This and That

The Aegean Sea in the view out the window of my friend Banu’s apartment in Izmir. First time in this San Francisco-like city with its water, hills, architecture with character and liberal history. The day began in rain but after an extraordinary lunch of 12 different vegetable dishes, the sun graced us with its warmth and light. We walked along the water and talked about this marvelous world of Orff Schulwerk we’ve had the good grace to land in—including all the gnarly gossip and small outrages over this person or that. The usual Human Comedy and Tragedy. 

There have been high and low moments these past two days. On a bus in Verona, my good friend Arianna translated the racial slurs a man was spewing at a black man who was drunk and serving his own form of verbal abuse. That was not happy. But then the next morning, I flew to Rome and then boarding the bus to the next plane to Turkey, saw the most beautiful rainbow. For five minutes straight. 

Successfully negotiated all three flights to Izmir, but though I arrived safe and sound, my bags did not. Aargh! I went through this in Spain a few years ago and it was not a happy thing. So now two days in my same clothes, including teaching in them unshaven tonight, and a vague hope the bags will arrive tomorrow. The life of the constant traveler.

Now preparing for three hours of body slapping with 30 Turkish music teachers—and again, the slight astonishment that this is how I make my living. Go figure. 

Life on the Farm

When I was young, I never could have imagined that someone would have paid for my flight, hotel and all my meals to travel to Italy. And that once there, I’d get to enjoy wonderful people and great food in restaurants and then get paid yet more money, in fact, more than I earn working at my school. To do what? 

To teach people how to slap their own bodies and make animal sounds in precise musical patterns. 

On the real farm, the squawking animals get the farmer out of bed at ungodly hours to feed the chickens, stack the hay and milk the cow. Me, I just get to sing a song about it. The real farmer goes on to feed slop to the pigs, work on the tractor, plow the fields. I just get to go over to the xylophones and play some simple parts to accompany the song. Back on the real farmer, people are out in the field together picking the corn or working with their neighbors to build a barn. My neighbors go off in small groups to create a barnyard of animal sounds based on rhythm patterns I had taught. 

I have great respect and gratitude for farmers doing the work to bring food to my table, but listening to these music teachers share their barnyard-sound musical creations with such humor, I couldn’t help but think:

I love my job. 

Some Things Are Made for Searching

I’ve been digging into old files on the laptop to try to find a hilarious piece describing a Schubert Symphony from a business cost-analysis viewpoint. Can’t find it (if any of you can, please send it to me!), but did uncover some interesting old pieces I wrote. Like my answer to this letter I received in 2009:

Dear sir,

I'm Jinky Jane, master student  from UMS Malaysia. May I ask sir some opinion for my research? Teachers use to teach singing and sometimes with unpitched percussion in standard 1 to 3. I plan to design a module using Orff-Schulwerk approach on bamboo xylophone(pitch percussion instrument).

Can this research design as an experimental research with control group or treatment group? To investigate the effectiveness of the module on developmental rhythm aptitude and music aptitude. But I’m not sure if I will have a problem if the control group uses unpitched percussion and treatment group uses pitch percussion(to teach borduns, accompainment etc) + Orff-Schulwerk approach.

Can I compare the pre-test and post-test results?

Thanks

Yours sincerely,

Jinky Jane

And my answer: (I was going to keep the author anonymous, but with a name like Jinky Jane, I couldn’t resist including it!)

Hello Jinky Jane,

Thank you for your questions. I understand that sometimes research can yield interesting findings, but it is not my way of thinking about children and education. I find it distasteful to experiment on children when some simple common sense will tell us the answers we seek. I have taught children for 34 years and I can say with clear authority that we should not choose between singing, dancing, unpitched instrument playing and pitched instrument playing—each one gives children something different and each one is essential. And the most important things it gives to them cannot be measured as pre-test or post-test results— it is the communion with their classmates, their encounter with their own expressive possibilities, the faculties of their souls that are opened by each new piece of music, the way music class can put a frame around their joy and sadness and a thousand other things that art gives to us that scientific measurement cannot touch. 

You don't need scientific testing to know that children who sing everyday guided by a teacher who loves to sing and knows how to choose repertoire, direct the group and train the vocal instrument will become better singers and grow to understand how melodies work. Children who play percussion, again with a teacher who knows how to play and communicate effective technique and share exciting pieces, will grow in their rhythmic skill and understanding. Children who play in the Orff ensemble, again guided by the knowledgeable and enthusiastic teacher, will grow in their understanding of ensemble playing, ensemble texture, orchestration and other essential musical skills. It would be cruel to have one group of children just do one of the above and another group something different just to prove the obvious. ALL children need constant, joyful and expertly-guided experiences in ALL aspects of music-making. 

Note that in each of the above, the prepared and loving teacher is a necessary ingredient. My suggestion would be to abandon the proposed research and instead, do your own search as to your capabilities as a music teacher—get training, read, refine your teaching skills by watching the children in your classes and seeing how they react—if they are happy, enthusiastic, excited, motivated, you're on the right track. When they are not, it's your job to re-consider how to reframe your lesson. Having taught children from 3 years to 14 years old for so many years at one school, this is still the way I'm learning how to teach. With experience, you get better at it, but you never wholly arrive—every class is a new challenge and every child an invitation to figure out how to reach him or her. 

I know this is not the answer you were hoping for, but it's the most honest one I can give.

Thanks for listening,

Doug Goodkin

I never heard back from her. 

(Jinky Jane, if you’re there reading this, let’s talk!)

Reach in. Reach up. Reach out.

After 27 classes in 10 days, over 40 hours of joyful music and dance together, my time with the Special Course came to an end. We sang some beautiful farewell songs and came to the cadence that announces, “The Song is Over.” But as Irving Berlin continued, “but the melody lingers on.” And indeed it will, in the days, weeks, months and even years to come. 

And then we said a different kind of goodbye this morning at breakfast, as each one of these 17 lovely souls got to speak of their “takeaway” from our time together, choose one thing out of the many to share. This is a strong moment for me as a teacher, the Mirror of Truth reflected back to me to discover what struck them, what helped them, what touched them or moved them. 

Predictably—and thankfully—none of them said “You’re an awesome teacher!” I would have been disappointed to hear that they merely praised my teaching. Of course, a little is okay, but real teaching is about the student, not the teacher. It’s about what the teacher was able to awaken in the student, what new ideas considered or old ideas confirmed came forth in the classes. I love hearing people testify that they understood something more clearly or grew more comfortable in a skill they had previously had doubts about or understood why their teaching hadn’t been as flowing as musical as they’d like it to be. Without exception, each sharing helped us all to know that the time was well-spent and served as reminders to remember what is so easy to forget in the heat of busy teaching schedules in schools that don’t often talk about such things. 

As someone constantly in search of the words or phrases that eloquently sing what most of us know but haven’t found how to say it, I was moved by one student’s (Michele Ellis, to give her due credit!) summary, paraphrased as follows:

1)   Reach in. Look inside for the music that sings in you, for your own way of thinking and organizing your teaching, for the stamp of your character that gives you a unique voice as an artist, teacher and human being.

2)   Reach up.  Work hard to constantly aspire yet one inch higher, to get yet a larger view, to push your “daydream up the mountain slope.”

3)   Reach out. Share it all with the world, formally in your classes, informally in your writing, in your performances or recordings or writing. Engage with everyone who comes across your path and discover what they have to offer you as well.

Reach in, reach up, reach out. A nice pithy way to remember what’s important. Thanks to Michele for this and hope my definitions did yours justice. 

Another student’s summary was even pithier, summarizing everything important that had happened in two weeks in one word: 

“Banana.”

For that one, well, you just had to be there.

Thank You, Orff Institut!

Yesterday, I showed my growing collection of videos to the Special Course folks (pictured above). It starts with my granddaughter Zadie when she was 2 scat-singing while she paints and ends with me and my Jazz course playing and singing I Got Rhythm with my 92-year old Mom at my side at the Jewish Home for the Aged. In-between are snippets of classes from my 5-year olds and 4^thgraders and 8^thgraders at the SF School, performances by various student group and the two performing groups I’ve been in, Xephyr and Doug Goodkin and the Pentatonics. It included footage of me and others in various venues at previous Orff Symposiums in Salzburg—1995, 2006, 2011. 

Throughout them all is the common thread of natural, relaxed, festive and joyful music-making, no matter who, where or what age. A playful, childlike spirit runs through all the music and dance and the general tone is sheer joy, bringing happiness to anyone in the room at the time, performer and audience alike. People switch effortlessly between instruments, move freely between playing, singing and dancing, improvise like the wind, listen and connect with each other and demonstrate enough virtuosity to make the music really swing and sing. With all due modesty, it stands as a testament to how the Orff approach can awaken, release, cultivate and share the music that is our birthright, a tangible model of what the result is when an Orff program is really working. 

At the end, I spontaneously said, “None of this would have been possible without the things that have happened right here in this room. None of it. ” It was a dramatic moment! It was true! The lineage of Orff teachers that reached me and then was passed down through me to my students mostly all trained, developed, worked right here in the Orff Institut, in the very room (and others) where I was sharing the fruits of all those labors. I continued:

“And each of you here is part of this live, ongoing legacy and what we are doing during these two weeks and during your 9 months in this room will reach some children who we will never meet, but will impact them nonetheless. Some teachers who may one day trace their life back to you and to me and to my teachers may someday pause in wonder that all of this made their life so happy and satisfying. And who knows? That moment of gratitude might take place right in this room!”

At least I hope it does. The fact of the matter is that more or less since I began coming here in 1990, the Institut has been pulled in many directions, and sometimes opposite ones, as it tries to negotiate its status as a satellite to the Mozarteum Conservatory, which in turn has to attend to the policy-du-jour of the Austrian Government. The autonomy that makes for a healthy institution is being chipped away and though it would sadden me deeply, it wouldn’t shock me if finally the Institut lost the thread with Orff’s far-reaching vision, victim of the very “drawing-board mentalities” Orff warned against it.

No one can predict. But one can be supremely grateful for what has been and for the chance to work in the very building where you can hear the echoes of departed footsteps—those of Orff himself, Gunild Keetman, Wilhelm Keller, Margaret Murray, Minne Ronnefeld, Doreen Hall, Hermann Regner, my teacher Avon Gillespie (for one year), Richard Gill and many more who helped shape and craft this beautiful practice. And thanks to all who continue to hold the line and keep the thread unbroken. It means the world to children and teachers worldwide.

This my thanks to the Orff Institut. May it continue!!! 

The Face in the Mirror

“Leadership is lifting a person’s vision to higher sights, raising their performance to a higher standard, building a personality beyond its normal limitations.”-Peter Drucker

Already in 2005, I was feeling the inevitable disappointment of looking in the mirror and thinking, “How did that face get in my mirror?” And so I wrote a poem: 

The glass is a lie.

All it captures is time’s cruel ravages

    Gravity’s insistent tugs

          The footprints of the hours walking over our bodies

If you want to see who you truly are in this world,

Look

     at the face of the child you are teaching

Listen

     to the sound of the strings you are plucking

Taste

    the soup you have so lovingly prepared

Gaze

    into the eyes of your lover at the moment of union

That’s the real story.

Pay no mind to the lies of cameras and mirrors.

Your true face shines out

       in the way you affect the world.

After the first week with these Special Course Orff teachers, they had to write up their “takeaways” from the classes. I have a certain sense of how it’s going for them by observing their participation, their level of enthusiasm and excitement and the feel of a buzz in the air. But reading their reflections gives me the details of what is working for them, what they find useful, how their world is affected by the work we’re doing together.  Some of which I’ll share in the next post. 

But for now, I’m liking looking into the true mirror where the work I’m sharing is” lifting people’s visions, raising their performance, building their personality” one inch higher or larger. 14 years after writing that poem, gravity has continued its tug (of course it will!) but the face in the true mirror is each day more handsome. For that, I am grateful. 

A Song for Every Story. A Story for Every Song.

 One of a thousand reasons why I am so happy teaching the Special Course at the Orff Institute is that I get to share just about the full 100 yards of everything I’ve worked on and cared about. In an insane condensed form with just two weeks to enjoy the banquet. But nonetheless, a pleasure that I would wish every person have in sharing the fruits of the career with others on their way up. 

So after leading folks through diverse body percussion, fun games, models of flowing musical process, clear sequences on xylophones, structures for coherent improvisation, folk dances taken a few steps beyond the norm, a taste of jazz, a sip of world music, philosophical backgrounds to effective pedagogy and more, yesterday I got to have a Singing Time with them. And that might have been the most fun of all. 

Though I’m light years better on piano than guitar, facing the group sideways or looking over the top of the big instrument always feels more distant than the direct encounter with guitar—or banjo or ukulele— in hand. And though I’m not much of a singer in terms of any God-given voice way, I think the group—kids or adults—feel how much I enjoy it and a festive energy always fills the air. And because the songs I choose to sing are never just songs, but opening doors to further explorations—motions, dances, new words, improvisations, stories and beyond—by the end of the gathering we will have awakened and exercised each and every intelligence—mathematical, linguistic, kinesthetic, visual-spatial, interpersonal, intrapersonal and of course, musical. We will have touched on history, geography, grammar, vocabulary, mathematical sequences and structures, foreign language, morality and ethics and even profound life insights. 

So walking to “work” this morning, I found myself thinking: “A song for every story. A story for every song.” Bicycle stolen? Let’s sing “Fietsie Foetsie.” Worried your job might be given to a machine? Time for “John Henry.” Your pet bird died? You can choose between “Mi Gallo” or “Cock Robin” or “Go Tell Aunt Rhody.” When you build a storehouse of songs by singing every day with children as I do at The San Francisco School, you have 150 ways to move through joys and sorrows, to find the song you need at the moment and feel the way it offers affirmation, comfort, healing.

And likewise, a story for every song. I hardly ever teach songs at my workshops or even in my school without telling how I learned Fietsie Foetsie and searched for some 20 years before discovering who wrote it. How John Henry can quiet the most rowdy group of 5-year-olds in two minutes and how their sadness is connected to the insight that he lives on in the song and every time they sing, it’s like the movie Coco suggests—John Henry stays alive and well in the other world. And of course, I have to mention who Aunt Rhody made 4-year -old Brittany cry and how it’s a perfect example of how a song in the major scale can still be sad.

So by all means, sing. But not just a little and not just the narrow spectrum of pop radio and not just by yourself in the car or the shower. Learn the stories the songs are telling. The words themselves, but also between the lines and behind the words, the story behind the story. 

And when singing with others, share how you learned the song or with who else you sang it and what it means to you and who you think of when you sing it again. I can testify: A life lived singing daily with children, collecting and sharing hundreds of song that hold the stories you need and that you hold dear, of telling the stories that the song evokes, is a life rich with purpose, color and …well, music. 

I’m sure there’s a song about this theme of a song for every story and a story for every song. If not, maybe I’ll make one up. Meanwhile, it’s a good time to sing either April Showers, I Remember April or April in Paris. Happy April!