Kowloon. Stay tuned!

Palette Cleanser

Amidst reporting my “Confessions of a Traveling Music Teacher” themes on this whirlwind Orff tour in Hong Kong, the waxing poetic about the delight of children and the powerful Soulwork of the Schulwerk, the outrage and genuine concern for the demolition derby of Trumpism and hope to stem the tide of destruction, let’s take a break and talk about last night’s dinner. A literal palette cleanser trying to capture a bit of the Veggie Skye banquet with its 17 extraordinary dishes hosted by a most lovely waiter and shared by the seven members of the Hong Kong Board and me. (For those curious and eager to try it, it’s just outside Western Market in Central Square of Hong Kong Island.)

 

I’m not big on taking photos of food, but I couldn’t resist here. So a little tour:

 

The meal began with 10 appetizers, each one unique and delicious and believe me, that would have been enough for the whole meal. But instead, it was just the warm-up. 

 

Amongst the dishes to come:

 

                        The softest and silkiest tofu dish I had ever had. With an exquisite sauce.

 

                A kind of open egg roll wrapped in tofu skin, to be eaten with a strawberry.

 

                                A fake pork (mushroom) burrito of sorts with pineapple. 

 

                                            A pomegranate juice with vinegar.

 

And yet more. 

 

Besides the exquisite care in the cooking, the obvious pride the waiter had in presenting each dish, the impressive variety of foods, it was the touches of these combinations— a strawberry slice here, a pineapple there, a touch of vinegar, that gave it all an artistic culinary touch far beyond the norm. 

 

My obvious complaint? Too much of a good thing!!! As I said, I felt done at the appetizers, so each new dish after that elicited more of a groan than an anticipated delighted. I was SO FULL but felt obliged to keep tasting. And I suspect if we had seven more people to help us share the banquet, they would have cooked larger quantities! 

On so many levels, it was a forever memorable meal and a needed palette cleanser to the horrific food the news is serving up each day. If you’re every in Hong Kong, do check it out. But make sure you’ve skipped breakfast and lunch! 

And bring some take-out containers.  

Day Mind/ Night Mind

"Poetry and Hums aren't things which you get, they're things which get you. And all you can do is to go where they can find you."  -Winnie the Pooh

 

I had an interesting talk with a colleague today about curriculum planning and why the usual go-to of scope-and-sequence and grid-calendars fails to account for the way actual human minds work. Or at least mine. I always tell my teacher-students that the way to plan the year is to thoroughly plan the first class. Then teach it and see what’s needed, based entirely on the response of the students and your own excitement about the material. Then you plan your second class.

 

Of course, you should have some idea of the territory you want to explore with the students. In the Orff world, that means making sure you’re opening each of the multitude of doors into the house of music— games, body percussion, speech, song, movement, folk dance, small percussion, Orff ensemble, recorder, drama, for starters, each of which have their own sequence of development from simple to complex. It means limiting material, especially on Orff instruments, to developmentally appropriate conceptual understandings— two-note melodies to three to the five notes of the pentatonic scale, simple drones to moving drone, simple ostinato to more complex ones to begin. Ascending through the grades, moving toward modal pentatonic, transposition, modal diatonic, I-IV-V harmonies, the full variety of meters and tempos and rhythmic grooves, the simple to complex forms.

 

Then you might consider thematic ideas that resonate with you at the moment—certain artists at the museums, cultural heritages, poetic structures, mythologies, the sea or the sky—what have you. The world is your oyster and you might as well savor whatever feels like it belongs on your table at the moment. 

But again, you don’t box yourself in by filling out the grid of the next 20 classes. You plan the first and the dreaming is set in motion, the mind’s search engine is revving up and if you have faith in its mysterious ways, you’ll discover yourself literally night-dreaming the next class— or at least day-dreaming. That’s precisely how I planned my tour-de-force of teaching some 6 classes a day at nine different schools and two different weekend workshop venues. I took it literally one day at a time and as I set down possibilities the evening before for the next day’s classes, the dreamtime mind took over and adjusted as needed. 

 

The grid is a business model, the dream is an artist’s— scientist’s— way. Many an artist will testify that melodies and harmonies and textures arrive unexpectedly in their fervent minds and they have no idea where they come from.  Likewise, scientists grappling with a problem sometimes find solutions in dreams. James Watson of the Watson and Crick team received the image of DNA of two snakes intertwining in an ascending helix in a dream. Rene Descartes, the famous philosopher who idealized abstract thought over imagination, received his famous sentence “I think therefore I am” (ironically) in a dream.

 

I know the idea of planning meticulously and then letting dream take over is hard to grasp for curriculum coordinators, who prefer at least the illusion that we know precisely what to teach and how and when to teach it. But my model of the live ping-pong game holds true for me as the deeper path to effective teaching, spending more time cultivating your ability to respond to the balls the students hit back then controlling precisely where you think they should be hitting them.  And letting the balls bounce back and forth in your dreams. 

That’s real teaching.  

Some Clichés Are True

“Each closed door leads to the next open one.”

 

One thing I never expected to become is a book publisher. My Pentatonic Press came from a need that I was determined to fill, a frustration with being at the mercy of existing publishing institutions who I had to court and date and just never quite got me. After rejection from three different publishers who held my jazz book manuscript for two years each, I set out into the unknown alone and published my first Pentatonic Press book Now’s the Time in 2004. There was a steep learning curve as I trudged uphill trying to figure out how to get the book in print and then once birthed, how to raise it. Get it out into the marketplace, get it distributed and sold and so on. I learned how to make an invoice on Excel, keep some reasonable facsimile of accounts and much, much more.

 

“Team work makes the dream work.”

 In the course of trying to figure out the basics of the business, I needed to find an editor, a copy editor, a lay-out designer, a cover designer, a printer, a distributor (several), how to register with Bowkerlink and get ISBN numbers, where to store the books, how to get them shipped and again, much, much more. I was fortunate to assemble a solid working team for each of those endeavors, most of whom I continued to use in the next 20 years as I published four more of my books and five books with other authors. 

 

All seemed to be going smoothly until many of the national Orff dealers closed, people post-pandemic started buying less books, printing costs almost doubled, storage costs increased and then what felt like the final blow when my large distributor Independent Publishing Group (IPG) recently sent me a letter that they’d be terminating our 15-year relationship this June because I wasn’t making enough money for them. Slam! went that door, alongside the other doors that were closing more gently, but closing nonetheless.

 

Today I met with my good friend aniDa Chan who so generously made an e-book for me of Teach Like It’s Music and it was the first time I had someone by my side to share all the trials and tribulations of self-publishing. The two of us went in search of a new distributor and we think we found the perfect solution which promises to turn out much, much better than IPG. Fingers crossed, but if it turns out to be true, both statements above will be justified— the open door into a better house made possible by the closed one and the supreme importance of gathering the right people around you to move forward. Further proof that sometimes clichés are true. May it be so!

The Broken Bus

Amongst my modest contributions to effective music education is my Doug Goodkin^TM  method of choosing partners. In a circle, the two people to my right turn and face each other, then the next two, the next two and so on around the circle. No two can turn to each other until the ones before them have. A simple method that avoids the confusion of randomly or purposefully choosing a partner where some are left stranded. With kids, it solves the problem of popularity by making it a little game with rules. By not having to actually choose, but just accept the person who happens to be next to you, it sidesteps the issue of who picks who and who doesn’t get picked. It solves the problem of interrupting the musical flow of the class by avoiding that moment of confusion. But its power runs deeper than just that. 

 

When a kid turns to a person and makes a face or blurts out, “Ewww! I don’t want to be his partner!” my response is: 

 

“I’m not asking for a lifetime commitment. Just two minutes of a little clapping play. And then you’ll have a new partner.”

 

And how do they choose the next partner? As simple as turning around and Voila! There you are! And if that complaining kid says, “I don’t want to be her partner either!” I respond:

 

“Guess what? I bet neither of them want to be your partner! Especially the way you’re acting. But here’s the deal. One day you may be riding a bus somewhere and the bus will break down. Maybe there’s a storm or a blizzard or it just breaks down in the middle of nowhere, far away from any help. What are you going to do? You didn’t get to choose who’s on the bus with you, so you better learn how to do work with whoever is in the room—or on the bus. This little activity will help you learn how to do something with someone who you wouldn’t choose to be a partner with, but just might discover that it’s fine to do a little work or play together. Who knows? You might even discover that they could be your friend! But most important, you can begin to understand that you can find something good and decent in anyone you meet if you give them a chance or at least figure out how to work together to solve whatever problem you have, whether it’s making up a new version of the clapping game or trying to fix the bus. “

 

And then I say to the workshop folks: “We’re all on a broken bus right now. We don't get to decide who's on the bus and if we kick someone off because we think we don't want to be their clapping play partner, it might be the person who knows how to fix the engine. So we better figure out how to survive it—together. ”