Raise High the Roof Beam

The news of friends passing from this world is becoming increasingly commonplace. No surprise for someone my age. As they come one after another, it feels, as is natural, that my response feels more and more casual. Like in this poem I once wrote about a neighbor:

PASS THE SALT

 

I was cutting carrots for the soup

 

when my wife said, “Richard died today.”

 

I replied, “Really? Can you pass me the salt?”

 

and astounded myself. 

 

It’s not that I’m cold and callous. 

 

Having known Richard casually,

 

my grief would only go so far. 

 

Still, though.

 

 

This is how it will be. Someday someone sitting at a kitchen table

 

will mention the news of my passing and someone else will reply,

 

“Really? Can you pass the salt?”

 

 

But some deaths hit harder than others. The news of my friend Wolfgang Stange’s passing stopped me in my tracks. He was 77 and I knew he was struggling with various health issues, but didn’t realize how serious they were. Wolfgang was from Berlin, but lived most of his adult life going back and forth between London where he mostly worked and Sri Lanka, where his partner George was from. George had just died last year at 90 plus years old and just a few weeks ago, I met a Sri Lankan friend of Wolfgang’s who told me that we would see Wolfgang in Sri Lanka in a few weeks. We took the requisite selfie and asked him to give Wolfgang a big hug for me. So again, quite a shock.

 

I first met Wolfgang in 1990 in my first time teaching at The Orff Institute in Salzburg. He shared an apartment with my wife and young kids for the two plus weeks we were there, cooking great curries and telling his wonderful stories. My kids went to some of this workshops at the Institut’s Summer Course and loved one in particular where Wolfgang decided the different levels of English-speaking was not equitable, so he should do the whole workshop in an invented babble language which the group named Chipro. For years, my kids would carry on conversations in Chipro. At a sharing night, he did a hilarious shtick telling in Chipro how to tie a sarong with Verena Maschat “translating.” Unforgettable. 

 

Wolfgang was not an Orff teacher, but one of the most brilliant teachers I knew as he worked with people of diverse abilities (or what we then called disabilities). He formed a theater/ dance group called Amici composed of people who were blind, deaf, in wheelchairs, had Down syndrome. Whoever showed up, Wolfgang found the way for them to express themselves artistically and the result was stunning. 

 

We met at various conferences around the world—Salzburg, Thailand, Japan, US Orff Conferences where we visited Graceland, Niagara Falls and other sites. I stayed at his home in London and his home in Sri Lanka. I almost connected with him last year in Thailand, but he was too unwell to leave where he was staying to meet me, so we had to be content with a Facetime call. 

 

Literally an hour or so before I heard the news of his passing, I had just re-read an old article I had written praising his kid’s demonstration workshop I attended at a the 1996 AOSA Conference in Memphis. Here is what I wrote:

 

In the corner of a large, impersonal room, with hotel staff moving chairs and noisy people in the halls, one teacher created a magic as palpable as a moonrise through tropical palm trees or the first light breaking into a redwood grove. It was perhaps a bit ironic that the most inspired “Orff” teaching I experienced in the conference was from a man not trained in the Schulwerk—Wolfgang Stange. Yet it also made sense that to get to the elemental and archetypal core of art, teaching and the art of teaching, one would be working, as Wolfgang did, with a group of students with mixed abilities— kids with Down’s syndrome, kids in wheelchairs, kids with hearing or visual impairments and more. The usual fallback of verbal explanation simply was not possible—one had to move to a non-verbal, intuitive level to communicate effectively. 

 

Wolfgang did so like a surfer riding a perpetually cresting wave, moving with the flow and keeping us breathless with anticipation as to when the ride would end. When one boy exclaimed, “I feel like stepping on somebody!” Wolfgang dropped to his knees without missing a beat and said, “Here. Step on my hands!” turning a tense moment into an exquisite dance as feet and hands moved through the space. When he draped masks over three children in chairs and they began moving, it felt as though we were witnessing the beginning of all art. The vast tower of flimsy justifications for why music is important in schools—raising SAT scores, building self-esteem, developing social skills, providing relaxation or entertainment or appreciation—crumbled at the first exquisite turn of the masked head. 

 

This is what I learned in that memorable workshop: There is no progress in art or religion—only the moment when the veil of Mystery is lifted aside. We can but prepare the space, stay alert and wait for the magic to appear. 

 

To paraphrase JD Salinger:

“Raise high the roof beam, carpenters. A giant of a man has just passed through.”

 

 RIP, Wolfgang. You will be forever missed.