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.