New Mission Statement

The Old School:

      1. Sit down!

      2. Shut up!

      3. Get the right answer!

The New School:

1.     Stand up!

2.     Speak out!

3.     Ask the right question!

Which will help the world more? Which will make teaching more interesting? Which do the kids prefer?

There is a right answer— and you better get it!!!

Failure to Encourage

“Encouragement to Fail,” my last theme, is the first step toward happily inviting our musical promise to step out into the world. It’s a good start, but we need more. It is our failure as a culture to encourage our musicianship that has caused so much damage—and renewed time and again my determination to turn things around. People whose musical promise has been left to go to seed or been aggressively trampled by terrible music teachers or been funneled into the narrow band of consuming pop music are not in danger of being homicidal or psychologically damaged beyond repair. But I do believe that they feel less then they could or should be, deprived of a language they need to speak the parts that words cannot. And the times demand of us— and perhaps have always demanded of us— that we meet the challenges ahead with the full measure of our human inheritance, that we claim our birthrights and step towards that feeling of connection and belonging and beauty that arts can offer. Happy people are less and less a luxury and more and more a necessity and where music brings happiness, let it resound!

But it’s how we encourage musical potential that needs attention. All most people can think of is more private piano lessons and helicoptering parents making sure the kiddies dutifully finish with their scales. But if we finally treat music as a language, the language of the heart with its own lexicon of verbs and nouns and adjectives and grammatical syntax and dialects and slang, then the necessary step is obvious: immerse children in a music-rich environment that they will absorb in nature’s way—ie, the same we they learned to speak and understand their mother tongue. And not just with recordings— can you imagine a kid learning to speak by playing those Berlitz tapes? Singing every day with kids, dancing, drumming, jamming on pentatonic xylophones or the black keys of the piano, putting kids under the grand piano to read or draw or daydream while you play some rollicking Bach or blues. The lessons and classes and formal aspects of music study can come later or side-by-side, but first comes conversation with musical adults.

Ah, but there’s the rub. If the musical adults were once children whose musicality was left untouched, then there’s no model for the kids. Do you see how bad ideas get rolling and replicate and cause problems generations down the line? The model for the kind of musical environment I’m describing above are places like Bali or Ghana or Bulgaria or Ireland or Appalachia a few generations back, all places where an unmusical adult was—and still is— a weird notion and a rare occurrence. “Music education” in these places means something quite different and proceeds from a remarkable foundation of musicianship already in place.

People, we have a lot of work to do. And that’s good news for me. I’m here to remediate untapped potential. As Tom Robbins said, “It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.”

For a modest fee, of course.

Encouragement to Fail

I left school after Singing Time (love songs—it’s that time!) and drove up to Napa for an evening with parents about Music Education. I have an opening shtick for such things these days, the same one I used for my TEDx talk. (What? You haven’t seen it yet? Get thee to Google). “Who here is a musician? Who here is musical? Who here likes music?”

The percentages held up. Some 10 to 20% for the first, 30 to 50% for the second, 100% for the last. I assure them that the first makes sense— to be a “musician” in our culture means putting in the 10,000 plus hours to master one’s craft and most of us have other things that we consider more important. The 100% means that some part of us understands that music is essential to energize us, to soothe us, to give language to the complexity of emotions we feel, to get us away from words for a while and pay attention of the feeling side of life.

But what bothers me is that middle category. Why do over half the people in any given adult crowd in our culture feel that they are not musical? (The one child in the audience, by the way, raised his hand for all three.) What happened to them? And so one brave parent said, “I used to play piano and when I made a mistake, my parents rapped me on the head.”

I asked her, “Did they rap you on the head when you played with blocks and they fell down? When you did a stick figure drawing that didn’t look precisely like a human being?

When you told a great story at dinner but made one grammatical mistake?” Why is it that we treat music like a concrete task with correct fingering at the piano and every pre-composed note in place? Why do we put up the toddler’s scribble-scrabble drawing on the refrigerator and greet it with admiring oohs and aahs? Why do we celebrate their first sentence “Me want cookie?” Encourage them to get up again when they fall down in their first attempts to walk? And then shout at them to stop banging on the piano!!!!!

All learning requires a long period of trial and error, of messing around, of playing with broad strokes before the fine tuning of precision. It needs adults who encourage the attempt with the equivalent of proudly displayed refrigerator art. This is the first step toward leading forth each of the potential intelligences we carry, one that we do pretty well with linguistically, kinesthetically, visually-spatial, mathematically, one that we are pretty patient with interpersonally (“Let’s learn to share.”) and intrapersonally (“Let’s learn to use our words to tell how we’re feeling.”), but one that we do a miserable job with musically.

One reason is our musical intolerance for unfocused and loud sound. I get why the banging on the piano is hard to bear. But an easy solution— buy one of the pentatonic Orff instruments with a quiet timbre and musically-pleasing well-chosen five notes and the beginning musician has permission to take that first step into their natural musicality.

But the larger dimension is to re-define and enlarge our notion of what musicality is and what the best route is to unleash it. And that’s my life’s work. So my goal for those 50% plus parents was to convince them that they were wrong, that they indeed were musical, each in their own way and in each at a different point in the spiral. And that it doesn’t matter who’s ahead and who’s behind, just who’s moving one inch forward. So up they got and we did some activities that gave them surprising instant success (and produced some truly lovely music) and others that showed them what challenges they might face to refine their musical expression. All in that loving circle of fun, play and encouragement to fall and fail knowing that I and their fellow travelers would pick them up. Nobody was going to rap them on the head.

At the end of an hour and a half, I asked them again. “Who here is musical?” You got it—100 %. It was worth the three hour round-trip drive.

Any other parents out there need convincing? Invite me.

Feed the Birds

The calendar page turns and Time continues its relentless march (to where?). Or to put it more gently, it’s another turn in the cycle, another point in the ever-circling ebbs and flows of welcomes and losses, of arrivals and departures. Two days ago, just as I received the news that my mother-in-law passed over, my daughter announced a baby boy in her belly. The land suffers from a January with no rain, and yet, the first plum blossoms have come to the trees outside the kitchen window.

February. A month so barren in the ancient Roman calendar that for a while (along with January) it had no name. When it was finally added in 713 BC, it was the last month. Ever wondered why the 9^th, 10^th, 11^th and 12^th months of our current calendar are called September (7^th), October (8^th), November (9^th), December (10^th)? With the two nameless months, there used to only be 10 months. Then January and February were tacked on to the end. Until 450, when they shifted position to the first and second month— and no one bothered to rename the others.

While most of our months are named for gods (Janus, Mars, Aphrilus, Maia, Juno), emperors (Julius, Augustus) or numbers (see above), February was named for a purification ritual called Februa. In various Nordic countries, its name is related to ice or frost or the cutting of wood. It is the shortest month, always shares the same first day of the week with March and November, its last day with January and October— except on leap years. It is the time for kids to exchange those little heart candies and for Hallmark stock to rise, for the wealthier Californians to go skiing in honor of Lincoln and Washington’s birthdays. It is my wife’s birthday, same day as my colleague James’ birthday and two weeks after my colleague Sofia. It is still Black History Month, it hosts Groundhog’s Day and the Superbowl and according to Wikipedia, is National Bird-Feeding Month. In San Francisco, it is the time for plum blossoms. On my windowsill, daffodils are in bloom.

I will be at school for the full four weeks of February before my time off to travel and teach and re-earn the title of this blog. Feels good to keep riding on the momentum of the past five months, but after a workshop in Fresno yesterday with a small group of dedicated teachers, I remembered the pleasure and importance of teaching beyond the kids into my school to the teachers who will carry new material, ideas and practices to kids far and wide. Europe and Asia await me in March and April and I will be happy to oblige.

Meanwhile, I gotta go feed the birds.