I Got Rhythm

With one foot in the past closing out summer work and the other in the future preparing a Fall season of workshops, performances and projects, there have been few blogworthy thoughts or events. I could talk about the new garage door opener, the trip to the post office, the way Firefox invited me to upgrade and then said, “Ha ha! Won’t work with your operating system and since we just trashed the old one, no Internet for you!” and other such mundane details of the daily round, but why bother?

But I did receive a transcription of an interview a student in Finland did with me and was surprised to discover I liked it. My marker for my own writing is that if someone else had written those words, I would enjoy reading them. And this interview passed the test. Since the whole thing is12 pages long, I’ll just include the first part for now—that is, if I can find a way to get on the Internet to post!

T: Well, Doug, let’s start with this. What is rhythm?

D: Carl Orff said: “It is difficult to teach rhythm. One can only release it. Rhythm is no abstract concept, it is life itself.” Meaning that we already are rhythmic beings. It is the rhythms in our body that literally keep us alive—the rhythmic pumping of the heart, the rhythmic rising and falling of the breath, the rhythm of our brain waves. If any of those rhythms stop, we’re dead.

As Orff so eloquently said, rhythm is life itself, not only in our bodies, but in the rhythm of the day and night with the sun, the month with the moon, the year with the earth’s orbit, all the rhythms that mark time. And then there’s the rhythms inside all of matter, which both ancient wisdom and modern physics tells us is vibration. All things are vibrating in their own rhythm. You know how sometimes when you hit an instrument in one part of the room, it makes another instrument (like a snare drum) vibrate somewhere else? That’s a deep statement about the polyrhythmic world we inhabit, where one rhythmic vibration can awaken or affect another rhythmic vibration. It doesn’t only happen with snare drums, but between people. Perhaps the physics of falling in love is when simply seeing another person strums a string in your heart and you pick that particular rhythm out from all the others around you. Or rather, it picks you.

Do you see how deep and far-reaching rhythm is? And we go to music classes and come out thinking rhythm is counting 1-2-3-4! Orff was so brilliant to insist that rhythmic training means releasing that which we already are. Seen in that broad light, counting beats has very little to do with it.

T: So you don’t think that there are any situations where there is not rhythm? That rhythm is in everything that we do?

D: I can’t think of one. You know I really can’t. All day long we have these micro and macro rhythms. How we brush our teeth or brush our hair, chop the fruit, the long tradition of physical work rhythms— milking cows, sowing seeds, hammering nails, sawing wood, pounding grain, most of which has been reduced to button pushing, at great cost to our body’s sense of rhythm. Then there’s the cycles of the body—hungry, then full, sleepy, then awake and so on.

Each bodily system with its own rhythmic cycle. And the structures of our daily life, our 9 to 5 cycle, our five day work week and weekends, our working year and summer vacation and so on. Whether in the human world we build or the natural world we inhabit, everything proceeds in cycles and patterns—it’s all rhythm.

There is a lovely poem by Gary Snyder that says:

 “As the crickets soft autumn hum

  is to us

 so are we to the trees

 as are they

 to the rocks and the hills.”

So the cricket has a very fast vibration and takes a very short time and ours is slower, right? But the relationship between the cricket and us is like between us and the tree. You know, compared to the tree, ours is very fast and the tree is very slow, but compared to the mountain and the rocks and the hills, the tree is very fast and they are very slow.

T: Or like earth and the universe.

D: Exactly. So they’re all different rhythms, all different expressions of the life force, each with its own rhythm. Some are fast and some are slow, but they all share this same kind of quality. It’s a great image of a universe filled with augmented and diminished rhythms and a very poetic way to think about it.

In short, to paraphrase George and Ira Gershwin:

“I got rhythm, you got rhythm, we all got rhythm.

Who could ask for anything more?”

Lie, Cheat and Steal

I was the proverbial bad boy in school and that mischievous fellow has never quite gone away. As a teacher, I’m responsible for cultivating solid, upright citizens who vote, pay their taxes and are kind to their neighbor. Yet I get such pleasure from telling my students that to be successful in my class, they have to learn to lie, cheat and steal.

I start by asking them what lie I constantly say to them. The astute kids know: “When we’re practicing, you keep saying ‘One more time!’” Then I teach them the Old Doc Jones game. Tell a story that’s on the edge of believability and then sing,

“Old Doc Jones was a fine old man, fine old man, fine old man.

Old Doc Jones was a fine old man, He told ten thousand lies.”

The kids put thumbs up if they think every part of the story was true. If even one part was a lie, it’s thumbs down. The storyteller then must fess up— true or false. The success of the storyteller has something to do with how well they can lie.

This is old hat for storytellers, whether they be telling a tale at the dinner table or writing a novel. Pick an interesting story and elaborate, exaggerate, stretch the truth as needed for dramatic effect. Artists are always more interested in the emotional truth of a work than a literal one. As Picasso put it, “Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth.”

Yet another lie I tell my children is the rules for composition. “This note is more important than that note, these two rhythms always go together, this chord leads to that chord, etc.” All of which are true—until they aren’t. The rules have an internal logic, are useful and helpful and sometimes appear as irrefutable truths. But the imagination refuses to be boxed and in the hands of a master composer like Debussy or Thelonious Monk, they are consciously and delightfully broken time and time again. Indeed, one of the most difficult tasks of the emerging artist in any field is knowing when to break the rules and why.

As for cheating, I take such delight in telling the kids that if they’re not looking over at their neighbor while learning a piece on the xylophone, they’re in big trouble. In math class, peeking at your neighbor’s paper when taking the test is bad. In music class, not peeking at your neighbor’s xylophone or recorder fingering is bad.

Then there’s our illustrious “xylophone fakers club.” Kids who really didn’t get their part, but the teacher hasn’t noticed yet and they’re too shy to admit it, so they sneakily move their mallets around “as if.” Of course, I want them to really learn it, but also tell them faking it well is a great skill. Other forms of cheating I encourage:

     • Just play the skeleton of the melody when the elaborations are too technically demanding.
     • Improvise the forgotten line in the school play.
     • Play the wrong version of the body percussion part as if you were improvising a new one and
       make it look you meant to do that.

 And finally stealing. Duke Ellington once quipped that he’s taller on one side than the other from leaning over listening to piano players and stealing their ideas. Some say that Louis Armstrong used to put a handkerchief over his fingers while playing trumpet so that fellow musicians wouldn’t steal his fingerings. With all the improvisation we do in the Orff class, kids are constantly watching each other and stealing each other’s ideas—and I encourage them!

As a responsible teacher, I do encourage my students to Eat, Pray and Love, but as a responsible artist, I also make sure they Lie, Cheat and Steal. I’m thinking about elaborating on this to write my own New York Times bestseller, but by the time I get around to it, one of you readers has probably already stolen the idea, lied about it being your own and cheated me out of my 15 minutes of fame and fortune. And since you might be one of my former students, I only have myself to blame.

The Three Languages

As grandfather of a 9-month old and son of a 91-year old, it is more clear than ever that we are well served by speaking several languages. I’m not talking about English, Spanish and Mandarin, as exciting as useful as such language proficiency is. I mean the languages before the mother tongue kicks in and after it has exhausted its usefulness. I’m speaking about the language of touch and movement and the language of tones and rhythms. And Orff Schulwerk, that dynamic pedagogy of music and movement and the place where I have so happily and fortunately made my home, has proven to be the training ground for the tri-lingual proficiency that has been both useful and spiritually uplifting.

A friend recently was complaining that there was nothing to talk about when he visited his aging Dad. His father was far beyond caring about or even understanding the gossip of who’s who and what’s what, the latest catastrophe in the newspaper or news about the grandchildren. Without the usual banter of small talk, what was there to do? And here’s where proficiency in the language of touch and the ability to play music or sing songs would have served my friend—and his Dad—well. Do we think enough about this when making decisions about school music programs or keeping dance outside the school gates?

Mostly school cares about the middle part of life, after the toddler has learned to walk and talk and before the elder begins the transition to the other world. How to succeed in business and get ahead and manage a bank account and negogiate a mortgage and occasionally, how to stay cultured through season tickets to the opera and meetings with the book club. This makes sense. Up to a point. Up to the point when you need to converse with a 9-month old or a 90-year old.

And so I’m suggesting the tri-lingual school of language, music, dance. Embedded in all is enough math and art and history and social studies for any school board’s taste, especially for teachers who understand who to reveal it. (Local teachers, come to my five-workshop series on the Integrated Curriculum this year to get the details of how— info on my Website www.douggoodkin.com). If we have enough money in the budget or the teachers make enough in bake sales, we might include science and computer studies and such, but first and foremost, students must learn to speak these other languages when mere words and numbers fail to say what needs to be said. And when we must talk, for goodness sake, let your speech sing out, punctuated with gesture and an animated face and an expressive voice. As I say to my students in all my courses, let out that three-year old who doesn’t yet know that people can talk without moving their hands with faces of bland newscasters.

Then next time you see the grandkid or grandfather, won’t you have a grand old time!

New Rondo a la Doug

I’m back on Bloor St. again in Toronto. I have a special affection for this city for three somewhat personal reasons.

 

1)    It was the first “foreign” city I ever visited on a family trip when I was 11 years old. I had my virgin taste of “puppy love” with a girl named Lizzie, memorized the license plate of our host’s car who we followed to the Casa Loma (and still remember it—B23882), went to a cool fort and some impressive botanical gardens and generally felt like I wasn’t in Kansas (well, really New Jersey) anymore.

2)    After San Francisco, Salzburg and Madrid, I’ve taught more summer courses here than any other city. Jazz, world music, poetry and music, each one a pleasure with lovely and memorable people.

3)    As a result of these courses and workshops, I know lots of folks here and enjoy getting together with barbecues in back yards, nights out at a jazz club. going out for meals (Toronto is apparently the most international city in the world—surprising, but seems to be true—with lots of great restaurant choices).

The streets are not quite as bustling as Madrid, the city not quite as scenic and charming as Salzburg, the culture not quite as vibrant as San Francisco (sorry! my biased opinion!), but it is rare these days to arrive in a place where my host tells me “The economy is going strong, all my music teacher friends have good jobs, the Royal Conservatory is happily hosting Orff programs in the summer and year round.”

This morning I kicked off yet another Jazz/Orff Course with 100 people, 60 or so only able to come for the opening morning of activities. Off we went into the multi-faceted Lemonade Crunchy Ice piece and I noticed that after playing one part of the game, I would stop and talk about some overarching principle that lay behind the activity, complete with stories from a life of teaching, and then Boom! back to the game for the next development section. More stories/talk, then the game and on we went like this. It was a lecture format unlike any I’ve witnessed— short five-minute talk, play the game, another talk, play again with variation, another talk and so on.

Don’t know what that experience felt like for the students (I’ll check in with them tomorrow). Maybe too weird, at one moment in the whole-body, whole-hearted fun of playing around, the overly-analytic brain shut down in favor of the bodily, social, and imaginative pleasure and the next, keeping still while listening critically to information, points of view, stories—and then suddenly, back to the game. Perhaps too schizy, not able to wholly relax in one world or the other.

On the other hand, the game opened up the mind and heart for maximum absorption and the points made directly related to the experience everyone just had might hit deeper and with more meaning. Who knows? Again, I’ll ask the folks and report back.

But the bottom line is the power of the Rondo form, that hero sandwich (bread-cheese-bread-tomato-bread-lettuce-bread-turkey-bread) of structures that offers the perfect balance between repetition (bread) and variation (cheese, tomato, lettuce, turkey). It offers the familiarity and comfort of the known balanced by the surprise and novelty of the not-yet-known. It is a winning combination in Orff classes and found throughout music—Mozart’s Rondo a la Turk and Dave Brubeck’s Blue Rondo a la Turk just two of thousands of examples.

And so I’m thinking about taking credit for a new lecture format, New Rondo a la Doug, balancing metacognition, neuroscience, pedagogy, didactics, anthropology, psychology, mythology, ecology, spirituality, health and well-being with playing children’s games or dancing or singing songs, each in five-minute doses. One is the reflective side of human understanding, the other the active experience of understanding, each feeding into and off of each other. Ted Talks, take note.

Meanwhile, grateful for the various Rondo forms of my life. School — travel — school —different travel —school—stay home and write—school. And within those cycles, other rondo forms— like the returns to Toronto. Always a pleasure!

Music for All Ages

Cleaning out my desk, I came across the program notes from our May Spring Concert. Besides the importance for the children to share their work and bring inspired process into inspired performance, I see the concert as an opportunity to educate parents. Before the curtain rises, it feels important to separate out the event from the roaring river of non-stop entertainment and help the audience see with different eyes and hear with different ears.

Reading over these notes this morning, the thought struck: “This is blogworthy!” Though it feels like old news, the ideas are timeless. For your music teachers out there, consider something similar for your concerts so the parents can look beyond “cute” and try to place music in a slot more elevated than frill and begin to understand the depth of an imaginative music program. Or you’re welcome to copy over these notes—with appropriate credit, of course.

Picasso once said, “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.” He admired the rich imagination of children unfettered by adherence to specific techniques. Children surprise—and often amaze us—with their paintings, with their poetry, with their spontaneous observations and provocative questions. Recent studies show that five-year olds can think of 100 things to do with a paper-clip, whereas high school students, who have had the wings of imagination clipped by too much dull schooling, might only think of five. Classified knowledge, virtuosic techniques, routine and habit and disciplined mastery all have their place in every field of study, but too much too soon unbalanced by “what else can we do with this?” is a blow to our rich childlike imagination.

In the field of music, young children in our culture are not seen as musical until they begin formally studying an instrument. Even then, there is a long unmusical waiting period before they finally start making decent music after years of practice. We endure their squeaky violins and clarinets in hopes that someday Bach and Be-bop will emerge in all their glory. But what if there was a parallel track to this kind of music study that found ways to make exciting and beautiful music at each step of a child’s development without hours of solitary practice? What if there was a way to create a musical culture that soaked children in the soothing and cleansing waters of music and dance without it having to feel like a special study? What if there was a way to grow children’s understanding and technique alongside inviting their imaginations to be set sonically and kinesthetically free? And the good news? There is! The Orff approach to music education in the hands of teachers who live it, breath it, embody it and devote themselves to its demanding practice.

And so what we hope you see here tonight is the dignity and delight of the children’s musical expression at each stage of their journey to adulthood. Fifth grade is more sophisticated and consciously knowledgeable about musical principles than first grade, but it doesn’t make them better, just different. As we grow and develop, our artistic impulses may mature and reach new depth, but ultimately the young seedling and mature plant share the same nature. Again, Picasso: “I don’t develop. I am."

Enjoy the show. The children certainly will. 

World's Shortest

After the intense two weeks at the Orff course of life lived full throttle, it has been days of boring catch-up work. Six hours answering e-mails, closing out course business, arranging Fall flights, paying bills, beginning the Sisyphusian task of sorting through piles of papers and folders. The piano sits behind me always ready to charge me up when needed and Chick Corea’s Further Explorations CD helps keep the electrical current running. “Whatever it takes” is my professional motto and though the work itself is always imaginative, thrilling, intimate, challenging, affirming, all that good stuff that good work should be, the organization necessary to arrange it and keep it going is the same as any other field of work. We all need help slogging through it all and besides music, I found the perfect thing to put a little fun into the mix—The Mammoth Book of Jokes.

Memorizing poems, fairy tales, songs and such became a necessary part of my vision of an integrated education and an indispensable part of the way I teach children in school and adults at workshops. But after the workshop, around the dinner table with my hosts, it also became a great pleasure—and indeed, necessity when the conversation flags— to saddle up the old warhorses of the jokes I’ve memorized:

“So a priest and a nun get caught in a snowstorm…” 

"A guy is on a dessert island when Michelle Pfeiffer washes ashore…” 

“An old man just married goes to the rabbi…” 

And so on. (If you want to hear the rest, invite me out for dinner!)

Besides, these longer jokes, I’ve often felt a need for some short zingers, little time-fillers for when I’m up on stage at the Spring Concert waiting for the kids to find their mallet. Things like:

“Did you know 5 out of every 4 people has trouble with fractions?”

“There are three kinds of people in this world. Those who can count and those who can’t.”

“Zebra: Let’s switch roles.

Lion: OK. I’m game.”

“A man walks into a bar. Ouch!”

It’s handy to have little jokes like loose change in your pocket— you never know when you need them. And the last one— a mere seven words—felt like the shortest joke I knew. But looking through the Mammoth joke book, I found a shorter one—four words!

“Florida: God’s Waiting room.”

By now, there was no way I was going to finish entering the new addresses on my mailing list. Off to Google to look for the World’s Shortest Joke and I found one attributed to John Cleese at a record two words:

“Pretentious? Moi?”

If anyone knows a one-word joke, let me know. Meanwhile, I thought about novels, poems, songs, etc. The novel is a famous six-word story by Hemingway:

“For sale: Baby shoes. Never worn.”

The shortest poem I remember is from Gary Snyder.

“Pissing watching a waterfall.”

The shortest song in my record collection is from the Incredible String Band. It’s titled The Son of Noah’s Brother, the melody repeats each note four times, descending from D to E in a minor scale, the text is “many were the lifetimes of the son of Noah’s brother, see his coat, the ragged riches of the soul.” And it lasts for 14 seconds.

Shortest text for a song’s chorus goes to Wilson Picket’s Land of a Thousand Dances: “Nah,   nah, nah, nah, nah,    nah, nah, nah, nah…” etc.

Shortest text for an entire song goes to Tommy James and the Shondells: “My baby does the Hanky Panky.”

Shortest text for an Orff lesson I’ve developed that ends in a remarkably complex mutli-faceted piece of music: “Johnny Whoops!” Close behind “Criss-cross applesauce.”

Shortest professional motto: “Whatever it takes.”

Prize for the longest time spent procrastinating by thinking about pointless world records goes to:

Moi!

Back to the mailing list.

Letter to My Father

“Dear Dad,

It is five years to the day since you left us. August 15, 2007. I was teaching in Toronto when I got the call in the early morning. I managed to teach throughout the day, but near the end, was singing this heart-wrenching Swedish song about how it’s impossible to say goodbye to a loved one without crying. We practiced it once and I opened a book to read a poem and a photo of you and me fell to the floor. I, of course, broke down and confessed to the group what had happened and we all fell on each other’s shoulders in heaving sobs and ridiculously, tried to sing the song. As I think I wrote recently, you just can’t cry and sing at the same time. It was both moving and intensely comic. Had an educational supervisor walked in, I’m sure my teaching would have been marked down for letting emotion interfere with the lesson’s main concept of minor scale going to major. But of course the true lesson was that a son must grieve for a father and why not surrounded by compassionate people who have known or will know that same kind of sorrow?

Anyway, I decided to shut the world out today so you and I could have some time. Well, kind of. I did spend six hours catching up on business and e-mails, but I also talked to you in-between, listened to Beethoven’s 3^rd, wore your purple shirt, snacked on almonds and raisins, tried to recite your favorite poem (a little rusty), won two games of Solitaire and brought out the Crostic book (though haven’t gotten to that yet). In short, do some of the things you loved to do on your behalf.

And then I went to visit your darling wife, who was still in bed at 4:00 pm. She seems to be going through a rough patch, low energy, looking a little grim and not communicating much. But what can you expect for 91 years old? While they got her out of bed, I played Tenderly on the piano, the song that you used to play on the Baldwin organ while I was upstairs going to sleep. That and Cocktails for Two are the two songs I associate with you, though in your later life, you didn’t seem to hold any special affection for them. No matter. Their notes carry to me the image of you at the organ in our cozy New Jersey home, a moment that seems at once just yesterday and several lifetimes ago.

But I know that what you would want most is for me to play your own compositions and so I did when Mom came out, starting with Forma. I hoped to share a tender moment with her, but she was in her mime class mode, pointing to whatever she wanted at the end of each measure and glaring at me like I better attend to her— water, food, get her to the bathroom, etc. I finally gave up and just took her to dinner and then went back and played a bit more. I showed the music to my friend Fran walking to dinner and she was not only impressed that you composed, but she loved seeing your calligraphy. It was good to hear those old familiar notes again and see your old familiar signature. I had a moment imagining you at the piano composing and re-working and writing it down, taking time from business as usual to feed some creative impulse. I suppose my love affair with the creative process came partly from your example. Thank you.

That’s the news, such as it is. I hope you’d be pleased to know that I’m about as happy as I’ve ever been, with so much that I love to do and the welcome opportunities to do them  and more and more, with other people that inspire and move me. Of course, I miss you terribly and still often have the urge to call you before and after a trip to check in, to hear your voice say the word “son” and sign-off with your corny “shake it easy!”

Five years. Time marches on and in some cosmologies, marching me forward to the day when perhaps we may meet again. Who knows? Meanwhile, I’m just trying to do my part down here to keep your memory alive. Thanks for listening.

Your still loving son,

Doug

PS Your purple shirt looks great with the sweater Talia just got me!”