May the Circle Be Unbroken

The first Orff workshop I ever took was in 1972 at Antioch College. A guest teacher came to our Education Class and motioned silently for us to remove our shoes and then imitate his gestures. He established a clapping pattern which we did with partners and then sang out in his soulful voice, “Head and shoulders, baby, 1, 2 3”— and my life was changed forever.

Here was something refreshingly different from sitting in chairs and talking, talking, talking. We were up and doing things, with great joy and laughter and communion. After, we would sit and talk, but now we had something real and tangible to talk about. Not our theories about this or that or our well-rehearsed philosophies, but reflections on what we just experienced and what it felt like and what it meant and what it might mean to the children we might eventually teach. Here was a model of active learning where the teachers themselves were active as we trained to teach children in an active way. And one that began and ended in a circle where all are included and connected and protected.

Last Saturday, I went to the local Orff Chapter’s workshop, as I have two or three times a year since 1978 and it suddenly struck me what a victory it is that all these years later, the active, living, breathing, moving, hand-holding, creating-together circle is still the primary mode of transmission. Orff training online has yet to make it on the discussion table and thank goodness for that. Yes, there are far too many Power-point presentations at Orff Conferences these days with participants looking at a screen instead of a musical teacher whose every gesture and cadence of speech is musical. And too many sitting off in the corner with their i-Pads thinking that recording the experience will serve them better than experiencing the experience (it won’t). But all in all, the tradition of the circle with active participants remains the primary form of transmission and is as refreshing today as it was for me all those years back. Hooray for that!

Meanwhile, I’m reading Dave Eggers chilling book The Circle about giving over the old ways of human community and the tried-and-true practices of connection to a modern 24/7 “connected” through electronics, a kind of 1984 Big Brother Is Watching You scenario, but we are all Big Brother watching each other. More on that to come (when I finish the book!), but meanwhile, just this moment of appreciation for Orff’s modern reincarnation of folks singing and dancing in circles keeping its integrity amidst the pressures of life given over to screens. May it continue!

Feel the Wow!

To piggyback on my “Perfect Ending” blog. It was the first singing time with preschool and I was playing the banjo with some rollicking Skip to My Lou singing with three, four and five-year olds that rolled energetically to a final chord and stopped on the dime of a deep, sudden silence. 75 kids singing their heart out and then that powerful quiet at the end. One beat later, one of the new five-year olds shouted out “Wow!!!!” I could have been mad that she ruined the ending, but it was so sincere and heartfelt, I just said, “You really liked that, didn’t you?” “Yes,” she replied breathlessly. “That was powerful!”

And it was. She got it. Music has a power that you can feel while it’s happening and feel in a different way when it stops. It brings together in one room all the separate parts of ourselves, the mind, body, heart, muscles, nerve endings, brain waves, breathing, all sitting down together in a circle holding hands. Nothing excluded, all of us invited to the party and in dynamic conversations with each other. Nothing— and I mean nothing— uses so much of ourselves.

It pains me down to my last nerve to have narrow slices of human beings tell music teachers what they should be accomplishing and how, according to some slivered idea of what education means. My mission statement is to invite the kids to “feel the wow!!” It’s as simple as that. And invite is the correct verb. I can’t insist or demand or plan or prove or measure or assess the number on the Wow Richter Scale. I just have to trust my own search to find and make and create powerful music and see if the gods will be with us. It’s not totally up to chance, every ounce of my planning is to set the table and make the musical food for the gods enticing and appetizing. But it’s also not a clear-cut and predictable cause and effect any more than our dreams or emotions or the weather is. A skilled teacher can reduce the randomness, increase the chances, but we’re never wholly in control. The Wow! is not a train arriving according to timetable. It’s a bit more like a sunset when the light hits just right and clouds form to make you stop and take notice.

Amidst the adult teacher-talk, let’s keep it simple. Teach so kids can "feel the Wow!" Works for me.

The Perfect Ending

Spoiler alert! In the movie Everest, they all die at the end. Ha ha!

No, seriously, if you’re going to see the movie, stop reading. You can come back to this after you see it.

In my music classes, I always insist on “the perfect ending.” On the last note of the song, I expect five seconds of jeweled silence before anyone makes a sound. I want to hear the ringing of the metallophone disappear in its diminishing envelope before anyone can lower their mallets. I insist on a dynamic frozen posture at the end of a dance or movement exercises. Whether you’re three years old or 13 or 33, I expect the same.

And thus, I get it. Not always the first time, to be sure, but by noting “Oops! We didn’t get the perfect ending. Let’s try again.… Nope. Again… Nope once more.… Okay, whoever ruins the ending this time, no recess for you! Ah, there it is.”

I’m playful about this, but strict. It’s my way of respecting the music, protecting its birth from a moment of silence, its life as it goes through its changes and its dignified death at the end as we honor its existence with a moment of silence. Silence is the edge of the canvas in a beautiful painting, the moment before we open to the first page of a book and the moment after we close the last page. Without it, all our efforts are just another jumble of noise in a confused and chaotic world.

And so back to the movie. Two of the people who have an extra-special reason to make it to the summit do indeed make it. Their monumental, extraordinary persistence and effort are rewarded as they plant their flag amidst tears and cheers. And then they die soon after in the descent. Tragic, yes, but also triumphant. What a way to go! After achieving the pinnacle of their life’s quest, indeed, what would be left? How could they bear to go shopping at the mall in their post-Everest life or sit around listening to their friends complain that the Wi-fi isn’t working in Starbucks today?

Anyone who attempted this climb might be righteously and rightfully outraged that I dare compare my life—or anyone’s life— to an Everest trek. But don’t our dreams, no matter what shape or size, have that quality? That monumental effort to unzip the sleeping bag each morning and face the traffic in our commute, to trudge step-by-step through the hundred e-mails demanding our attention or inch our way across the icy bridge with the chasm of failure below us? Don’t we all have the sense that the summit of achievement is perpetually ahead and just out of reach? Obscured in swirling clouds or beating us back with raging winds and relentless snow? Don’t we find ourselves breathless with exhaustion in need of oxygen and sometimes the cannisters dangerously low?

And yet we soldier on, step by step, day by day, in pursuit of the perfect Orff lesson or the jazz improvisation that says precisely what we hear inside or the moment in the meditation where the solid walls of a small self break loose in an avalanche and finally connect us wholly with the ten thousand things of this world.

I often say that my path is called the Orff Approach (not Method) because we are perpetually approaching the summit, but never quite reaching it. And that’s what gets us up again for another day. If I really taught 7 perfect Orff music classes on any given day, I might succumb to the same fate as the two climbers in the movie.

And so next time you feel upset about the kids who are disrupting your perfect plans in your class, the ones that are creating that storm that blocks the top, consider thanking them instead.

They’re keeping you alive.

A Matter of Perspective

This morning I had a hangnail that was bothering me.

This evening I saw the movie Everest in 3D.

I think I can live with my hangnail.

John Henry

After Joseph Campbell gave one of his spellbinding lectures on mythology, an admirer came up and with a glazed look in her eyes, said, “You’re incredible!” His humble reply? “It’s not me, it’s the material." He continued, "After all, when you have the world’s great myths and stories to work with, how can you go wrong?”

But of course, he knew full well that you can go wrong and reduce the splendor to some boring analysis, squeeze all the juice out with a dry reading, beat it with a rope until it confesses its true meaning, whatever that is. He also knew that part of it was indeed him, the part that spent 9 hours a day reading for 5 years to immerse himself in the depthst of the mythological ocean where few divers had ever explored.

I thought of this today singing the song John Henry with the preschoolers. I had just sung it two days ago to preschoolers in Washington DC and the effect was exactly the same. It’s a song that gets the room quiet and creates a quality of listening that is palpable and notable. The same kind of hush that you might feel come over the room as Yo Yo Ma starts playing Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 or a poet reading hits the right combination of words and cadence to create a quality of listening in the audience as if their lives depended on it. That’s the magic John Henry works with 4 and 5 year-olds. And all I have to do is decide to sing it and strum a few of the right chords.

So Joseph and I are in accord here. With material like John Henry or The Wabash Cannonball or Soul Sauce or Stompin’ at the Savoy or… well, if I went on, I’d name a few hundred games, songs, dances, compositions that have worked their magic with children—how can I go wrong? But like Mr. Campbell, I’m well aware that there’s a lot of me in there, the parts that took the trouble to learn everything I needed to know to bring this material alive. And sometimes more alive than anyone could previously imagine. One of my notable accomplishments is to begin with a little fingerplay for babies like Johnny Whoops and end up with a Stravinskyish/ Steve Reichian composition/ improvisation that had Conservatory percussionists, pianists and violinists in Prague working at the height of their capacity to keep up and enthralled with the result.

So that’s the deal. Choose great material. But also pay your dues by living with it, turning it inside out and backwards, throwing light into its dark corners and further illuminating its bright spots. A significant part of it is you and you might as well step up to it.

But from “It’s me” to “It’s not me” to “it’s both of us,” the final step is “It’s us.” All of us. The collective imagination of our species made manifest, from John Henry’s story to the person who wrote his song to the people who passed it down and the books that included it and the guitarmakers who helped us sing it and the visionaries who brought music into schools so kids could sing it. There’s no end once you look with those eyes. All of them, all of us, were somehow present today as the preschoolers got quiet and went to some deep part in their imagination, dreaming over and over the story of that brave man who defeated the machine, but broke his heart in the process.

John Henry, John Henry. He was a steel-drivin’ man.