No Song this Morning

(A final post from the Denver AOSA conference by POSA veep Mark Anderson)

And just like that, it's all over but the shuttling to the airport to catch the cheap crowded flight home.

There's a post-Orff letdown that comes after any of our gatherings. We are a different breed of teacher, and while so much of our work involves building musical community among our charges, those charges are, first and foremost, children. What we do with them, we do in isolation from others like us. While the kids get it, have a deep understanding of what it is we are doing, better than any of the adults we work with every day, they cannot be the community we crave most: a community of musical peers, of fellow travelers who are both saturated as we are with music, and are old enough to know how special that is.

I've been to big music education gatherings sponsored by other organizations. As a grad student at Illinois, I was part of the huge contingent we sent to the national MENC convention in Chicago in 1984. The following summer, I was able to attend the ISME world conference in Eugene. I heard incredible performances, attended workshops with nationally and internationally renowned educators, and was in the company of hundreds of colleagues. Neither made an impression on me. State association gatherings have similarly had no impact, no afterglow.

Things were different while I was in ministry--different, at least, in the sense that gatherings of both clergy and laity get community, know how powerful it is to sing together, think together, be together. Unfortunately, the power of Methodist singing, as inspiring as it can be for those who are engaged in it, as magically as it can turn a bitter disagreement into a moment for prayer and some kind of unity, is only a taste of what gathered musical zealots.

I found Orff five years after leaving ministry, and much to my delight, was instantly at home. It started with a drum circle, the opening activity of Orff 101, September 2005. Rosalie worked her special magic, and I was hooked. It continued with my first Doug Goodkin workshop. In both cases, I felt my heart synchronize with kindred spirits, felt myself become part of something far greater than myself, and left energized and empowered to begin the hard work of transforming my conventional classroom into a place where musical magic could happen.

Workshops were great, but nothing compared to trainings: Level I, the Jazz Course, Level II, Level III. Summers without a training felt somehow empty. After the last four days, I know that what was lacking was not so much the training, or even the workshop atmosphere, as it was the company of my fellow Orff practitioners, and the magic we make when we sing together, play together, dance together, create together.

The only other place I've found this spirit is in the world of improv, and I highly recommend it to all of you. Improvisers practice the art of "yes and..." It means taking what's given to you by your fellow performers and, rather than denying it, embracing it, making it bigger, better, more wonderful. It's precisely what we who practice Orff do when we create together, though in the dramatic (and usually comedic), rather than the musical, sphere.

But this was not an improv conference. It was all music, all the time. This morning did not start with song, and it felt to me like I missed my morning devotions. This tells me I need to make some adjustments to my own spiritual practice, building more solo keyboard into my day when I'm not able to perform with others. It also tells me I need very much to keep participating in these events, to never miss a workshop, to make plans for future conferences and, if possible, master classes. I encourage the same regimen for you. It will make all the difference not just to your teaching, but to your life.
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Viva la musica!

I Just Danced in from the Banquet, and Boy, Does My Toe Hurt!

They're called The Nacho Men. They're an amazing cover band, and they should be: they've been playing professionally for thirty years, opening for some big acts around the country. They were our entertainment tonight, and they were perfect, playing hits from 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s--ideal for a music teachers' conference, even for our most youthful members (and we have quite a few who are fresh out of college). I'm not sure who entertained whom more, though: they may never have had an audience rock a dance party like we did.

Like many of the things that make people cool, dancing was added late to my repertoire. In all honesty, I only really learned to move to music when I became an Orff practitioner. I'd done folk dancing, square dancing, contradancing, ballroom dancing (took a year of it in grad school, in fact), but I never took to the free dancing that is such an important part of enjoying rock music. Part of my problem there is I came late to rock 'n' roll, too.

Enter Orff, though, and everything changed. Orff Schulwerk is big on body music, and I'm not just talking clapping, stomping, patsching, and snapping, as important as percussion is. We believe music is a full body thing, something that starts at the tip of one's toes and reaches up through the crown of one's head, even as it extends out to the far reaches of the performing space, hopefully connecting with a listener on its way to the back wall. Whether we're making music or taking in music, we want it to involve the whole person. The drum circle workshop I participated in this morning was a powerfully holistic musical experience. So was tonight's dance.

On the dance floor, we were endlessly creative, spontaneously creating line dances, conga lines, circle dances, moments for solos and duets, all of us constantly moving, clapping, singing along to the familiar lyrics, harmonizing with our voices as our bodies grooved to the beat. It more than made up for the awkward cocktail hour (I really do hate those things) and the okay catered dinner, both of which could, like our opening session, have been a part of any convention, regardless of the presence of musicians. Sipping drinks or chatting over a chicken dinner, we were doing what anyone does at a conference: the extraverts were dominating the conversations, and the introverts were hoping someone would draw them in. And yes, as if it's any surprise to the people who know me, I fall into that latter category.

Dancing, though--there were no shy people on that dance floor, myself included. Come to think of it, all my favorite dance parties have involved Orff gatherings: the previous experiences were my Level trainings in San Francisco. The music gets inside us, and we love to move to it. By the way, it doesn't have to be rock or pop music, or even swing: Orff teachers can and will groove to some obscure folk song from Albania, move with passion to a dirge, swing our hips to a samba. Dance training is an essential part of our preparation to teach this way, and it gets inside our bones.

It kept me moving well past my injured toe's limits, but I ignored all its complaints, and am now icing it in preparation for going to bed. Tomorrow I will check out and fly home, sorry to leave this magical event, eager for the next one (Nashville!), a full year away, knowing, too, that I've got to find something Orff-related to feed my soul next summer.

The San Francisco Orff program is taking a master class to Ghana in June. Hmmmm--I've still got some continuing education money to spend...

Viva la musica!

Having a Moment

(Posts from Rocky Mountain Rendezvous, the AOSA Annual Professional  Development Conference, by POSA Veep Mark Anderson)

After a wonderful first day, yesterday was a bit of a let-down. I wrote previously about the three choral workshops, only one of which was really useful. The last was so poorly delivered, in fact, that in retrospect I feel embarrassed for the presenter.

With that said, I do have to say that Doug Goodkin, the man I frequently refer to as my Orff guru, delivered, and then some. His workshop started late to accommodate a number of classroom teachers being brought in from the city to experience his approach to integrating all the major disciplines with music. It also ran long. He didn't get to all his planned material--he rarely does--but his many asides, speeches, and sermons all contributed to the whole. And the experiences, while many of them were familiar to me from my previous encounters with Doug, reminded me all over again why, thanks in large part to him, I am an Orff practitioner.

The children's choir concert was, as I expected, polished, which actually made it feel a little out of place: all those highly disciplined and well-dressed young people standing so perfectly still on the risers just seemed--un-Orffy. But they sang beautifully. The Western line dancing I went to could have made my day, but the broken toe in my foot let me know it was not having any of this, and I had to quite after fifteen minutes. Nuts.

This morning, thankfully, started with a bang--or, rather, a BOM BOM. My first session was "Innovative Drum Circles in the Classroom: from Rhythm to Melody and Beyond," and it was led by Mary Knysh. The "beyond" for me came when, after a seamless process starting with simple "heartbeat" rhythms and evolving through far more complex improvisations to including mallet percussion to recorders playing Indian scales and, finally, to voices singing sustained pitches from Japanese scales, we dropped all the instruments and just sang those pitches, in clusters, moving randomly from one to another, basking in the dissonance, feeling the vibrations deep within. It was so powerful, so transcendent, that I found myself on the verge of weeping.

I'm a pro. I have improvised pieces on the piano that I know caused people to weep, and I've conducted bands and choirs in pieces that, had I been listening, might have done the same to me, but I'm totally in my performance space at such times. Since most of the music I experience is music I am performing, I don't get many opportunities to experience it the way I did this morning; and this was...beyond speech. Words cannot begin to describe it.

It's moments like that, and helping both children and adults find them, that make what we do so worthwhile. It's where pedagogy becomes sacrament. And it is the peculiar privilege of the music educator to straddle this space between sacred and mundane, and transform lives simply by blending sounds, by helping ordinary people find the rhythm and music in their souls and make it big.

The Voices of Children

Fourth in a series of blog posts from the Denver AOSA National Professional Development Conference by POSA Vice President Mark Anderson

 

I got into music education for the wrong reasons.

In high school, I was a fair-to-middling trumpet player, and in the early stages of becoming a scratch pianist (that's my own term for a keyboardist who seamlessly plays whatever's in front of him, making up whatever he has to, and freely improvises as well, to the extent that the listener is utterly unaware that little or nothing is on the printed page). If you'd asked my teachers what I would be after college, probably many would've said I'd be in education, but most likely in one of the humanities. And yet I went to college intending to double major in music and math, with an eye toward being certified in both. The math major died on the vine after two semesters of calculus, but I stuck with music education through graduate school and one miserable year divided between a broke rural district and subbing in Salem.

Why music? Because of my band director, Mr. Ogren, a man who embodied the twin passions of music education better than anyone I was to meet for the next twenty years: he loved music; better than that, he loved sharing music with young people. And I wanted to be like him. Except I wasn't like him--not yet, anyway.

I pursued a whole second career after leaving teaching, this time as a Methodist minister. When I was done with that, music education found me. I needed income, so I subbed for a year. During that time I was in plenty of music classrooms, but also in general education, grade-level classrooms. I was reminded of something I had only just figured out at the time I left this career in 1985: that working with younger children was much more rewarding to me than leading a high school band could ever be. Perhaps I should be a classroom teacher, I thought, and began taking some courses to be certified in that area. And then Beaverton called with a need for a full-time general music teacher.

My first two years doing that were a time for growth. I had so much to learn. I was mostly operating from whatever canned curriculum the school owned, supplemented with Recorder Karate and, in one location, a keyboard lab I improvised. My classroom management was all over the place.

And then, in 2005, I attended Orff 101, and finally found a home.

Eight years later, I teach for the right reasons, the reasons Mr. Ogren stuck with teaching for another thirty years, mostly spent with middle school bands: I love music, and I love sharing it with children.

That's a long introduction to today's first three sessions, and the concerts I've heard so far. I attended three different workshops on the child's voice. None was as "Orffy" as I wanted it to be, though I did glean plenty of techniques for warming up my little school choir, and for encouraging all the children in my classes to sing more authentically. It's the concerts that remind me, and most of my fellow attendees, what this is all about.

I taught singing the wrong way for my first three years back in the field, until my Level I instructor pointed out this wonderful gift my gender has: to sing the entire range of the human voice. Sure, I sound like Mickey Mouse when I'm singing in falsetto, but it magically transforms my students' voices from monotones to angelic choruses. Seeing the children's groups who have performed so far--and none of them yet has been an audition-only concert-grade ensemble--and hearing them pulls at me in ways that adult performances rarely do. It's not just the pure beauty of their voices, either: it's their excitement, their lack of refinement, the joy they clearly take in making music together, and the bashful pride they display when all of us adults roar our approval at the end of their performance.

There are many places one can go to hear children's groups perform, and it's not as if Orff has a monopoly on them. Every music educators' organization I know of makes ample time in its annual conference for concerts by school groups. True, our performances are a bit less stagey than those tend to be: we don't use risers much, there's very likely to be an instrumentarium included in the performance, and there's usually body percussion and movement worked in; but overall, this is the one thing that all of us, whether we're Orff, Kodaly, or Silver Burdett, are doing right.

Tonight, I'll hear "Young Voices of Colorado," a concert-level children's choir led by one of today's presenters who, while her workshop didn't do much for me, clearly knows how to get great music from a juvenile larynx. I don't know what the program will be like, but I can guarantee I'll be deeply moved by it. Right now, though, I've got a workshop to get to, by the other educator with the most powerful influence on my career: Doug Goodkin. I expect he'll more than make up for the ho-humness of those other three.

Viva la musica!

Many Many Many (too?) Many Sides of Orff

This may be heresy, but I have concluded, at least for myself, that one can have too much of Carl Orff. 

My final activity last night (apart from blogging) was a supposedly hour long concert celebrating all aspects of the Orff oeuvre. The concert hall was, if not packed, certainly loaded with conference attendees like myself and families of the many children performing over the course of the concert. It was unified by narration on the life and career of Our Founder (may his name be rhythmically revered), Carl Orff. Much that the children did was delightful. There were also adults involved in many of the performances, as well as a high school choir. There was speech, body percussion, movement, strings, piano: four hands, choral reading and singing, and at the end, selections from Orff's only mainstream success, "Carmina Burana," which concluded with a sing along of the iconic "O Fortuna." That was fun. It was also much too long coming. 

There's a reason that, except for "Carmina," Orff is associated almost exclusively with holistic hands-on music education: the stuff he wrote for serious audiences is eminently forgettable. I'll take it up a notch: if it weren't for the Schulwerk, Orff would be a one-hit wonder.

But oh, that method! The genius of this approach, of learning through all the domains, so far ahead of its time, holding up so well, effective in so many settings: there's nothing wrong with being remembered for what you did for children. JK Rowling is deservedly revered for Harry Potter, but a year from now, her first adult novel will be in bargain bins, if it isn't already. Through the Schulwerk, Orff made it possible for countless children to grow up loving music. 

So I don't feel at all guilty for forgetting almost everything I heard in that concert last night almost as soon as I was out of the hall. The masterpiece I'll take with me from Denver is the myriad variations on Orff's theme of uniting music, movement, and improvisation. Now that's a tune worth humming. 

Three Hits and a Near Miss

If your experience of higher education was anything like mine, you probably took courses that sounded great in the catalogue, then failed in small or huge ways to live up to the promise. History of Jazz was like that for me, a course taught, it turned out, by a non-musician, and aimed at non-musicians. I learned little I didn't already know from being in jazz ensembles. It wasn't until I took Doug Goodkin's Jazz Course that I developed a true appreciation for the history and literature of jazz. I had appreciated jazz for most of my life, but it took Doug's unique Orff twist to make me love it. 

You may also have had the experience of reluctantly enrolling in a class to fulfill a requirement, or because nothing you want is open, and having that class transform your life. Such was the case with a class I took during my final year of seminary on the theology of Reinhold Niebuhr. My eyes were opened, and suddenly I understood why the world works the way it does. 

Today I attended four workshops. The first, on Cajun dance, was a rousing way to start the day, but fell far short of what I'd hoped: a true Orff approach to introducing this music to children. Instead, I got a boilerplate folk dance class: fun, but not that useful. This was followed by a workshop with Lorna Heyge, an early childhood expert who turned my expectations on their head. Apart from showing me techniques for reaching my feral kindergartners, Lorna said this: "The child's answer is never wrong. The teacher's question is frequently wrong." Right there I had a learning-centered platform from which to teach all my students. 

The afternoon had me in a session on rounds and partner songs that I will put to use immediately, but it wasn't especially revolutionary.  What followed, though, again shifted my perspective on what I do very day. Rick Layton was one of my Level II instructors at the San Francisco School, and I remember him saying and doing many things I wanted to incorporate into my teaching style. Unfortunately, it took me three years to get back into an elementary classroom, and much of what I learned then faded. When I arrived at his session, and realized it was going to be on teaching middle school students to improvise on the alto recorder to Renaissance melodies, I briefly considered looking for something more applicable to my situation. My oldest students are fifth graders, and I've only got toe more months with them before I change schools--barely enough time for the soprano recorder unit I'm starting next week, let alone introducing altos! Something told me to stay put, though, and I'm glad I did, as Rick reminded me of just why those kids keep playing mallets when I need to talk to them: they're practicing. Sure, it's frustrating at times, but do I really want to stop them from making music so I can dictate how to do it right? Well, actually I do, but I clearly need to give them more time to play, experiment, explore, mad create. That is, after all, one of the things that sets Orff apart. 

It's been a long, wonderful day. I've got more to say, but not now. This first timer needs some sleep. Tomorrow is another day. 

Viva la musica!

Wake Up Singing

(POSA Veep Mark Anderson blogs about his first AOSA National Professional Development Conference, Rocky Mountain Rendezvous, Denver, November 13-16, 2013)

I didn't sleep well. The altitude, the flight, the strange bed, Dax coming in at midnight (not his fault, and he was as quiet as a kindergarten at nap time), and just the expectancy of something new, of being in a place with hundreds (as opposed to dozens) of kindred spirits--all told, I got maybe four hours of sleep. I finally gave up at 5:45, had an overpriced bran muffin for breakfast, registered, and was in time for the 7:15 singing session.  We sang two songs: a spirited gospel number that, toward the end, coaxed our bleary eyes into Orffland; and then the sacred Austrian yodel, which despite its amusing (tommy ears) name is hair-raisingly gorgeous when sung in the multiple parts Orff-trained teachers can improvise at a moment's notice. 

This is one of the things that sets an Orff gathering apart from any other music educators' event I've been to: how quickly, how often, how beautifully we sing together. Yes, a gathering of choral directors would naturally have some lovely reading sessions. Many of those directors can sight sing anything, and most likely improvise harmonies with ease. What's different about Orff teachers is the instant musical community we create with our voices and bodies.  It's not that we wear our hearts on our sleeves, though many of us do; nor is it that we all know each other, though there is for me (a first timer) an amazing sense of reunion with people I've never met. No, what binds us all together is how deep land sincerely we believe in what we do. This is not just a job for us. It's who we are: people who know, deep down, that teaching music this way will change the world for the better.