Visible Echoes

Amidst the trials, tribulations and triumphs of the teaching profession is the pleasure of bumping into former students, parents, teachers out in the world. (Well, most of them. There are no students I can think of who would make me cross to the other side of the street if I saw them coming, but yes, there are a few parents. You know who you are.)

But living in San Francisco, barely a month goes by where I don’t see these alum folks at the store or the concert or out walking in the park and the past few weeks have been especially remarkable. I saw four alum parents at an event celebrating the Margaret Jenkins 50^th Anniversary of her work as a dance choreographer and another three the night before at a Community Orchestra fundraiser, along with one student, now 54, who I hadn’t seen since he was in 4^thgrade! (And extraordinary that he recognized me!) I saw my school’s front desk person from years back working at Trader Joe’s, had two parents stop their car to talk when they spotted me on the street, ran into an alum student at the park where I was playing one of their outdoor pianos. I saw four alums at two different concerts in which they were performing, ran into another at Tartinne Bakery. And so on. 

Exchanges are usually brief, but warm. If an alum parent, it often begins, “What is your kid up to?” and then, almost as an afterthought, “And how are you?” If it’s a kid (still using that word, even if they’re 54!), it’s reversed— “What are you up to?” and then “How are your folks?” I always tell a story, whether directly to the kid or the parent, of some small or big moment we’ve had together and that’s fun. These days, I insist on a selfie and when I have some leisure time (and just when will that be?), hope to gather the photos from the past couple of years into a slide show. I had a meeting last year with the SF School admin and they hinted that I could be the Alum Representative. Because of my longevity at school, my memory for people and our accompanying stories and the fact that I  genuinely enjoy seeing them, it’s the perfect role for me. But typical of my school, there’s no official job definition or acknowledged title. Oh well.

Every time I run into someone, it’s like a tangible, visible and visceral echo of a special time we shared together. Not a wistful recall of “the good old days” trying to recapture sorely missing from our lives now (though certainly some of that!), but a mutual acknowledgement that we were there together. We did this and it mattered. And here we still are. As my Mom liked to say, “Imagine that!”

I wonder who I’ll bump into today. 

  

The Merry Month of May

It’s a rainy day in May. Technically, it should be sunny and flowery and perhaps a bit windy, but usually the rainy season is finished by now. No cause for alarm. I remember a couple of decades back (before climate change was a household word )an outdoor school graduation in June being frantically re-located inside at another school because of rain.

I would be perfectly content to forego the picnic in the park and enjoy a cozy indoor day starting a new jigsaw puzzle listening to the pitter-patter of the raindrops. But the responsibilities of adult life are awaiting me, with their foot tapping and finger waving in the corner insisting that I stop playing around and pay attention to them. The piles on my desk are calling me over to slog through delinquent finances, prepare my overdue taxes, contact school alum with one more plea to sign up for an alumni concert before I cancel it and so on. This Peter Pan meekly putting down my toys and answering Wendy’s stern look with “Yes, dear.”

Of course, not before I write this little piece of fluff, another tool in my Procrastination Toolkit. Or look at the calendar to see what delights the merry month of May has in store. Tonight, I will ascend in the building I most hate in San Francisco—Sales Force Tower— to both play some piano and be an auctioneer at a community orchestra fund-raising event. I know I will be astounded by the view, but suspect it won’t change my feelings about this ugly wart on the SF skyline. My piano-playing starts exactly when the Warriors third game in the second playoff round begins. Darn!

Tomorrow, I’ll go with my sister to help celebrate the 50^th Anniversary of the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company, in which she once danced and I accompanied dance classes for $3 an hour when I first moved here. Then it’s all hands-on-deck for the 5^th and 6^th grade Spring Concert at Children’s Day School where I’ve been co-teaching and will direct six of my pieces. There is my OLLI Jazz History Class and a neighborhood sing and another school sing and the weekly Jewish Home for the Aged piano play on my calendar squares and then all the things that don’t make it on paper— like a new project to memorize two Chopin pieces on piano and perhaps to return to a book project that I left after the first draft.

Forgive me for writing this all on a public Blog. There is no earthly reason why anyone else should be the least bit interested in my schedule and there is little here that hits any kind of universal vein. Except perhaps as a model of how to procrastinate yet more!

Now, about that jigsaw puzzle…

50th Anniversary

A few posts back, I evoked the three pillars of my life—Orff, Jazz and Zen. This morning it struck me— they all began in one remarkable year. 1973. Which makes this year the 50^th Anniversary of all three disciplines.

In the Winter of ’73, I was completing the last six months of a college-sponsored job apprenticeship teaching at The Arthur Morgan School in the foothills of the North Carolina Black Mountains. It was a small boarding school for some 30 Middle School kids connected to an intentional Quaker community called Celo. In February of that year, I created and led a school Jug Band with 17 of the students and three teachers and organized (at 22 years young with no Internet or cell phones) a two-week Jug Band tour of the South, driving a rented yellow school bus from North Carolina to Miami and back. We performed at schools, community centers, one urban club and one radio station, stayed in people’s homes and church basements and camped, playing music inspired by Jim Kweskin and his jug band that included blues, ragtime pieces and old jazz standards. It was my first public foray out of my classical piano background into the universe of jazz that awaited me and also prophetic of my vision of school as community, tied together by joyful music-making and fun at the forefront.

In the Spring of the same year, I returned to Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, lived with three friends a couple of miles from campus in the country (all three of whom I’m still in touch with), rode a bicycle to school and took a semester-long class with a guest teacher named Avon Gillespie. The class was an obscure pedagogy known as Orff Schulwerk and both the approach and the teacher were destined to define the life I’ve ended up living. 50 years ago that was!

Summer was my first trip to Europe singing the Renaissance sacred music that would later be the doorway into meeting my future wife (that’s another story). But it also marked the first journal I kept, a practice uninterrupted for the half-century that followed and marked me as destined to write and later publish. It whetted my appetite for the 60 plus countries I later would visit in my love for travel and my insatiable curiosity about other cultures. That trip alone would have marked the year as an extraordinary turning point, but there was yet more.

Returning from Europe, I moved to San Francisco in the Fall, got my first job teaching jazz piano at The Community Music Center (amazing considering what a beginner I was!) and with my sister and brother-in-law who let me live with them those first three months, went to my first Zen meditation retreat (sesshin) at Mt. Baldy Zen Center, a practice that would sustain me without pause all the way to this morning’s zazen sit (and hopefully beyond!). 

And so. In one astonishing year, I took my first steps onto the paths of Jazz, Orff, Zen, as well as writing, traveling, living in San Francisco. 50 years of being kneaded by these beautiful practices, massaged by their strong fingers that evoke chords of deep music in this body/heart/ mind. Happy Anniversary to them all!

FTM

I awoke at 4 in the morning with a headache and stumbled to the bathroom to take some Ibuprofen. In my sleep-dazed state, I was having trouble opening the cap and thought: 

“Look at all the thought and trouble we’ve gone through to make child-proof caps to protect children from possible harm. And yet after hundreds of innocent kids are mindlessly slain each year in school shootings, we can’t manage to ban assault rifles and create some sensible gun-control laws?”

And why? Three simple words:

“Follow the money.”

How else to understand why Columbus chose to enslave the Arawak Indians he met when he first landed in the “New World?” People he described in his journals as “well built with good bodies and handsome features. They willing traded everything they owned …” and then concluded, “They would make fine servants… with fifty men we could subjugate them and make them do whatever we want.” And when he did come back with 1200 men, cross-bows, cannons, attack dogs and guns, he ordered every Arawak over 14 years old to find gold for him. If they failed to meet their quota, he cut off their hands and they bled to death. (And yes, this is the same Columbus we’ve celebrated on a national holiday.) All heartily approved by his culture and religion that had treated God and Gold as synonyms— after all, only one-letter difference.  Why the genocide of the native peoples? Follow the money.

Want to understand the birth of systemic racism and white supremacy? An economic system of free labor gets put into place and then the priests, ministers, scientists concoct the theory of racial superiority and inferiority so that benefactors of the system could sleep easily at night knowing the people they bought as property "were in their proper place as pre-ordained and better off than in their native lands in Africa." Follow the money.

Ever read up on the atrocities of bosses exploiting workers in the factories, the coal mines, the Amazon warehouses? Backed by government and protected by police? Follow the money. 

Ever wonder why a black man caught with a stick of marijuana could be jailed for a long time and lose voting rights for his felony conviction while the Wall Street scammers get a slap on the wrist, if that? Follow the money. 

Did you ever think about why we went to war in Iraq and Kuwait but not in Rwanda? Follow the money (ie, oil).

How have corporations gotten away with polluting the rivers and poisoning the earth in places where people live but the CEO’s don’t? Follow the money. 

And why does the NRA wield so much power when every person with a functioning brain cell can understand how the response in New Zealand to ban assault weapons after the Christchurch massacre in 2011 has reduced such shootings to zero in the last TWELVE YEARS while we in the U.S. have had 25 in the past FOUR MONTHS alone!? Follow the money.

Not every atrocity and aberration in human beings can be so simply explained, but if you really follow that thread— including things like the rampant takeover of computers and their ilk in schools while arts programs get cut— this little FTM mantra explains a helluva lot.

And yet I still believe that if we’re thoughtful and good-hearted enough to make child-proof Ibuprofen caps, we can agree to ban assault weapons. God and Gold are two different things and if there’s a decent bone in our body, we can have the good sense, courage and compassion to make better choices. Yes?

Wrestling with Giants

Antaeus was a Greek god, son of the Mother Earth Goddess Gaia. He was a giant who challenged and defeated all comers in wrestling matches. One of Hercules’ 12 Labors was to fight Antaeus. A little while into the fight, Hercules realized that every time he threw him down to the ground, Antaeus rose up stronger, fortified by the contact with the Earth, his mother, the source of his strength. So Hercules holds him up aloft and then finishes him off in a strangling bear hug. 

I think of this myth often when life throws me down to the ground, when people or institutions betray me, attack me, disappoint me. While at first, I feel bruised and trampled upon, I often end up rising up stronger. Except when I’m lifted up— as every modern person is— into cyberspace and spun around until I’m dizzy and roundly defeated by the bear hug of things that don’t work. Like the PaymentWorks (the very title a lie—it doesn’t!) method of getting paid for my work by a University that refuses to simply mail me a check and yet, offers no help as I navigate a system that consistently refuses to accept me. 

Here I think of the poet Rainer Marie Rilke and find some comfort in his extraordinary poem “The Man Watching.” Though indeed I must continue this maddening battle with machines if I want to get paid, it’s helpful to remember that organizing my life around the trivia of daily life is not where I live or want to live. Rilke says: 

…What we choose to fight is so tiny! 
What fights with us is so great. 
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm, 
we would become strong too, and not need names.

When we win it's with small things, 
and the triumph itself makes us small. 

The things that define my life are three powerful one-syllable words— Orff, Jazz and Zen. Each is a monstrous giant that constantly throws me to the ground. Nobody ever wins against these three. But with dedication and perseverance and resolve, though I get slammed down time and time again, I often rise up stronger and have brief moments when I’m on top and the giant is at rest, conceding a momentary defeat. The class that resisted my lessons suddenly yields and astonishes themselves with the beauty they’re capable of creating. (This happened today!). After sessions of dubious jazz piano solos, suddenly I’m dancing through the chord changes like the Nicholas Brothers, alive, coherent, vibrant, free. By sticking to the same morning meditation for most every day of the last 50 years, the rise and fall of my breath sometimes dissolves this limited physical body and connects me with the true nature of the resplendent Universe. 

The occasional triumph is only made possible by the ongoing defeats. Back to Rilke: 

What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us. 
I mean the Angel who appeared
to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when the wrestlers' sinews 
grew long like metal strings, 
he felt them under his fingers 
like chords of deep music.

Whoever was beaten by this Angel 
(who often simply declined the fight) 
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand, 
that kneaded him as if to change his shape. 

Winning does not tempt that man. 
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively, 
by constantly greater beings.

There is no glory in figuring out the right password to the Website. Ah, but to be defeated, decisively, by constantly greater beings. That’s where the juice of life is.

Bring it on!

Down in the Valley

In 1987, the local Orff Chapter hosted a weekend “Mini-Conference” event at a marvelous retreat center called Hidden Valley Music Seminars. The headliner was my teacher Avon Gillespie. There I met the head of the Seminar, a lovely man named Peter Meckel. The Mini-Conference continued to be held there every two years for the next 25 plus years and I always enjoyed my brief contact with Peter. 

In 2011, a time when construction at my school meant I had to look for a new site for our summer Orff course for the following year, I was at yet another Mini-conference and suddenly had the thought, “We should do it here!” I met with Peter in his office and explained the situation, he asked me for the dates I needed, opened a book, erased something and said, “Let’s do it!” I asked him for his contract and he stuck out his hand and said, “Here’s the contract. And save the e-mails between us.” We shook hands and the deal was sealed and our first SF International Orff Course meeting at Hidden Valley took place in the summer of 2012. 

After the first week, I met with the staff and told them that we could return the course to the SF School or… and they all interrupted at once and said, “Here!!!” And so we have had ten glorious years in this remarkable piece of heaven in Carmel Valley and the opportunity to hang out yet more with Peter. At 80 years old, he is still going strong.  A Board Member suggested we write our congratulations to him today on the occasion of the  60^th (!!!!) anniversary of the site. And so I did. 

 

 

TO PETER MECKEL ON THE OCCASION OF HIDDEN VALLEY’S 60^TH ANNIVERSARY

 

Dear Peter,

 

When my beloved teacher Avon Gillespie threw open the doors at the end of his Easter Cantata at the first Orff Mini-conference in 1987, little did I realize that he was opening the doors to my future. With such fanfare! The light streaming in and the choir of voices singing “Hallelujah!!” There could be no better description of what Hidden Valley has meant, not only to me personally, but more importantly, to both a local and international Orff community. Ten years of hundreds of inspired souls who will always connect the memorable heights and depths of both their professional life and personal epiphanies with this little piece of heaven in Carmel Valley. I’m thinking of an old Doc Watson song (with one word changed):

 

As I went down in the valley to pray
Studyin' about that good old way
And who shall wear the starry crown
Good Lord, show me the way
Oh teachers let's go down
Let's go down come on down
Oh teachers let's go down
Down in the valley to pray.

 

The valley is Hidden Valley, hidden to those who just go about their business without thought of the beauty and divine Spirit lying within and without them, but revealed to the seekers willing to do the work and make the time to study the good old ways. Those timeless traditions that harmonize the chaos within through the prayerful power of song and dance and music-making. And so every year we gather and witness the moments when the starry crown appears on our heads as we become the kings and queens we were born to be, the conduit between heaven and earth.

 

And behind it all is a humble, hard-working, affable, generous, dedicated, spirit-filled man who had his own epiphany some 60 (?!!) years ago envisioning the glories to come and doing whatever it took to make them come to life. To give them a space and a place to stretch their angelic wings and feel the freedom of flying through glorious music, year after year after year after year. A man who doesn’t flaunt his golden crown and multi-colored robe, but for those with eyes to see and ears to hear, it’s clearly visible. A man who sits so many evenings on his humble throne in the corner of the theater, observing, smiling, celebrating and offering his blessing to us with the full measure of his bounteous spirit. A man important to so many and here I can only add my testimony of all that he has meant to me. Offering me a refuge from those in power who don’t understand me, encouragement in my own inches of growth, fellowship and companionship as we move from our congenial professional relationship to the deeper waters of true friendship. It means the world to me.

 

And so Peter Meckel, my heartiest congratulations to you in this milestone moment and as Billy Strayhorn liked to say, “Onward and upward!!”

 

All my love,

 

Doug Goodkin

Director of the SF International Orff Course

East and West

I just returned from a fun “Boys Weekend” with two music teachers colleagues— Rick Layton and Paul Cribari— I’ve taught with for decades. Now they’re both “retired” from the summer course we’ve taught at together, so we’ve made a special effort to keep our connection. That was time well spent!

I first met Rick Layton in Denton, Texas in 1986, our first time teaching an Orff Course together. Our mutual mentor, Avon Gillespie, told me that there was a promising young man from the East Coast that he wanted me to work with and told Rick there was a promising young man from the West Coast that he should work with. So Avon brought us together, the West Coast guy and the East Coast guy meeting in the middle of the country.

In the Venn diagram that became our decades long friendship and teaching together, we shared some common ground. He began working at an independent school in Annapolis, Maryland called the Key School in 1979 with a vibrant Orff program in which the kids had music four or five times per week. I began working at a progressive school in San Francisco in 1975, also with a vibrant Orff program in which the kids had music twice a week and Singing Time every day. He stayed there for 42 years before retiring in 2021, I stayed at my school for 45 years before retiring in 2020. His school groups performed several times at Orff Conferences, as did mine. We both taught together at what became the SF Orff International Summer Course, he starting in 1987 and ending in 2018, me starting in 1991 and continuing still. We both were “on the circuit” giving workshops in Orff Chapters through the country throughout this time. We both are hard workers, dedicated teachers and love to laugh. 

Avon felt our similarities, but also deeply appreciated the contrasts. The Key School’s program was started by an Orff teacher named Brigitte Warner who created a thorough rigorous curriculum based almost exclusively on the music of “the Volumes”, the source material of music for children composed by Carl Orff and Gunild Keetman. I started the San Francisco School program and based on my interest in World Music, Jazz, body percussion, ritual and ceremony. The more traditional East Coast and the more experimental West Coast both mirrored and shaped our proclivities. Rick got his doctorate in Music Theory and still teaches theory at The University of Maryland. I never got a teacher’s certificate, Masters or Doctorate and studied independently Bulgarian bagpipe, Balinese gamelan, Philippine kulintang, Brazilian samba, Ghana xylophone, jazz piano and more in summer camps, verandas, kitchens and church basements.

Paul came to Key School at a young teacher and Rick recognized something in him the way Avon had recognized something in Rick. I had the same dynamic with James Harding and in the mystery of the way things develop, Rick was James’ Level II and III teacher and both Paul and Rick have co-taught with James in the SF Summer Course. Paul and Rick share a fondness for cars, bourbon, quick-witted repartee faster than I can keep up and music theory. They co-wrote a book on the Orff style of composition together and are now working on a second volume. Paul worked at Key for many years before relocating to Denver, his home state. He left teaching kids to become an arts coordinator for an extensive school district and so now he and Rick share the “retired from teaching kids directly” experience. While I continue (happily) on. 

Back to the Venn diagram. Amidst the commonalities, there’s so much we don’t share. Every year I’ve given a lecture at the summer course looking at the Orff approach from multiple angles, connecting it to neuroscience, mythology, psychology, jazz, trauma and healing, orality and literacy, ritual and ceremony, social justice, etc. That’s the afternoon that Paul and Rick look at each other and say, “Off to the bar!!” while I’m speaking. Neither are outdoors hike-in-the-woods-type, performing musicians, are not especially interested in world music and culture or writing. They have good values, but are not especially active in the social justice realm. 

But friends are not the people who think exactly the same and do the same and like exactly the same thing. We’ve always had deep respect (I think!) for each other’s ways and love the way we laugh together. The conversations this weekend were light and frothy but also sometimes serious and meaningful and we had fun driving in Paul’s GTO with the top down, playing Topgolf and cornhole, re-telling the stories of so many years together while still making new memories. And we’re not afraid to hug goodbye and sincerely tell each other how we love each other.

And we do. Looking forward to next year!