Midlife Meditation

Sure, they look far more fierce than meek, but read on to find out how they got there. The occasion for this post: I'm in San Francisco re-taking Doug Goodkin's "Jazz Course," a week-long workshop on how to teach jazz to young children. Doug is a master teacher of the Orff Schulwerk approach to music education. Studying with him has shaped me as an educator, a musician, and a spiritual human being, and this course is a huge part of that. Most programs for jazz education are aimed at secondary and collegiate instruction. The Jazz Course is unique in its focus on children between the ages of 3 and 13. I took the course in 2008, and was inspired to build an entire year's curriculum around jazz. I'm back now, seven years later, with my full Orff certification, dozens of workshops, last week's trip to Ghana, and several more years' experience under my belt. Most importantly, I've got a far greater jazz vocabulary: as much as I knew about jazz (an...

This is not  what I'm talking about. The question comes up frequently when people find out I'm a musician: "What do you play?" My vague answer is "piano, trumpet, guitar, a little bit of everything." My much more specific answer is "scratch piano." Then the conversation begins. There are pictures of me sitting at a piano when I was still too young to walk. My mother began teaching me lessons when I was in kindergarten, so I like to tell people I could read music before I could read words, though that's quite an exaggeration. In any case, my formal training on the piano ended after fifth grade, when I was allowed to take up the trumpet instead. This means that, for all practical intents and purposes, everything I do on the piano now is self-taught. I can say this sincerely because what I do is nothing like what my mother taught me. What is "scratch piano"? Most literally, it's a term I made up about a decade ago to d...

Chances are very good that the only thing you know by Carl Orff is Carmina Burana. Carmina is a suite of songs for chorus and soloist based on poetry by medieval defrocked monks. It's lusty music, full of pounding rhythms and grunting voices, collectively evoking a post-Christian bacchanale. The most famous piece from the suite is "O Fortuna," a hymn to chaos that begins and ends the work, and which has provided background music for many a depiction of apocalyptic warfare. As a whole, Carmina Burana is one of the most popular classical works composed in the twentieth century. Musically, it's schlock, but it's fun schlock. It's a shame that so few know anything else about Carl Orff, because it's far from his greatest contribution to music. That would be the Schulwerk. With the help of Gunild Keetman, Orff developed an approach to teaching music that puts children at the center of the learning experience. The Orff method is elemental, starting with...

Yeah, I hear your dismay, fellow music nerds: What the glockenspiel happened to Brahms? The answer is very simple: I just don't care for him. Blasphemy! Heresy! Tools of musicological excommunication, anathematization, shunning, and belittling are even now being leveled at my cretinous self. But if you can just bear with me for a few minutes, I hope you'll reconsider booting me from the Society of Musical Snobbery, because the case I'm arguing in this series is that taste, while it can be cultivated, is ultimately subjective. When last (a few hours ago, to be precise) we checked in with our erstwhile musical novice, he was about to embark on full apprenticeship in the musical arts. His institution of choice: Willamette University, a small liberal arts college in Salem, Oregon. I arrived at Willamette grossly unlettered in music literature. My exposure to the classics was limited to a few recitals I had yawned my way through (Van Cliburn--yes, that Van Cliburn--was ...

   I am a snob. There. I admitted it. Happy? There's no getting around it: I go for the better things. I prefer the original Star Trek to the JJ Abrams remix, microbrews to BudMillCoors, Hondas to Fords, Steinways to Kimballs, iPhones to Galaxies, Dick's Kitchen to McDonalds, HBO to NBC... I could go on for several more paragraphs, but you've got the general idea. These are not just mild preferences. Some of them have been developing for decades. I'm not, in general, given to quick judgment, and lacking adequate knowledge and experience, I will not jump to conclusions about the relative superiority of one variety of a thing to all other iterations of that same thing. One bad experience does not necessarily eliminate an item from my favorites list, though it does result in a warning tag. My experience with Japanese cars, for instance, has been almost universally excellent, with one exception: an Acura that, in the three years I owned it, had two major breakd...