Dancing Lessons from God

 

“Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.“ 

                                       — Kurt Vonnegut: Cat’s Cradle

 

The last day of both the Orff Conference and the end of my three-week Orff-tour arrived. Two excellent workshops from students of mine, a Memory Hour for five departed Orff colleagues, a talk with two other teachers who trained at the SF Orff Course and I’m at the Richmond Airport ready to wing home. 

 

Thought today how in-between workshops, I’d wander the halls, stop in at the Exhibits, decide to check it on the lunch situation, just randomly (apparently) following my own footsteps  and without fail, running into—with no previous appointment— someone I either needed to talk with or simply was delighted to talk with or both. I got the feeling that I was following some higher power’s dance steps that made such meetings both necessary and inevitable. 

 

It helps that I know so many people, people who studied with me at the SF Levels training or New Orleans/ Memphis Jazz Courses or Orff Afrique in Ghana. People who had attended my workshops over these many years of Conferences or met me at a Chapter workshop or read my books or listened to my podcast etc. etc. People who were fellow teacher-trainers who I saw each year at these Conferences. And in just about every case, a brief profound connection far beyond the casual “How’s it going?”

 

Just another affirmation that when you let go of over-planning and trust serendipity, just wandering through a Convention Center can indeed feel like “dancing lessons from God.” Vonnegut’s book creates a religion called Bokonism, whose adherents embrace spontaneous, strange, or unplanned journeys with a sense of playful surrender. Even if they feel clumsy or unsure of the steps at first, they lean into the chaotic rhythm of life. 

Time and again, I feel the wisdom and pleasure of this approach to life. Of course, I also plan a lot and that’s its own necessity and pleasure. But like wandering through a bookstore and stumbling on the perfect book, I love the feeling of just following my feet. At this Conference, it led to so many connections and re-connections, pleasures of the past remembered, seeds of the future sown. Selfies to send to people we know in common, talks that reveal that we indeed know some people in common. Often the sense that a mere few minute conversation says precisely the things we both need to hear and consider.

 

Soon back to the routine of my familiar home life, but already not routine as I sub back at my old school this week and go on a Men’s Group routine the next week and drive to Portland for Thanksgiving the next week. Not the best for a settled rhythm, but the variety that feels like I’m continuing my traveling, doing the things I love with the people I love. 

 

Thanks for it all!

All in the Family

I have often felt like people in other countries where I teach— Brazil, Colombia, Turkey, Spain, Thailand, China and many others—seem to get me, appreciate what I have to offer, describe profoundly what resonates with them far beyond the superficial and off-the-point, “You’re awesome!”

 

Fresh from such articulate enthusiasm in Greece, Turkey and England, I wondered if coming to the annual American Orff Conference might feel like a bit of a let-down. Some of this is connected to my constant disappointment in American people as evidenced in voting patterns throughout my life and especially the last ten years. Some of it is holding my fellow citizens to a higher standard because we share, after all, the same homeland. Some of it is certain real national characteristics—the world as one big shopping mall and life as endless and often pointless consumption— leak in everywhere. Including the way we think about education in general and teaching music in particular. Some is the felt presence of all the ghosts wandering about because we have refused to own our barbarous past and properly grieve our ancestors’ errors. Some is our naïve and dangerous faith that technology will save us, The Jetsons our sad vision of Utopia. The list is long. 

 

In my home organization of the American Orff Schulwerk Association, I’ve had a long and complicated relationship that truth be told, many others have probably felt as well. As I once said in an interview, “AOSA is a home with a family feeling and also a family’s dysfunction— I’ve at once felt like the ignored or misunderstood kid, the rebellious teenager, the betrayed husband, the beloved father, the weird uncle, the respected grandfather. But in the end, AOSA is the home in the way that Robert Frost says it in his poem The Death of the Hired Man: ‘Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.’”

 

Family indeed. We all have to come to grips with the family we land in, whether we think it was some deep karmic choice inextricably twisted into our life’s story or some random accident of birth. I remember lying in a bed in Java, Indonesia, a half century ago with gamelan music playing outside the gates and then listening to a cassette tape of Art Tatum playing a jazz standard and knowing that no matter how much I appreciate the beauties of “the other,” this was my home and had me dreaming of sitting at the Thanksgiving table. 

 

After the miracle of the refreshing waters of the blue tsunami, washing away for the moment all the disappointments and betrayals and bad choices and the illusion of red and blue states, I feel renewed faith in and love for my family. Both fellow Americans and fellow American Orff teachers. As I walk the halls of the conference, I hug many of the old timers, some of whom look me in the eye and say unabashedly, “I love you.” And I can sincerely reply, “Back atcha!” And others I don’t know stop me in the hall to express appreciation for my podcast or movie or books or workshop I taught years ago that they attended. I often feel that my role has been to hold our collective feet to the fire of Orff and Keetman’s vision and that has made some uncomfortable. And so I bounce back and forth between outcast and respected leader. This conference I felt the respect and appreciation coming through from others and from me to them. That sense that we’re all doing our best to do our best, even as we all can get pulled off the path into the power-point screens, the surface material, the confining rubrics, the shopping mentality, the obsession with making everyone feel “safe” at the expense of being properly challenged. I hope to continue to model resistance to those bewitching sirens and invite others to do the same. But at least for now, coming from a place of mutual appreciation and respect. 

 

It’s a good feeling as I turn to the last day of my 43^rd Conference. Viva, viva, la musica! 

Last Gasp

The history of the country which has largely been ignored in schools and then recently banned is a simple story of white supremacy married to patriarchy and unchecked capitalist greed (need one word here!) that purposefully puts profit over people. Our wealth and power has been built entirely on decimating the original inhabitants who caretook the land we came to ravage and pillage, the stolen labor force who did the work for free, the women who raised the kids and served the meals and kept the houses so husbands could go do their work of systemic brutalization of people and the land, the immigrants who brought energy and culture and great food and great music and so much more. 

With Native Americans banned to reservations, enslaved blacks doing the unpaid labor of providing cotton, sugar, tobacco and such and then the poorly paid labor of raising white children, working in our factories, fighting our wars, the women deemed the property of their husbands and nursing the sick and teaching the young, the working class doing the backbreaking and dangerous work while bosses got rich, etc. etc. and etc. All of them marginalized, kept out of positions of power and beaten down and stuck with labels of lazy, shiftless, criminal, while white men born on third base kept boasting about hitting a triple. It’s a sad, sad story and as long as its sustaining narratives were kept hidden, untaught, banned, spun by Fox news to gullible consumers, nothing would ever change. 

 

The Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron said, “Nothing goes away until it teaches us what we need to learn.” The rise of Trump and Trumpism showed clearly that Obama’s victory did not drive the lesson home deeply enough into the psyche of the American people and the Toddler King’s resurgence in 2024 showed how very, very far we still had to go. Those Americans with still functioning brain cells, a heart capable of feeling and a conscience capable of recognizing immorality and indecency were baffled that we seem to have learned nothing. 

 

Until now. We just had to give the Repugnatins enough rope to hang themselves before we awakened out of our stupor and as the recent election shows, that’s what seemed to turn the tide. This election represented the last gasp of a dying animal whose time for extinction has finally come. 

 

Of course, not to be naïve. The dinosaurs will double down and re-group to spin their narrative in new ways to brainwash a population not wholly capable of critical thinking and caring kindness. I’m not imagining any moral re-awakening of conscience of people and parties who spent every minute armoring themselves against facing their own failings and pointing all their guns outward at the evil villians-du-jour out to perform trans operations on innocent schoolchildren.

 

But just perhaps the public will stop drinking that Kool Aid. The election results clearly point to that. All those marginalized groups mentioned in the first paragraph now have a seat—many seats!— at the table. (see below)

 

And I, for one, welcome them heartily. Of course, an ethnic or gender or sexual identity doesn’t automatically guarantee good-hearted, clear-thinking, morally upright people (ie, the recent news about Cesar Chavez), but it clearly breaks the stranglehold of white privileged males who time and time again have shown their incapacity to care about others and just be decent human beings. 

 

To paraphrase Wynton Marsalis’ quote: “Jazz is what America could become if it ever became itself.”— “This is what American could become—has just now become— when it matches the promise of ‘all are created equal’ with the opportunity of all American citizens to sit together and make the dream real.”

 

Here are some leaders of our new country. Let’s go, America!!

Relief

Amongst a thousand other feelings, it is a great relief to not have to keep trying to explain the inexplicable to friends in other lands when they ask, “WTF, America?!!!! How can so many choose to shoot themselves in the foot—again!— and then wonder why they have to limp through a decimated land?” Of course, I’ve had no easy answer and have been exhausted from trying to analyze and make sense of that which makes no sense whatsoever. Beyond the great effectiveness of Fox News brainwashing and propaganda that make the old Russian techniques seem like child’s play. 

 

But I do always point the camera away from the news my friends abroad get to the news they don’t— the extraordinary numbers who turned up for all the No Kings Rallies, the courage of the Minnesotans, the reality that just about every single person I know personally—and that includes the thousands of music teachers in every state— have been aghast as they are. And a little reminder that the people are not their government. As my friends in Turkey, China, Brazil before a few weeks ago, Venezuela and beyond are well aware.

 

But now. How proud I felt to re-enter my land at the Washington Dulles Airport, with my U.S. passport in hand without shame, a land I can now re-claim as something worthy and indeed, inspiring. We stood up, spoke out, organized, showed up to vote— and the result is spectacular. The air we breathe feels refreshed like it is after a thunderstorm and everything feels different. The bad guys—and gals— are on retreat and though we can’t relax, knowing they will regroup to cause more havoc, we are prepared. 

 

And who knows? Maybe some of them will finally realize that it’s more fun to love than hate, to be kind than cruel, less exhausting to keep all the walls up and fears flowing than just relax and welcome each other. We can’t be naïve, but we can hope to bring them around. 

 

Meanwhile, it’s 4:30 in the morning at the home of my lifetime buddy and colleague, Rick Layton and even in the slight fog of almost 24 hours awake last night, such a delight to catch up. This morning off to my 43^rd Orff Conference and looking forward to the embraces with old and new friends to share the relief and exultation. Life is sweet.

 

Onward and Upward!

The day after the midterms, I read the news in Heathrow Airport en route to Washington DC. One word suffices (though the font too small for the occasion) to express my feelings: 

 

YES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Should I elaborate? If so, always best to turn to the poets and here is Sheenagh Pugh’s lovely poem that gathers everything I—and millions of Americans—are feeling:

 

Sometimes things don't go, after all,
from bad to worse. Some years, muscadel
faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don't fail.
Sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.

A people sometimes will step back from war,
elect an honest man, decide they care
enough, that they can't leave some stranger poor.
Some men become what they were born for.

Sometimes our best intentions do not go
amiss; sometimes we do as we meant to.
The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow
that seemed hard frozen; may it happen for you.

 

              Sheenagh Pugh

 

It happened for us. But not just by the grace of the gods. By the hard work and determination of all those—Democratic politicians, social justice advocates, voters and people just fed up with the meanness and cruelty— to get out and make the needed change. Now the real work can begin. Ride on the momentum and overturn all that has tried to bring our democracy down and get serious about the 25^th Amendment and restore the Supreme Court and—well, it’s a long, long list. 

As jazz musician Billy Starhorn liked to say: "Onward and upward!" 

Restoration

Today is election day. If we are to do our job well, it is not about politics as usual, this candidate over that one, this issue over that one. It is about answering the call to help restore a broken world. A world purposefully dismantled so the rich, greedy and powerful few can guard their unearned privilege at the expense of everything that truly matters. They’ve done so with our permission. Now is the time to withdraw it. To vote with our dancing feet and singing voices and joyful celebration. To restore harmony, order and balance. To awaken from the sorcerer’s spell and walk forward in beauty. To heed the call some of our first Americans put forth and we have ignored to our peril. May all the benevolent forces gather and fulfill their prophecy!

 

NAVAHO NIGHT CHANT (excerpt)

 

House made of dawn. 

House made of evening light. 

House made of the dark cloud. 

House made of male rain. 

House made of dark mist. 

House made of female rain. 

House made of pollen. 

House made of grasshoppers. 

 

Dark cloud is at the door. 

The trail out of it is dark cloud. 

The zigzag lightning stands high upon it. 

An offering I make. 

Restore my feet for me. 

Restore my legs for me. 

Restore my body for me. 

Restore my mind for me. 

Restore my voice for me. 

This very day take out your spell for me

 

Happily I recover. 

Happily my interior becomes cool.

Happily I go forth. 

My interior feeling cool, may I walk. 

No longer sore, may I walk. 

Impervious to pain, may I walk. 

With lively feelings may I walk. 

As it used to be long ago, may I walk.

 

Happily may I walk. 

Happily, with abundant dark clouds, may I walk. 

Happily, with abundant showers, may I walk. 

Happily, with abundant plants, may I walk. 

Happily on a trail of pollen, may I walk. 

Happily may I walk. 

Being as it used to be long ago, may I walk.

 

May there be beauty before me. 

May there be beauty behind me. 

May there be beauty below me. 

May there be beauty above me.

May there be beauty all around me. 

In beauty it is finished. 

In beauty it is finished. 

 

'Sa'ah naaghéi, Bik'eh hózhó

 

The Use of Beauty

My first of two days free in Athens began with a delightful meeting with Katerina, an Orff colleague I had met over the years, mostly in Salzburg. She gifted me with a book by Polyxena Matey, a woman who studied in the Munich Guntherschule where Orff taught back in the 1930’s. They developed a lifelong friendship and upon returning to Athens in 1938, she established her own school both for children and training teachers in Orff Schulwerk. It’s the very school where I taught these last two days, soon to celebrate it’s 90^th anniversary! 

The current economy, bad traffic and parking, along with diminishing interest in gifting children with the arts as fundamental to their education, seem to be taking their toll and enrollment is suffering. Likewise, young teachers eager to train themselves in this life-changing, soul-stirring approach are harder to find as everyone prefers to stay home and find some cool lessons online. But nevertheless, we persist. 

 

Katerina gifted me with a little book Polyxena Matey wrote when she was 90 (!) and we sat on the hotel 11^th floor veranda looking out at the Parthenon and lamented about the decline in authenticity and integrity in the modern world. Some of it the usual elder complaints about the younger generation that has been our dubious privilege since time immemorial, but much of it is genuine concern about the way machine-thinking has gained such monstrous power as machines now literally our doing our thinking. Back in 1992, Ms. Matey was already warning us about this: 

 

“This technological civilization, with its astonishing achievements, has enslaved us. We orient our lives primarily toward what can be measured, calculated, and judged as useful.”

 

Indeed. Here she echoes thinkers from time immemorial hoping to remind us as to what’s truly important. Here is Victor Hugo in his epic Les Miserables.

 

“You are always eager to make everything useful, yet here is a useless plot. It would be much better to have salads here than bouquets.”

 

…the bishop replied, “You are mistaken. The beautiful is as useful as the useful.” He added after a moment’s pause. “Perhaps more so.”

 

Ms. Matey independently arrives at the exact same conclusion: 

 

“We should offer our children an education that cultivates in the developing human being a sensitivity to Beauty. Beauty, which may not appear ‘useful,’ yet is an essential nourishment for the human soul.”

 

So Katerina and I talked about the danger of our diminished capacity to think for ourselves, to live with passion, to savor genuine beauty, all concerns every teacher in every place I talk to is noticing about the next generation. Rather than mere old-people whining, the purpose was to notice and then work yet harder to keep these lights burning in those who will follow. And my happy report is that they respond! When we give them, be they children, college students or adults, what they genuinely need and richly deserve, they happily step forth into their enlarged humanity. At least that has been my experience. 

 

After I parted from Katerina, I went on my own little odyssey in search of beauty and found it ascending to the top of Mount Lycabettus. There I was gifted with a sweeping 360^o view of Athens, including looking out at the Acropolis and the Pireaus Sea beyond it. The sun had come out, the temperature was perfect and the cats were out enjoying it all alongside the people. 

Back at the hotel, I treated myself to a Greek salad dinner back at the penthouse restaurant, now with the Parthenon lit up. I then met with another person interested in translating some of my books into Greek. A lovely person and another profound conversation, more pleasure than business. We agreed to start with my Humanitarian Musician book and include some quotes from Polyxena Matey and also her song that we sang at the closing of yesterday’s workshop. 

 

Here is a photo of me in the workshop with the photo of Polyxena Matey on top of the piano. Two spirits sharing the same vision.