Midlife Meditation

6-28-14 The children played and danced for two hours. They had us on our feet many times, singing, dancing and, in the end, joining the dancers as they moved about the courtyard. Now the concert was over, and the brass band from Nunya Academy, after a prolonged time of being greeted and praised by us, and playing games with us (I taught them “Baby Shark”), were finally saying goodbye. “May I ask you a question?” said the ten-year-old boy whose stamina on the trumpet had amazed me. “Of course,” I said. “When do you think you will return to Ghana?” I felt my heart break. The Nunya children have performed for us four times in the last two weeks. Nunya is a school without a building, the dream of Kofi Gbolonyo, a local boy from Dzodze who has made it big in the academic world, traveling to America to earn his doctorate in ethnomusicology and finding a teaching position at the University of British Columbia. While still living in Ghana, he envisioned a music sch...

6-25-14 I can do without a lot. No private room? Share a bed with a stranger? Same food for every lunch, every dinner, for two weeks? No TV except the World Cup? No good beer? Nothing but instant coffee? I’m good. In fact, I’m great. I can handle being without all sorts of creature comforts, and often choose vacations that take me away from all these things. But take away the internet, and oh boy, am I going to get cranky. It’s amazing how dependent I’ve become on this invention which didn’t even exist for me before 1995, and which I didn’t begin using in earnest until 2003. So that’s really just over a decade of living on the web. But live on it I do. Except in Ghana. My first night, at the Hotel Obama, I had a good strong connection, and was able to Skype with Amy. I expected the same for our week in Dzodze, at the White Dove Hotel—and I was mistaken. There was nothing, no way of connecting at all. Even mobile roaming was dicey. I did manage some time at an i...

6-22-14 This morning’s run started like all runs so far in Ghana: I was up as early as I could be, out the door before sunrise, hoping to beat the sun for the entire run. There are only two directions to run from the White Dove Hotel, both going through villages, though there is a junction on the westward route that gives access to a country road. That’s the option I took this morning, heading north past groves of palms, corn and cassava fields, and occasional unfinished buildings (see “Building Boomlets”) and dirt driveways leading to small clusters of huts. I had been out about 25 minutes, almost at my turnaround point, when I realized the drumming and singing I was hearing through my headphones, intruding on the podcast in my ears, was coming from the road ahead of me. I had just rounded a curve, and there they were: a group of twenty runners, all keeping step to a bell and two shakers being carried by runners. That wasn’t all: there was a leader calling out songs, drill sergea...

6-22-14 I grew up in church. Until last November, I spent almost every Sunday morning of my life in church. Even on vacations, I usually found a church, though as I grew older, I felt less and less need for that observance. Church had become a job, and little more. Finally, last November, I resigned from a good paying church job because I just needed, for the first time in my life, to have weekends. I haven’t looked back. With all that said, church is still a comfortable place for me to be. I speak the language, I understand the way people think and interact, and even though I may now find those customs and ideas far less attractive, and find some of them offensive, I know that church is, and always will be, a place I can fit right into, no matter where it is or what its practices are. So Sunday morning in Ghana, knowing we would be attending a church in Dzodze—though strictly for sociological reasons, to see how they made use of Ghanaian music in a western religiou...

6-21-14 It was a week ago tonight that my flight landed in Accra. Since then, I’ve been immersed in the culture of the place I’m visiting more deeply than on any of my previous adventures save one, to Britain, and I was there for two years. Two features of this trip have made the difference: that this is an Orff experience, and that I’m in Ghana. Orff courses are, by their very nature, immersive. That’s the Orff approach: rather than tell students about music, plunge them into it, let them learn it by doing it. It’s how Orff workshops and training courses are taught, as well: not by lecture, but by experience. Kofi Gbolonyo, our host and teacher during this master class, has been an exemplary Orff teacher in this regard, getting our hands on drums, rattles, bells, flutes, and xylophones; and getting our bodies in motion, stomping, thrusting, gyrating. He’s also spent plenty of time helping us reflect, explaining, interpreting, translating. Most importantly, he’s brought Ghana ...

I see connections. At the music festival, in the performances we have every night, the way school girls dance when they chance by our compound and hear us drumming, there is a particular Ghanaian style of thrusting the elbows back, then forward, while stepping on the beat in a crouch that is almost a squat, and somehow gyrating the core and glutes. Dancers want everyone to join in, and draw in spectators to their performances, pulling them out of their seats or away from the shade tree from which they’re watching. Kofi calls the move “breaking the back,” and likens it to pulling away from a knife attack from the front then the back, over and over again. In some ways, it resembles the chicken dance, though much more active and full-body. In terms of coordinating all the movements, it feels to me like trying to get the Charleston basic step right: my body just can’t pivot on that many axes at once. Or, more likely, I’ve never learned to. Most of Orff movement training take...

The greatest challenge to the classically trained western musician—or to any musician, including jazz, rock, country, Latin, whatever field, who has studied in the west—in adjusting to traditional African music (and here I include the entire continent) is the oral nature of its preservation. Until the arrival of European ethnomusicologists, none of this music was written down. Free of the printed page and the necessary strictures of notation (systems for recording meter, rhythm, duration, pitch), African musicians created music of incredibly complex polyrhythms with little or no regard to where the beat would fall. When they dance, they find it with their feet. When they play, it floats freely. Lacking this frame of reference, it can be difficult for a western musician to figure out the meter of an African piece. During a drum circle experience yesterday, Kofi introduced us to a new bell rhythm, then asked us what meter it was in. 2, 3, 4, 6, 8—we all felt those meters, in one...

6-16-14 I know what to expect from an Orff workshop. Typically, they start with the presenter inviting everyone into a circle, then teaching a greeting/mixer musical game by lining out a song and the movements that go with it. Once the song is learned, variations are developed, leading organically into deeper learning of the concept. If it’s a 1-2 hour workshop, that one concept is likely to be the entire event.  If it’s an all-day workshop, the learning will be broken into units, each exploring a concept that ties into the central theme. And if it’s a 1-2 week course, each day will have a theme, again tied into the overarching conceptual framework. The learning will involve singing, dancing, playing games, drumming, barred instruments, and recorders. There’s little, if any, lecture, and rather than have participants take notes, presenters prepare an exhaustive set themselves describing every game and including scores for the songs to hand out afterward, the better to keep ever...

6/15/14 I saw wonders from the air: Windsor Castle, the neatly organized fields of Dorset, the more American-looking fields of France, the Sarah Desert, a thunderstorm flashing below the plane, and finally, the lights of Accra, not all that different from the lights of Portland, Chicago, New York City, Dallas, or any other city I’ve flown over—not from the air, anyway. Then the doors opened, the humidity hit, and after 34 hours of travel, I stepped onto Ghanaian soil. It was a rude awakening: waiting in a slow queue to be passed through customs, struggling to claim my bag, and the moment I was out of the luggage area, being confronted by scammers pretending to be airport officials, hoping to get something off me: a tip, my passport, perhaps even my suitcase. I had been warned by a sign in customs, and managed not to give in to any of them. Once out of the chute, I met Kofi, our director and host, who had hired three taxi drivers to ferry us to the hotel. Note that n...

6/13-14/14 By the time I get to Ghana, I will have been in transit for 32 hours. Heeding the advice on the Portland International Airport website, we left the house at 4 a.m. "Arrive two and a half hours early for international flights," it said. I thought there'd be a heightened security experience, extra scrutiny of my documents, other things I couldn't imagine, since I haven't flown internationally since 1990. In fact, the only difference at check-in was that I had to present my passport instead of my driver's license. Then I got to kill two hours at the gate. By the time I finish this trip, I will have cooled my heels so much I'll need to defrost them. Five hours in Chicago, eight hours in London, plus those two in Portland, means almost half my travel time is being spent sitting in airports, waiting for flights. The people watching may partly make up for it: as I've been sitting here in Chicago, I've seen some frighteningly young ...

By the time I get to Ghana, I will have been in transit for 32 hours. Heeding the advice on the Portland International Airport website, we left the house at 4 a.m. "Arrive two and a half hours early for international flights," it said. I thought there'd be a heightened security experience, extra scrutiny of my documents, other things I couldn't imagine, since I haven't flown internationally since 1990. In fact, the only difference at check-in was that I had to present my passport instead of my driver's license. Then I got to kill two hours at the gate. By the time I finish this trip, I will have cooled my heels so much I'll need to defrost them. Five hours in Chicago, eight hours in London, plus those two in Portland, means almost half my travel time is being spent sitting in airports, waiting for flights. The people watching may partly make up for it: as I've been sitting here in Chicago, I've seen some frighteningly young USN sailors...

It took me by surprise. Yesterday, a Reynolds High School freshman broke into his parents' gun locker and took an AR-15 type rifle, along with magazines capable of holding hundreds of rounds of ammunition, a semi-automatic pistol, and a large knife to school, where he shot another freshman to death and wounded a teacher. The teacher was able to escape to the office and initiate a lockdown. With police closing in, the shooter took his own life. I've written about my outrage over the laxness of American gun laws many times. The knowledge that, in this case, the gun had been locked away by "responsible" owners lends the lie to the notion that these weapons have any business being in the hands of enthusiasts. A teenager with a death wish will find a way around the locks. It's fortunate--if we can call it that--that there were just two deaths. Given the firepower and the quantity of ammunition, there could have been dozens. But I'm setting aside the outrage...

II. A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. --U.S. Constitution, Bill of Rights As controversial documents go, this one is short. It's also convoluted. Like much of the foundational legislation of the United States of America, the second amendment to the Constitution suffers from dependent clauses and the passive voice. With that said, it's telling what the first half of the amendment states, quite plainly: "a well regulated militia..." The entire reason for a "right to bear arms" is maintaining a well regulated  militia. Set aside for a moment the reality that the role of maintaining security has become the province of an immense military-industrial complex with highly regulated armed forces and police forces at every level of American society, that said military and police forces are under constant scrutiny from elected civilians from city hall ...

Reynolds High School is 3.6 miles away from Hartley Elementary School, where tomorrow I finish my teaching year. This morning, a person with a gun opened fire in a locker room at RHS. A teacher was wounded, a student died and, later, the shooter was killed. There may have been two other shooters. There's not much news available yet, and the district is being particularly secretive about what happened. I've written a lot in this blog about guns and shootings. I'm always upset by shootings, especially when they happen at schools, but who isn't? Imagining hundreds of children cowering in fear, being led out of the school with their hands on their heads by police checking for more firearms, and the subsequent mob scene as parents try to reunite with them, injects so much trauma into the formative experience of school that I can't help but be moved. To have it happen in my district, at the school attended by every teenaged big brother or sister of the thousand studen...