God Exists

While theologians and skeptics have been arguing for centuries about the existence of God, tonight I was shown irrefutable proof.

Driving to the Presidio Theater on Chestnut St., I arrived five minutes before the movie started faced with the usual impossible task of parking in San Francisco. Yet as I pulled up to the theater, at the very moment I approached the theater, the miracle happened. A woman got in her car to pull out. She opened the door, got in and pulled away and the whole operation took 15 seconds. No fixing up her make-up or checking her text messages or looking for something for ten minutes in her purse. In and out.

But most remarkable of all. The spot was across the street from the theater! Let me repeat that. In San Francisco, on Chestnut St., just before the movie “Enough Said” started on a Saturday night, I got a parking place across the street! As to the question of God’s existence, I can only reply, “Enough said.”

Joy and Obligation

Sometimes I start the day by reaching randomly for a book on my poetry shelves and opening to a page, hoping for some words that will give shape to my day. Today it was Pablo Neruda and a poem titled Summary that ended,

“My life was always singing its way between joy and obligation.”

Ah, there’s a theme. We all have our particular joys and we all have our common obligations— how do we make them meet? I’m reminded of the quote in my blog “mission statement,” about being “torn between my desire to improve the world and my desire to enjoy the world” (E.B. White). The Puritan in us is all obligation and duty, the social activist is all improvement, the old hippie or New Ager is all pleasure and balancing our biorhythms, the consumer all accumulating the toys and machines for our constant entertainment. How do we get these various selves to sit down and talk or to stand up and sing as they thread through the maze of play and work, joy and obligation?

No blueprint answer for all to follow, just the daily dialogue that we each have to create. All I can add to the conversation is the thought of finding the joys within the obligations, searching out the obligations within the joys. Doing my duty as a son to visit my Mom in her state of advanced dementia is my obligation. Playing piano for her or buying her ice cream as we sit out in the sun is my joy. Playing piano whenever and wherever I can is high on the list of my current joys. Searching out performance venues and organizing rehearsals for my Pentatonics group is my obligation. As is the mandate to actually practice and get it right. Teaching children is my pleasure, going to staff meetings my responsibility. In the teaching, I am constantly surprised to remember how much obligation lies inside of that contract— fine to spin out imaginative, fun and spirited classes, but then comes the hard work of reaching further to the kids who aren’t quite getting it— and letting me know in all sorts of socially dubious behavior.  And as for the staff meeting, an enticing snack makes the gathering more pleasurable, though I often think that we could do so much more to enliven things with an opening game or song or creative exercise.

Well, you get the idea. Today the piano beckons on the joyful side, 46 e-mails on the obligation side. Let the conversation begin!

Everything In Its Place

Today I gave a little talk to the Interns about Montessori and Orff. Some robust discussion followed and a few new insights that provoked further thoughts. I began in great admiration of Maria Montessori’s accomplishments— her keen insight into the nature of children, her astute observations that led to carefully thought out pedagogy, her hard work and dedication. Our school begain as a Montessori school (and still is in the preschool), my own children were Montessori-trained, as are just about all the children I’ve taught there over the years.

As brilliant as she was, her genius in one direction necessitated some gaps in another. As a doctor (the first woman doctor in Italy), she was a scientist and as a scientist, she leaned heavily toward the logical, the practical, the analytic mind, the work ethic. She believed in an ordered universe and created a Montessori environment in which there was “a place for everything and everything in its place.” This credo ranged from the material put back neatly on the shelf to the proper steps of good work habits. I admire that. My front room is still pleading with me to act on it. It’s a vital part of solid education and child-raising and some semblance of a successful adult life. But it’s not the whole deal.

What’s missing? Precisely the things that Orff Schulwerk encourages— the communal circle more than the individual workplace, fanciful play more than practical work with right and wrong answers, attention to the imagination more than the intellect (at least at the beginning stages of music education. As the children progress all these apparent opposites marry in equitable doses according to the developmental level.) My colleague Sofia astutely observed that the Montessori bells, the one musical activity Montessori invented, are simply about getting the right answer in ordering them in a scale. She never suggested that the children actually create music with them.

And here is where Montessori and Orff part ways. One seeks to discover order through the rational mind, detailed observation, analysis of cause and effect. The other seeks to create order through a carefully-honed intuition searching for just the right note, just the right gesture, just the right color or shape on the canvas. There are rules to guide it, but no rule can open the door to the finished work of art. Leonard Bernstein once said that Beethoven wasn’t as good as others when it came to melodies, harmonies, forms, but his genius lay in composing music in which note felt inevitable, fell precisely into “its place” as if ordained from above. One can say the same about Miles Davis’ improvisations or Bob Dylan’s song lyrics. For the scientist, the right understanding can crystallize into a technology that can be made the same each time. The artist has no such comfort. The right note one day might be the wrong the next.

At my school, Montessori and Orff form a good complementary team. Two contemporaries who never met (as far as I know) but their work resonates on in life-affirming ways. One can only be grateful.

Living Inside the Song

As often happens, writing about something puts me on some vibrational wavelength that magnetically attracts other similar thoughts. Yesterday’s blog was about immersing children in a song culture, filling their storehouse with a wide range of profound, funny, dynamic, soothing, storied songs that will see them through the long Winters of the soul and enhance their bright Springs and Summers. Then this morning I “just happened” to re-read this glorious passage from the poetry collection “The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart” (Robert Bly, James Hillman, Michael Meade).

“While our European-American tradition questions and argues, and has to teach poetry to sullen students in English classes, other cultures, speaking Spanish, Russian, Arabic, to say nothing of the many tongues of Africa and the Indian subcontinent, grow up inside poems, drenched through with poetic metaphors and rhythms. As we learn to criticize, to take a poem apart, to get its meaning, they learn to listen and to recite.”

“Growing up inside poems, drenched through with poetic metaphors and rhythms.” I often talk about immersing children in the bath of music and so the “drenched” verb above is spot on. To live inside the song and to absorb the essence of it like a sponge. (This the metaphor Maria Montessori’s uses in her brilliant book “The Absorbent Mind” to describe how children learn in the first five years of life.) So while later, we will take some time to analyze and verbalize the components of music, to take the music apart and put it back together, the first step is always to step into the water. Absorb the whole of it through the pores of the skin, adjust the temperature as necessary, soak or swim or float or doggie paddle as needed, begin simply by the pleasure of immersion in water and step out cleansed and refreshed.

Bly, Hillman and Meade continue:

“We live in a poetically underdeveloped nation. People blame their own lives for a deficiency in the culture. For, without the fanciful delicacy and the powerful truths that poems convey, emotions and imagination flatten out. There’s a lack of spirit, of vision. The loss in the heart appears as a loss of heart to take up the great cultural challenges that are part of every man’s citizenship. It is in this sense that we have come to think that working in poetry and myth with people is a therapy of the culture at its psychic roots.”

Breathtaking. Could be a music educator’s mission statement. Song (which is sung poetry) carries “fanciful delicacies and powerful truths” and children who grow up without it will not grow into the full promise of their emotional and imaginative life. They will become voters unprepared to fulfill their responsibility, citizens unable to think with head and heart connected. They will mindlessly accept leaders without spirit or vision because they lack both themselves. Thus “working in poetry and myth” and song with children is a deep “therapy of culture at its psychic roots.”

It’s another warm summer day in San Francisco. Time to jump into the water with the children. 

Filling the Storehouse

“If you want your children to be brilliant, tell them fairy tales.

  If you want them to be exceptionally brilliant? … Tell them more fairy tales.”

                                                            -Attributed to Albert Einstein

I’m talking a lot and writing a lot and thinking a lot about creating a musical culture in a school. What does that mean and how does one actually do it? Thanks to the presence of the Interns, who are causing the SF School music staff to reflect even deeper than we ordinarily do and are casting their own mirrored reflection on what they see back to us, I keep coming back to the Singing Time we have every day with the elementary children. I’ve come to realize that it is a rare part of schools and school music programs and besides the long list of benefits regarding language, math, history, it plays an enormous part in developing our children’s musicality. Just how and why is worth a ponder.

A song is a remarkable piece of technology. As mentioned above, it carries stories, sentiments, patterned mathematical structures, vocabulary, rhythm, rhyme and much much more. But the melody is at the center of most music and the daily immersion in a wide variety of melodies brought close to the heart and into the ear through the voice also feeds the mind’s understanding of both the similarities and differences in melodic shapes and phrases.The mind begins to absorb the larger patterns of melody-making and starts to make predictions. Such predictions form a feedback loop, reaffirming understanding when they’re correct and enlarging it when they’re not.

Each new song a child learns goes into the mind’s storehouse, where it serves as a point of reference for the next new song. When a new song is learned, the mind searches for familiar patterns and tries to relate the new information to what is already known. Not just in music, of course. All knowledge is based on prior knowledge and our first strategy when we encounter something new is to try to compare it to something familiar. I noticed when my wife and I traveled around the world years back when places really were different, that we were constantly commenting “This place reminds me of that other place” in an effort to orient ourself. We in fact do this with each new thing or piece of information we encounter.

The more examples we have in our storehouse (Einstein’s “more fairy tales”), the deeper richer and more textured and nuanced our understanding becomes. And the quicker we learn the next new thing. One of the most impressive things guests notice when they come and teach a song to our kids at our school is how fast the children absorb it, learn it and remember it. And it is no small part due to that storehouse of over 150 songs in diverse styles that the kids in our school know.

Without such prior knowledge, without a storehouse of diverse stories, melodies, emotions, perspectives, what have you, the learner simply cannot advance very far. So one of the best strategies for creating the above average children every parent wants is to to fill their storehouses with plenty and make sure that plenty is of the highest caliber. It’s not only that the kids in our school know lots of songs, it’s that they know lots of great songs and lots of songs from different places in different languages from different times and different cultures. The grain in their storehouse is both delicious and nutritious,filled not only with songs, but also stories (story and storehouse are etymologically related), dances, experiences in nature, exposure to dynamic ideas.

I don’t need much convincing that education is important, but when I think of what dry schooling or overhyped pop-media throw into the children, preparing them for nothing but either boredom or hypermanic sensation, I want to shake the culture by the shoulders and shout, “Wake up! Put inspired schooling at the top of every budget and town meeting and give the children what they deserve.”

Friends, sing lots of songs with children. Lots. You’ll notice the difference. And tell them some fairy tales while you’re at it.

A Summer's Night

I wrote my ode to Fall (“October Song”)  in September and now in October, it’s time to praise a rare summer’s night in San Francisco. I mean the kind when the air has no hint of a distant fog chill, when no winds blow through one’s short sleeves shirts, when the streets are filled with folks promenading in amazement that they can take an evening stroll past the outdoor diners without shivering.

On Thursday and Friday, I gave two full days of workshops in Boise, Idaho, both indoors in an echoey gym, but there the evening was also warm and allowed for an outdoor dinner with a polka band evoking Oktoberfest. Came in late Friday night and up early Saturday morning to my colleague James Harding’s workshop in our new school Community Center, 110 fellow music ed conspirators gathered in jubilation. Some, like me, have been attending these events since the 1970’ and ‘80’s, and many since at least the 90’s. Such pleasures.

And then the customary dinner out with the local Orff Board in the growing hip neighborhood called Dogpatch. Several square blocks of chic restaurants and the young folks out on a Saturday night. But the first sign of some strangeness to come was the celebrated ice cream store, Miscellaneous, with lines around the corner at 5:30, closed by 7:30. New York and Barcelona we are not.

The post-dinner plan was to go to a boat called the Balclutha and enjoy a hearty evening of singing sea chanteys. The weather couldn’t have been more perfect for it.  However, the monthly sing  had been cancelled because of some mean-spirited, self-serving and verging on just plain-evil shenanigans in Washington that closed down certain parts of the government. I needn’t point my finger— suffice it to say that after cleaning off my bookshelves, I took back the “I Hate Republicans Reader” from the recycling box. With no chantey sing, took off in search of a movie and without an I-Phone amongst us, looked for a newspaper on a corner to see what was playing. 10 newspapers boxes, but all of them empty except for one advertising rag. The evening’s theme had been set.

So a daring drive to the Embarcadero Theaters to just take our chances and see what’s there. Ascended the stairs and—“Closed.” For renovations. The entire Embarcadero Complex was deserted and a weird moment of getting lost in the parking lot and feeling like we were in a bad scene in a movie, walking the deserted bowels of the buildings waiting for someone to appear in a shadows. And we did a hear a blood-curdling scream in the distance. Honest.

Finally found the car and set off for the Opera Plaza near the Civic Center. Lucked into a movie worth watching and yet another sign of this strange emptiness in San Francisco— there was parking on the street. On a Saturday night! The movie— Wadjda— was about a young girl in Saudi Arabia who wanted a bicycle and the resistance in a culture with very narrow ideas about what girls can and can’t do. Aargh! Humans! Why do people seek to limit and confine and narrow the whole range of our human possibility, clipping the most beautiful parts of the flower that want nothing more than to bloom? It’s bad enough that people do it to themselves, but then they get in power and do it to others. While music teachers gather on their day off to discover their own possibility for blooming and enjoy each other’s fragrance. In my Idaho workshop, there was a transplanted Californian who told me that when he was in elementary school, they had just cut his music program. So as a 25-year old, he had his first xylophone solo in my class and it was beautiful. I invoked Tom Robbin’s quote and told him he had just proved it yet again, “It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.”

Now it’s Sunday morning and summer is still with us. Which part of the flower will bloom today? 

Stirring the Miso

Many years back, when I was baking my own bread, culturing my own yogurt, sprouting my own alfafa seeds, I flirted with the idea of making homemade miso paste. I read a recipe and was excited about each step of the way until I came to the last: “Stir once a day for two years.” Ha ha! I decided that it would be worse than having a dog. If I went off for the summer, there would be no miso-stirring kennel. Or I could sublet my place with this addendum: “Must be responsible miso-stirrer.”

So now it’s October and I’m back from the granddaughter visit in Portland, dove back into school on Tuesday, again on Wednesday and out that night to fly to Boise, Idaho. Taught a full day today to an enthusiastic crowd of 100 or so (highlight was the trombone/sax/flute/trumpet/oboe, viola, clarinet, collective jam on Step Back Baby!), another day of world of World Music tomorrow and back home in time to go to my colleague James’ Orff Workshop at the SF School Community Center on Saturday. So not much time for reflective thinking or inspired writing.

Is there a link between the above two paragraphs? Only this. This blog is a little like the miso stirring I never did. No pressure to write on schedule, but if too many days go by without an entry, ti feels wrong. So this the image that made this entry almost worthy and now off to an evening gathering of music teachers jamming in the living room. Maybe we’ll riff on the song we sang today—Soup Soup— and I’ll be sure to sing out, “That miso soup!”