On Its Own Terms: Part II

(The continuation of yesterday’s talk that included video footage)

Let’s watch some highlights from a recent trip we took with 45 Middle School kids to perform at the San Diego Orff National Conference. I hope you notice how alive in their bodies these kids are, how concentrated their focus, how connected they are with the music and with each other. Also note their comfort level with quite sophisticated music in quite diverse styles, how relaxed and natural they are in their performance, how joyfully engaged they are.  They learned everything by ear in some 10 rehearsals over two months and remembered every note.

You’ll see some snippets from a workshop they helped lead the next day, teaching adults what they knew, playing music and playing games with the adults. In one photo, you’ll see both the kids and adults singing with their arms around each other. This was a spontaneous idea on my part to help us feel and heal the grief of the terrorist attack in Paris that happened the day of the performance. We began singing We Shall Overcome and the kids were right with it, well-practiced in the art of music as a response to both the joy and terror of the world.

In that workshop, the adult participants asked questions to the kids and with no preparation, the kids were fighting for the microphone to answer. They were so wise in their response about what the music program meant for them. They talked about how music helped them connect with themselves and connect with others, how they can lose themselves in the music, how they valued the discipline of playing the right notes side-by-side with the freedom of expressing themselves in the solo. 

They know brain science: “These music teachers are teaching you as a kid and you start getting into the habit. It’s easier to learn things when you’re a kid because your brain is still developing. When you’re a grown-up, you’ll say, ‘I did this as a kid and can totally do it now!’

They know about social skills: “Music sets you up to work with other people because in a job setting, you need to work with others and you don’t want to be that awkward guy.”

They know about emotional intelligence: “Different songs bring out different feelings and it’s cool to share those feelings together with others singing the same songs.”

Wise kids indeed. Now here’s a video of my granddaughter when she was two painting while scat singing. Note how the arts are effortlessly integrated in her pre-verbal mind, combining Jackson Pollock with Ella Fitzgerald and Max Roach. And then my 92-year-old mother conducted my jazz band students who came to play at her home. Look how alive and happy she is. She had run out of words, but music she understood. We have ample proof of how music resonates the longest in the human psyche, awakening severe Alzheimer’s patients from their comatose trance to full aliveness within the first few notes of a song. That’s one of music’s gifts that nothing else can do in the same way. Certainly going over their old math tests won’t do that!

When I teach the little ones, I'm giving them precisely what they need in the moment, but also something that they can carry with them into their future, the tools to sing to their aging parents and the songs to remember when their musically-educated children sing to them. What will happen if we fail to give tomorrow's seniors what they needed and deserved when they were kids? Do you see how what we do with the two-year old now will echo 90 years into the future? That’s no theory. You’ve just seen it.

What will happen if we fail to give seniors what they needed and deserved when they were kids? What will be there for them at the end of life if we don’t give it at the beginning? And what will the middle feel like? These are not decisions to make—or refuse to make lightly. Something profound and real is at stake. This is the kind of discussion that we should be having at the school board meetings and so rarely do. Ask the people making the decisions: “What songs will bring you comfort? Who will sing then for you in your hour of need? Think about that and now, let’s vote.”

On Its Own Terms

(The following is Part 1 of a talk I gave at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia yesterday. The audience was mostly music teachers, but preaching to the choir is still a worthy endeavor. Part II tomorrow).

I’ve been told that music education in Australia is in a precarious position and that I’ve been flown across the ocean with the job of convincing everyone in this talk that it’s important. No pressure!

First let me say that music education in Australia has been in a precarious position ever since I first came here in 1994 and I don’t think you’d be surprised to hear that it’s the same just about everywhere I’ve taught. And here I’m speaking of almost each of the 50 states in the United States, each of the provinces in Canada, the countries of Brazil, Colombia and Argentina, Ghana and South Africa, some 15 countries in Asia and some 20 more in Europe. Music education  in schools here, there and everywhere, has been, is, and continues to be, in a precarious position. There are some years and some places where it rises and thrives. But always the sense that it can be taken away in an instant—and far too many times, has been. Why is this?

To start to answer this, I often ask the audience three questions: Who’s a musician? Who’s musical? Who loves music? I see that this group is heavy to the side of musical musicians and since most of you are music teachers, I should hope that’s true! But typically in any group of people, the first percentage is necessarily small and the last in unsurprisingly 100%. And isn’t it odd that something that everyone says they love needs to be defended? But the reason why has something to do with that middle one, the fact that some 40% to 60% of the people in any given room feels they’re not musical. I want to find out what happened to them and the sad reality is that it often comes back to bad music teachers.

So the first challenge is to reform music education itself. We music teachers have far too often taught the subject of music so unmusically that it is painful for the musician inside of us. We have taught it with attention to the wrong things—winning the competition or reading and writing before speaking and singing music or learning how to wiggle our fingers correctly on the keys like a mere physical exercise to be mastered. We have taught with far too little love and encouragement for the child and far too much emphasis on the right answer and the right note before the right feeling and enthusiasm. How many of you felt wounded by a music teacher? How many of you don’t feel you’re musical because some music teacher told you you’re not? Or you never had music in schools or music lessons to find out.

And so I travel the world under the banner of a dynamic pedagogy called Orff Schulwerk to try to assist and inspire my fellow music teachers to do this work better, with better results, more joy, more love, more understanding of what the heck we’re trying to do. Convincing school boards to fund and support music is a daunting task, but teaching our classes better is within our reach. Without it, any further advocacy is pointless. With soul-stirring classes that hit children where they live, we can make our classes memorable and our work irreplaceable. Still the cuts may come, but with the support of the children, parents and colleagues who see how integral we have become to school community, we stand a chance of surviving and thriving. In short, the first principle of advocacy is to do good work.

The second challenge is to understand that in order to have quality music education for children, we have to have a deep understanding of  each of those components—what education is and what music is and who children are. And we so often have too-narrow understandings of all three. The word education, for example, comes from the Latin “educare” which means to lead out, to draw forth that which we already have within us. All people in all places in all times are born linguistic, mathematical, visual-spatial, kinesthetic, social, emotional—and yes, musical beings. They come with all intelligences in seed form that then require watering through experience, shaping and cultivating through disciplined attention. That’s what schools are for, to follow nature’s timetable of the brain’s most receptive and flexible stage of development to lay down the neural pathways that form the foundation for a lifetime of blossoming. Anything neglected will wither and die, anything cared for badly without loving attention will grow sick and suffer.

And then, music.  Far too often we equate that word with reading notes written by dead white composers on instruments we have to practice painfully. But when I say that everyone in this room is musical, I’m starting from the fact that each of us is a

walking polyrhythmic being, filled with the life-sustaining rhythms of breath, heartbeat, brain-waves and more. If those rhythms fail us, we are dead. We walk rhythmically, speak in phrases with musical inflections, eat and sleep and work in rhythmic cycles. We are vibrating beings within inner strings receptive to and responsive to the vibrations of tones sounded outside of us. The conversation between our inner music and the outer is what grows out musical intelligence. And because music goes directly from vibration to vibration, with no needed intermediation from dogma, concepts, ideas, beliefs, it carries a great power. It changes those inner rhythms of heartbeat and breath and electric impulses and those shifts in movement create e-motion, thus changing the way we feel, the way we think, the way we live. That’s why 100% of people in any audience raise their hand when I ask, “Who likes music?”

And then children. They’re not miniature adults, they’re a whole different creature altogether and just when we’re getting used to who they are and how they think and what they need, they change! They are superior to us in many ways— more honest, more imaginative, more enthusiastic, more energetic, more curious, more surprising, more filled with wonder, more expressive in their faces and bodies. They’re also more whiny, unreasonable, liable to tantrums, fantastic liars, and prone to making really bad choices.  As teachers, we are both delighted by and inspired by their freshness that awakens the child in us and patient with their shortcomings, helping lead them to the emerging adult in them.

95% of the time all the fuss and bother in educational policy debates fail because they don’t include the children in the discussion. And I mean that both metaphorically and for real. I believe every proposal should be explained to children in a language they can understand and their feedback included in the decision-making process. You’ll hear the children’s voices later on here and I think you’ll be impressed by their ability to articulate what’s important.

In summary, to achieve quality music education worthy of guaranteed inclusion in school curriculums, we should enlarge our vision of education, of music, of children.

But the third problem is the most difficult one. We need to enlarge our very vision of human potential. Music as I’m describing it is not popular in schools because it is so damn difficult. It uses more of us than anything else, calls forth every single one of our seven plus multiple intelligences. Music is math, music is language, music is visual-spatial understanding, music is kinesthetic, music is interpersonal connection, music is intrapersonal connection and music is—well, musical. Music is academic, because Plato Akademia included it. It is everything plus. There are a thousand ways to assess how effective it is, but none of them can be run through a computer (though brain waves can be measured) and so it appears messy, too emotional, too touchy-feely, not the kind of stuff that will land you a job with prestige and money and all your feelings neatly arranged in boring little predictable compartments. When we refuse to consider music a place at the banquet of human possibility, or a place reserved for some notion of the talented, or a place as a mere consumer, we are publicly showing that we’re settling for a lesser definition of a human being who can walk on this earth without a song in his heart and think that’s okay.

So many try to get music into schools by trying to convince parents and school boards that it will make kids better in math, language, social skills, etc. My own experience shows that it does give children a much larger facility and understanding of mathematical pattern, linguistic pleasure, physical coordination and so on and so on. How could it not? But the reasons we need music are in the “plus.” Music needs to join the party on its own terms ,doing what only it can do in the way that only it can do it.

So let me show you some examples of what that “it” is—with middle school kids, with toddlers, with 90 + year-olds.

(Here I showed some videos and than gave closing comments, to be posted later.)

Down By the Riverside

Occasionally I have the wisdom to follow my little collection of “notes to self.” One of which has been: “When crossing oceans to give workshops, give yourself a whole day to recover from jet lag before teaching.”

I arrived in Brisbane, Australia around 1 pm yesterday after some 18 hours of flying and decided to treat myself to a nap. A five-hour nap. Got up for dinner, went to bed at 10 pm, awoke at 2:30 am and I was ready for the day! So prepared my speech for the University, whittled my e-mails down to zero, played some disappointing Solitaire and disappeared for awhile in the novel I’m reading. Breakfast at 8:00 am and out the door with the day before me, no appointments to keep, no one to answer to but the whims of my traveling feet. I was relaxed about not sleeping through the night knowing the day to follow was wholly mine.

After breakfast, I set off to find the bus at the nearby shopping mall. I belief the designer of Australian roundabouts and malls must be named Daedalus and learned his craft from the ancient Greek who built the labyrinth. I twisted and turned through one windy path after another before finally landing in the brightly-lit mall of Everywhere, World, with mostly the same old stores selling the same old things hardly anyone needs. Note that the ancient Greek labyrinth was designed to house the monstrous Minotaur, a half-man, half-bull who was the offspring of a King Minos’s wife and a bull. Because of this unnatural mating of woman and beast, the Minotaur had no natural source of nourishment and so devoured humans for sustenance. There’s a moral in here somewhere for the insatiable consumption the Malls encourage, some unnatural creature who is slowly devouring us with its masked benevolent smile.

But I digress.

I did find the bus and had a pleasant 25-minute ride into downtown Brisbane and Queen St. Got off at another mall, escaped to the outdoor pedestrian mall, much more pleasant, and started my aimless wander in hot summer heat, but the blessing of some cloud cover. Stumbled into the Botanical Gardens, saw a few lizards and banyan trees and jacaranda mimosas and lots of long-beaked herons and egrets feeding the way birds seem to perpetually do. I sat and savored a garden quiet interrupted by the banging of nearby construction. Trees grow quietly, but high-rise building is a noisy affair. Still, I enjoyed just sitting and then reading my book until an exercise group surrounded me and started jumping rope and doing push-ups on my very bench! Time to move on.

The Gardens went right to the edge of the river and there was a lovely inviting path filled with joggers and bicyclists and a few leisurely strollers like myself. And so stroll I did for an hour or so back and forth, with a short break on a bench to do a Crostic puzzle. I lunched on a mushroom burger with sweet potato fries at a Garden Café and then crossed the footbridge to the other side and South Bank. And here things began to look familiar from my two previous trips to Brisbane in 1996 and 2002. The beach right in the city, the art museum, the rainforest path and more. I thought about other riverside walks I’ve done in other cities—Salzburg, Prague, Budapest, Paris, London. San Antonio, Portland, Memphis, Tampa. Bangkok, Istanbul, Suzhou. The people flowing down the path, the water flowing down the river, it’s a happy combination.

And so I passed a delightful day down by the riverside doing nothing in particular and loving it all. Another half-an-hour after the return bus lost in the maze of my own confusion before finally finding the hotel and just in time, as the late afternoon rains began pouring down. Now in my spacious studio apartment ready to plan tomorrow’s University classes and keep myself up until 10, happy to have laid down my sword and shield down by the riverside and passed a peaceful day in blissful jet-lagged solitude.

February

I seem to have a new ritual of beginning each month with a little nod to the month itself.

And so February. Back in the 10-month calendar (the back story to September as 7^th month, October as 8^th, etc.), so little happened in February in terms of the agricultural and seasonal cycle that it had no name. When Julius Casesar reformed the calendar, it got its name from Februa, an annual ritual of purification practiced during that time.

In its short 28 days (the only month where it’s possible not to have a full moon), February boasts two national holidays now condensed into one (Lincoln and Washington’s birthdays simply have become President’s Day), Groundhog’s Day, Chinese New Year, Valentine’s Day, Fat Tuesday (Mardi Gras) and Ash Wednesday, and Black History Month. Thanks to Wikipedia, I also discovered that in the U.S., it boasts these rather obscure holidays:

• National Wear Red Day

• Ice Cream for Breakfast Day

• National Weatherperson’s Day

• Rare Disease Day

• International Stand Up to Bullying Day

Worldwide celebrations include Autism Sunday (UK), National No Smoking Day (Ireland),

Inventor’s Day (Thailand). (I feel a blog coming on about the proliferation of special days, from International Polar Beat Day to International Day for Zero Tolerance of Female Genital Mutilation, both also in February.) I’ve had the good fortune to travel in February and be in Taiwan during Chinese New Year, Japan for Setsubun, Kerala, India for its remarkable Pooram Festivals, Brazil for preparations for Carnaval.

Back in San Francisco, February is the month of plum blossoms and an annual walk to Edgewood Terrace, an entire street of plum trees. It’s the annual Super Bowl spectacle, the one football game I watch all year, the Oscars spectacle, the pleasure of four Sundays of Downton Abby (alas! last year for that!), 100’s Day at my school. My wife Karen and music teacher colleague James (along with ten other people I know!) share the same Feb. 28^th birthday and my other colleague Sofia celebrates hers on the 10^th. And on this Leap Year, the gift of a full extra day.

Because of crossing the International Date Line traveling to Australia, the first day of February hardly happened for me. I boarded a plane on January 31^st and disembarked on February 2^nd. Perhaps it zipped by while I was watching the movie Truth in Seat 21 D and not a bad way to start the month, hoping for the resurgence of bold investigative reporting and a population that cares more about learning the truth then hiding the dirty laundry of the rich and powerful. (Do see the movie and be properly outraged). Maybe I’ll propose February 1^st as Dan Rather Day.

Meanwhile, onward into 2016 from the Land Down Under. I'm off to find some ice cream for breakfast.