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.

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.