The Life I Might Have Lived

Ever since I first taught at The Orff Institut in 1990, I always thought that someday I might spend an entire year teaching here in Salzburg. Live through the entire cycle of the seasons, finally learn German, teach one group for so long that I ran out of material or things to say. (Unimaginable!) Never happened (no invitation) and never will (past the Austrian required retirement age). But still I could dream.

Walking some back streets of Salzburg the other day, I played the little game that many of us do, searching for the dream house and imagining myself living there until a blissful old age. This one with its perfect view of the mountain Untersberg, that one with its cozy English cottage look, the other with the enticing patio and garden. I imagined myself waking up each day and greeting the distant fortress on the hill, enjoying my breakfast of hearty whole wheat bread and cheese, walking through the wild-garlic smell forest path along the flowing Salzsach river or biking down the bike path with no cars through the open field to a day’s work at the Orff Institut serenaded by the numerous morning birds. A two-hour lunch break in the nearby park, chatting with the folks that come here from all over the world. Ride back to my welcoming home with the sun setting over the mountains, a radler beer with my dinner and an evening playing some Mozart on the piano. Why not?

And maybe the year would have grown to two or three until I wholly forgot about rush-hour traffic, news of black youths shot by police, the takeover of machines running our lives, the voices shouting from all angles to shop and buy and get more stuff and talk about getting more stuff and the rise of ignorance, greed and cruelty to the top of the power structure. I wonder what that would have been like?

Instead I go to work at a school overlooking the freeway, spend some meeting time talking about the improper use of the i-Pad each middle school student is given, watch helplessly as the next ugly unneeded skyscraper starts rising to blot the San Francisco skyline and bring in 40,000 more cars to clog the freeways and sort through the 50 daily e-mails asking me to protest against the next outrage by our Toddler-in-Chief.

But of course, I exaggerate. Always a joy to bike through Golden Gate Park or hike in nearby Marin, go to the Garrison Keillor event or buy the next book of poems by Mary Oliver or go to SF Jazz to hear Josh Redman or Sonny Rollins. The work at school is stunning, both musically and otherwise and despite the traffic, litter and homelessness, San Francisco remains a vibrant place to be. It’s not always pleasant to be an American living in the heart of the Beast, but it’s always interesting and for better or worse, the life I was born to. And lately, hopeful as our slumbering compassionate selves are awakening, rising to the call and gathering together to organize our visions of life as it should be lived.

My time—and times again—in Salzburg were not meant for my chosen life. Its role is to help me remember that “life as it should be lived” should include two-hour lunches, numerous bike paths, a healthy distrust of high-rises and too much money, attention to savoring the simple pleasures of good bread and beer and keeping both natural and human-made beauty at the forefront of the conversation. Salzburg, I will always remain your short-term guest, but always happily so. And now, off to walk along the river on a Sunday morning where the stores still close and the city rests.

Playing with the Enemy

I had the good fortune yesterday to see Mandana, one of my former students and a teacher from Iran, do a music class with five young girls. From the first minute on, the atmosphere was fun, playful and wholly involving as the kids did some movement exploration so expressively, connected to their own ideas and bodies and to each other as well. After the first activity, Mandana introduced me to the kids and each came over with a welcoming smile and confidently looked me in the eye, shook my hand and told me their name. None of this in itself was extraordinary except for one fact— these children were Syrian refugees.

Mandana told me that when she began this work with them a year ago, the kids were angry, frightened, unresponsive, hitting each other. As any of us should be able to imagine, they were traumatized by being torn from their homes and culture and landing in a strange place with a language they couldn’t understand. Trauma is a deep wound in the human psyche, sending by necessity any sense of trust or openness hiding in some secret part of the soul or surrounding it with protective armor. The only healing is a long, slow and patient process of creating a safe place to coax it out again, surrounding the trauma with love, care and laughter as well as the necessary tools of belonging (like speaking the language of the host culture). It was extraordinary for me to try to imagine that these open, warm, friendly, funny and expressive kids had begun these classes in the grips of trauma. I watched them transfixed and teary-eyed to witness so clearly what it looks like when decent adult human beings choose to help.

And then contrasted it to the image of a 5-year old boy in the U.S. airport being handcuffed by U.S. officials. Five. Years. Old. An adult “just doing his job” treating this boy like a criminal and an Enemy of the State because the President of his country, himself traumatized by riches and privilege and hole in his Soul but with no intention to heal, ordered such an action. What have we become? What would happen if the policy-makers had to first come to this music class and join the circle and look these smiling kids in the eye as they shake their hand?

Institutional terrorism—a name I think these practices deserve—is based on the lie that the “other” is less than human and not worthy of concern. It requires a whole hiding vocabulary— words like “collateral damage" and "enemy" — to continue unchecked. Everyone who agrees to this language, who refuses to see the faces of the people devastated by these actions, who accepts the portraits of people as sharing nothing in common with them because of different skin shades or dress or names for God, is a collaborator in these evil deeds. I’d like to think that many of them with essentially good hearts would feel differently had they been to this class. Could this be required for every immigration officer? Every Congressperson?

Mandana invited me to lead an activity and I decided to bring my whole class of 16 teachers. We had a marvelous 30-minutes playing Table Rhythms, challenging the kids to figure out some complicated patterns and rhythmic techniques through a process that was fun, supportive, challenging and satisfying, with not a single word needed to be spoken. Bodies, minds and hearts were all active and awake and held within the circle of community. As they always are in this radical healing work I’ve been fortunate to be part of. Every class with any person of any age in any place is a step toward wholeness and healing, a radical refusal to continue the damage of dehumanization, a radical affirmation of humanity’s beautiful promise and possibility. But when the folks in your class are from Syria and Iran, the places my country has declared “enemy,” the ordinary acts of teaching music become extraordinary. The smiling faces of these girls will live with me for quite some time to comfort me in times of despair and remind me what work lies ahead. 

Confessions of a Non-Coffee Drinker

 Note to self:

• Drink coffee at 3 pm

• Up for an hour at 3 am

• Don’t repeat.

Beauty

The first time I came to teach the Special Course in Salzburg, I stayed in a farmhouse in the outlying village of Anif. It was a 45-minute walk to the Orff Institut, a 20-minute bike ride, both along enticing pathways through village back-roads, a beautiful park and Hellbrun Allee where Julie Andrews skipped merrily along. If I wanted to go downtown, it was another 20-minutes in the other direction and a late dinner or concert meant 40 plus minutes riding home in the dark and sometimes in rain, sleet or snow. My farmhouse hostess didn’t speak a word of English and me no German (or rather thick Austrian dialogue), so communication was a challenge. If I had one class in the early morning and another late afternoon, I either had to do another 40 minute bike ride or hang out at the Institute or go somewhere else. In short, it was utterly inconvenient, sometimes challenging and not ever completely comfortable.

And I loved it.

But the next few visits, I succumbed to practicality and found another place closer, though still funky enough to have some charm and the bonus of being on the river. Still later, I opted for the Youth Hostel, a bit closer yet—20-minute walk/ 10 minute bike—and less homey and pension-like, but good wireless connection, a youthful energy and close to the Old Town.

This time, worried about it being cold and not being able to rent a bike, I succumbed to convenience and tried Motel One a mere 4-minute walk from the Institute. Convenient and comfortable it is, but way too slick and modern for my taste. No paintings on the wall and instead a TV screen with a video of a fire, complete with fake crackling sounds. Bright lights, overlooks the Merkur (great view of the fruits and vegetables) and the only close restaurant is across from McDonald’s on Salzburg’s most strip-mallish street and complete with disco-beat music.

The fact is, I’m immersing myself completely in the 2 to 6 hours daily I’m teaching and we are certainly creating our own kind of beauty in every class, musically and otherwise. But truth be told, I’m suffering a bit from BDD—Beauty Deficit Disorder. I’ll solve that this weekend with long walks and bike rides. But in retrospect, I loved the way my home in Anif made beauty part of the daily routine and me with no choice in the matter. When a friend visited Salzburg once and I took him on that bike ride, that I used to do every day, he paused and said, “Doug, this is beautiful,” affirming the happiness I felt living that brief life of biking daily through beauty.

I think BDD is a real thing (am I the first to name it?). I felt it at the beginning of this trip in the Philadelphia outskirts in the typical American strip with no place to go but drive to the mall and even a bit in Barcelona in a more modern hotel fare from the true character of that marvelous city. Brugge was the exception, a room that just made me happy every second I was in it, which was only two short nights. It seems that my Soul needs a certain ground base of aesthetics to feel wholly itself. And I think we all do.

I think the uglification of my country is part of our problem. Because humans are so adaptable, we lower ourselves to the next standard of ugly expediency and stop noticing what we’re missing. I believe it makes us less capable of intelligent feeling and a feeling intelligence, less able to distinguish between the nuances of genuine aesthetics, the subtleties, the shades of beauty’s many faces. Instead of Chopin’s intricate dynamics, we fill the restaurant with the never-changing pounding disco beat, serve bland or artificially-flavored food, have scattered conversations while checking our superficial text messages. We numb ourselves to intricacy and complexity and indeed, how can we make measured decisions about our future if our present is so one-dimensional?

And I can understand how that can happen, having just myself traded the Anif bike ride of beauty for the Motel One convenient short walk. But at least I’m noticing my BDD symptoms and am determined to overcome it. What happens when we’re incapable of even realizing that we’re missing something?

Tomorrow, a long walk and hello, Salzburg!!

Heaven Is But a Half Step Away

It is my virtue and vice to make music work as my Secretary of Freedom, constantly transposing its musical lessons to life itself. I’m like a modern day John Muir, who once said something like: “When I try to pick out anything by itself, I find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” Welcome to my Orff workshops.

Here in Salzburg, working with these most marvelous 16 teachers from 7 countries, I’m moving them through the Evolution of Human Consciousness and Development through the vehicle of scales and textural and harmonic accompaniment. The Drone places our feet on this Earth, connects us to the ground of our being and lets us know we are home and we belong. Our first tentative flight from the nest is a safe one, sheltered in the first two overtones of the harmonic series, sol and mi. The ambiguous La comes next, sends us fluttering a few feet away. Then the Re, the next in the overtone series after the others. And that completes the Pentatonic Scale, our training ground for future flights, always hovering close to the nest and the comfort of Mother.

Put in less technical terms, the kids playing on these five notes on the Orff instruments have removed all potential dissonant notes so that whatever they play sounds good. They have their whole life to deal with tension and conflict, so why not start them off with some comforting pleasing sounds? And so we do. Though we also learn that there are three distinct worlds (at least) inside of these five notes that can speak to three different moods we may have and that’s why music is so necessary to unleash, evoke, affirm and extend our emotional life.

Somewhere around 4^th grade, they’re more prepared to face the realities of tension in the world, so we let them put the F’s and B’s (Fish and Bananas/ Fa and Ti) on the instrument and learn how to pass through them without getting too involved in their tense and anxious characters. We still have the drone to ground us, even after the drone itself starts to get restless and move to its neighboring notes. But now we’re flying further from home and armed with the knowledge of which parts of the forest to avoid.

Finally, we enter the territory of our cousin’s house down the block, the V7 chord that takes us squarely away from the comfort of our own room and into the adventure of the other. It’s exciting and a bit scary, but once we understand the route, we can handle the tension of the F and B/ Fa and Ti tones sounded together in the Devil’s interval of the tri-tone. Left hanging by itself, it is sheer hell, a straining tautness yearning for resolution, the F leaning toward E, waiting to fall in its arms, the B reaching upwards to embrace the waiting Do. (Try it on the piano and you’ll know what I mean).   

And that’s where today’s title came from. We may feel like we’re in a Hell without end (read U.S. politics today or our own personal sorrows), but there should be some comfort in knowing that Heaven is but a half-step away. Let us fall into it or rise up to it—not a giant super-human leap, but a mere half-step—and in the glory of the homecoming, the sun will shine out and help erase the memory of all those storm-clouded days. Let Fa to Mi, Ti to Do be our mantra and play our new national anthem: One Half Step to Heaven.