Opening Talk: SFIOC Summer Orff Course

“We never know how high we are, 

Till we are called to rise
And then, if we are true to plan,

Our statures touch the skies—

 

The Heroism we recite,

Would be a daily thing.

Did not ourselves the Cubits warp,

For fear to be a King.”    -Emily Dickinson

 

It has been quite a year and a half.. We have been called to rise to parts of ourselves we didn’t know we could reach. And equally, we have been called to descend to some murky depths we have refused to visit. And here we are, finally on the cusp of return to normality.

But should we return to the old normal? Arundhati Roy suggests not.

 

 “Nothing could be worse than a return to normality. Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew, to enter a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.”

 

How tragic if the passing of the virus put it all back to sleep again. Here we are, with Nature rattling and Culture unravelling and  both calling us to rise higher than the previous mark, to be yet larger versions of ourselves. As the song says, “We don’t know what’s coming tomorrow, maybe it’s trouble and sorrow” and we’re all feeling that more deeply than ever. In the new world we’re entering, we will need an extra dose of courage to speak out about the things we have been silent about, an increased capacity to feel the things we've been afraid to fully feel, an enlarged ability to listen— really listen. All of which music can help nourish and fortify. 

 

This is the time of our singing. This is the time to dance that moral arc towards justice. This is the time to improvise through the staggering accelerated changes like a disciplined jazz musician. This is the time to work on our downward dog and then come up barking ferociously at the robbers trying to steal the treasures of our humanity, the shameless profiteers coming to steal the souls of our children.  This is the time to connect the mindfulness of our breath with the denial of some of us to breathe while the knees of centuries old and government sanctioned brutality are on their neck.

 

And that means the children need to learn the songs. They need to know how to sing. And right now, in this moment, they need more than ever the comfort of a soothing lullaby, the caress of a violin string or the healing breath of the saxophone.. They need to create something from sounds, images, colors and motions to stave off the chaos of the world, to bring order to the pandemic’s pandemonium, the cultural confusion. They need to understand that beauty is powerful, a flowering plant pushing up through the concrete or singing even through the screen. This they need and this they deserve. We all do.

 

And as teachers, this is the time to teach beyond music, from the core of our humanity to the seed of our fullest humanistic flowering We need to tell the children the stories we have been silent about, vaccinate them against the epidemic of purposeful ignorance that protects unearned privilege and power, tell them the truth of who we have been and lead them toward who we yet might be. 

 

My friends, that’s why we are gathered here. To help each other rise to the call, so we may emerge from the winter of our sheltering into the beautiful blossoming that has waited patiently for its moment. And that moment is now.

You Just Had to Be There

I simply don’t know what to say. But I will try to say it.

 

Tonight was the opening ceremony in our 38^thInternational Summer Orff Course. I was a student in the first class in 1983, in the first graduating class in 1985 and have been teaching in it since 1990. These two weeks became an indelible part of my identity, as it was here (as well as in my annual Jazz Course) that I got to share so much of what I knew and cared about with people eager to learn. So when the course, like all other similar courses, closed with the pandemic in the summer of 2020, it meant two years would pass before it could open again (2019-2021).

 

As noted in these blog posts, I compensated, as did we all, with online courses and convinced myself that they were still fun and satisfying. And they were. But tonight as I stepped into the beautiful Hidden Valley space where so many miracles have come to pass, I knew that this was a moment to savor and pay closer attention to. My last live workshop was in Singapore in February 2019, so now I was about to break a 2-year fast from face-to-face, live voices raised in song, live bodies dancing together. 

 

And so we began.

 

I silently gestured the people onto the floor to make a circle and made some mimed gestures about reaching for their neighbors’ hand and then deciding against it, nervous after all those months without human hand-to-hand contact. And then… we joined hands.

 

We stood silently for a minute just feeling the simple beauty of a connected circle. And then I spoke:

 

“I have been waiting for this moment for 18 months. Dreaming of it. Longing for it. Wondering if it would ever happen again. I think we all have. And now…here we are.”

 

I went on to say, “I’m so glad you’re here” and burst into the old Georgia Sea Island song of the same title and they joined in and started clapping and then started swaying and then started moving around the room and then started joyfully dancing while one student took out his tenor sax, I went to the piano, another to the drums— and my, how those rafters rang with the relief of live sentient beings, playing, singing and dancing — together! Later I invoked various Ancestors, but I believe they were already out on the floor with us. 

 

My colleague Sofia then took over with an energetic Spanish greeting song and pulled the group, as she does, into her orbit of joy. And then James shared his charming “a little nervous” canon in the way that he does and bam! the first tuneful canon singing I’ve heard in a long time. On to the business part of the two weeks of living together as a podded vaccinated cohort and then ending with a short piece I had written, to be shared in the next post. We were back! And my oh my, didn’t that feel fine!

 

I know I have failed miserably here to invoke the poetry necessary to capture even a drop of full epiphany, but if there was any occasion that merited the cliché “you just had to be there,” this was it. You really just had to be there. 

 

And I was. 

Three-Ring Circus

For most of my life, I’ve been a juggler, trying to keep the balls or clubs or fire sticks of teaching kids, giving workshops for adults, arranging workshops for adults, writing, my own musical life, family life and more up in the air without crashing on my head. It was an ongoing Three-Ring Circus! 

 

But with retirement, the tent came down, the elephants in the room went back to their proper cages and there was the leisure to sit under a tree and chew on a grass stalk while contemplating the next step in the tour. Until this week. 

 

Suddenly, it was back in the Big Top! Finishing my 5-day Toronto online class, helping get my daughter off to Europe, preparing to host three guests coming for two days and then giving them the Doug Tour of SF, packing for the live Orff course down in the Carmel Valley and preparing for my birthday party next week—the show was on! A few more balls got thrown into the air— the emergency meetings about the student from abroad who was about to arrive with the wrong non-CDC-approved vaccine (we held firm to our promise not to let her in, but it broke all our hearts), the question about which instruments/ supplies we can pick up from school and so on. 

 

It struck me that I rarely had to juggle so much with deadlines and time pressures during the last 18 months and like the return of rush-hour traffic, one of the less attractive sides of post-pandemic life. But just as I can choose whether it’s worth it to get on the freeway, whether I need that trip or not or should consider biking or walking, so is it my choice whether to teach this class or that. I’m scheduled to present at a Conference in Australia in January and they’re still unclear whether it will work for me amidst Covid restrictions. If it has to be online, the thought of avoiding 24-hour plane travel and arranging other courses while I’m there to justify the time is somewhat attractive. 

 

Okay, my guest have awakened, I have to pack and then take them on Part II of the Doug Tour. The circus is back in town! 

Points to Ponder 3

• Teaching as an act of revelation. 

Alongside  leading students to discover the key elements of a given discipline, you also are leading them to discover what they can do and think or imagine that they didn’t yet know they could. Each activity is a stepping stone to who they are and who they might yet be. 

 

• “Each object rightly seen unlocks another faculty of soul.”– Coleridge

Art is the key to unlocking the soul’s closed doors, inviting us to see deeper into things, to listen deeper into things, to move like a dance in the world. The case for wide exposure to all kinds of literature, art, poetry, music, dance, etc. is a path to growing larger souls. No one composer, artist, musical style can speak all of the multitude of selves within us— we need  Debussy to reach the places Bach can’t, jazz to touch the parts of ourselves that European classical music can’t reach, Indian music or gamelan or Ghanaian drum choirs to sing selves we didn’t even know we had. Amidst the social reasons to enlarge our repertoire beyond the Western canon are the deeper reasons to awaken large selves lying dormant within us.

 

Points to Ponder 2

Each thing you learn is not the end, but the beginning of the next possibility. 

Art —and life— is a verb, a constantly evolving and changing expression. The act of creation is what moves things forward and keeps them perpetually fresh and rejuvenated.  Whether learning a piece of music or considering how to plan a class, developing the habit of asking “How else can we do this?” leads to the excitement and surprise of the creative act. 

 

 The job of the teacher is to lead the children to the edge of discovery.

 Rather than simply explain an idea or show a technique, consider how to structure a class so that the kids discover the main points of the lesson. "How many different ways can you make sound on this drum?" can be a good lead-in to introducing tried and true effective drumming techniques. , "Choose two bars to take off the xylophone and create a little piece in your scale" can make a good introduction to different forms of the pentatonic scale. "Find three notes that sound the most like blues to you" might make for a more involved and more exciting way to begin to learn about the blues scale." And yes, sometimes its simpler, more effective and even necessary simply to show a technique or explain a concept, but by beginning with hands-on exploration and problem-solving, you set the foundation for the student's interest. Try it and see. 

Points to Ponder 1

Still loving my online class and particularly, the way that being in a community of teachers, even online, stimulates both thought and occasional surprising eloquence that I sometimes try to remember after class and set down. Today, I came up with six, nothing that I haven’t said before, but some new ways to articulate them. In the spirit of narrowing the focus instead of the constant side trips, I’m putting them out here two as a time. Whether or not you’re a teacher, hope they seem interesting. 

 

Do it first. Some teachers in the U.S. are required to begin class by telling the children the learning objectives of the class. Telling the kids what they’re going to learn might be a useful beginning occasionally, but takes away intrigue, mystery, surprise. It’s not an enticing beginning. It’s more of an adult notion not always friendly to kids’ mindset. But immediately doing something, setting up a riddle or a problem to be solved, beginning with humor, etc. is the best teaching, meeting kids where they are and from there, leading them to where they haven’t yet been.

Watch the children. Criteria for evaluating an educational strategy is not its credentials coming from an “educational expert.” Simply watch the children and their response. If they’re engaged, happy, connected, making progress, you’re on the right track. If not, throw out any notion of your “perfect class.”

 

By the Way

Have I mentioned that I love to teach? Any age, any time, any subject. It’s not exactly like the craving I had for basketball in 8^th grade, feeling my fingers itch to bounce the ball and shoot the basket and feeling restless until I did. (I used to shovel the snow off the court in the inter just to satisfy that obsession!) If I go through a long period without teaching, I’m fine doing other things. But when I return to it, it’s always a homecoming.

 

And so off I went this morning with yet another 5-day/ 15 hour Zoom class on the theme of my last book “Teach Like It’s Music.” Most people are so Zoomed out and can’t believe that I would want to do it and that anyone would want to sign up (19 have). But once engaged, I come to life in my whole self, share the things I considered valuable in almost a half-century of working on it, feeling the palpable pleasure of sharing ideas and material and the enthusiastic response from the folks in the little squares, with smiles, gestures, comments and questions. And soon, in just one week—oh, joy of all joys—I get to do this live!

In today’s class as in all my classes, I did have a clear plan, a marked trail that I laid out and intended to walk with the folks, but there are parts of yourself that you will never change and for me, it’s my fascination with all the side trails, all the beckoning off-trail wildflowers that beg to be admired and occasionally picked. Because of my lifetime of reading and writing and thinking about diverse fields, all it takes is a tiny impulse and off I go talking about the myelination of the synapses in the brain or the modern culture’s hyper-pace of change like a song that changes keys, rhythms and styles every few bars and never allows you to sink into one sustained feeling or how the Orff teacher’s “How else can I do this?” mantra is also good advice for Congress. I fervently believe that the marked trail is a worthy one and it feels good to be led from point to point in a straightforward way, but truth be told, the most interesting part of any class, whether it be with adults or children, often are the side excursions. My most common little phrase that I insert when I teach is “by the way,” which turns out to be the perfect expression of what’s off to the side that I think is important to note. Either that’s true or it’s my way of spinning my serious learning disability into something positive. 

I'm sure it's a little of both. Don't want to pave the road and put up "keep off the grass" signs, but also recognize that one good point artfully developed that resists the side trips, be in a musical thought, a philosophical thought, an image or a story plot,  has a power worth pursuing. Wish me luck!