More Music!

 

Today I finally felt so connected to wonderful friends, colleagues, former students that I miraculously forgot about the clown-cars careening down the hill. But still, the healing that this Conference could be was not as powerful as I wished it would be. 

 

When I was looking through old paper cards and letters from friends and family a couple of weeks ago, I found a short thank you card from an Orff Chapter I just given a workshop to. This phrase struck me:

 

“It was wonderful how you made more music with less fuss.”

 

 “More music, less fuss.” I liked that. Music! Let’s make it! Vibration to vibration, note to note, rhythm to rhythm, directly, with no unnecessary fuss. And yet, here, wandering into workshop after workshop (with some exceptions), I find two things:

 

• A lot of clever ideas about how to prepare the music but the wrong ratio. Five to ten minutes preparing to release our musical impulses and two minutes of music and not very inspired music at that. 

 

• Related to above, workshop after workshop with participants seating looking up at a big screen. This beautiful oral approach, this antidote to reading notes from paper and instead standing/ dancing in circles with song, music, rhythms right at our fingertips— that’s why I signed up! When I come to a workshop, I expect ten, twenty, thirty or 90 minutes of non-stop music-making and dancing, with both simple and complex rhythms, melodies, harmonies unifying our nervous systems and touching our hearts and soul. 

 

I’ve missed that! At any time, but now more than ever, how wonderful it would have been to feel the quality of those drums at the Ghanaian funeral or the exquisite harmonies of a European Requiem or the playful energy of exuberant children’s games played long and hard. Again, I went to a few workshops that had that quality and probably missed others that did as well, but peeking into room after room, the larger percentage was seated people looking at a screen.

 

In this world with everything we’ve known as good and true crumbling around us, can’t we rededicate ourselves to the magic that drew us into the Orff Schulwerk to begin with? Shut the damn screens off, trust our ear and musicality and stop with all the fuss of “preparing the music” and get to the root of it all?

 

I hope so.