The Secret Song: Embracing Musicality in Every Classroom

All right, well, welcome, Doug. I’m so glad that you could be here on the show today. So for anybody who may not know you yet, can you just give us a little bit of an overview about your background and your work for the last four decades?

I went to a college called Antioch College in Neal Springs, Ohio, and we had a guest teacher for one semester who was teaching music education via the Orff approach. And this was 1973. So Orff was only five years old as an official thing in the United States then. His name was Avon Gillespie. It was a fabulous class and I loved it. But I was in college, so it was just like, okay, that’s fun. It wasn’t like, my gosh, this is my life’s work. But I came to San Francisco and I found myself volunteering at schools and trying to remember what we did in that class. I had these dittoed sheets with an outline some of the material. Anyway, I… kind of kicked around for two years like that. And I stumbled into an opportunity at a school where a parent had bought six or five instruments and nobody at the school knew what to do with them. My girlfriend at that time was in her first year teaching art at that school. And she told me about it and I said, can I come to a class? They hired somebody to show the teachers how to use the instrument. So I said, well, can I come? I could use some refreshment. So I did. And luckily he was a terrible teacher and they fired him. And so I said, well, I can give you a workshop based on what I did in college. And I did, and they said, what are you doing next year? And I said, well, I was gonna maybe work at that school. And they said, why didn’t you work at this school? So I did and stayed there for 45 years. Wow. And my wife.

My wife stayed there for 42 years, and my two daughters went there for 11 years each, and my second daughter just finished her 13th year as the fifth grade teacher at the school. So it’s quite an unusual circumstance. It’s called the San Francisco School, began as a Montessori School in 1966, grew to a middle school, preschool was Montessori, middle school. I mean, the elementary school was not.

And then in the mid-80s, went on to the middle school. So small place, about 250 kids, and from three years old to eighth grade. And for 15 years, I taught all those kids. And then through a whole other story, a man showed up at my doorstep and said, can I watch some classes? Can I keep watching? And can I help you teach someday? And his name was James Harding. And so he became a co-teacher of sorts, and then another woman who I had met at the Orff Institute in Salzburg joined us in 1996, Sofia Lopez de Bor, and we both taught, the three of us taught together for the next 25 years, which was a very unusual circumstance because they’re both brilliant teachers and both of them are internationally known as Orff teachers, and the three of us were there in one school.

And it was a school that from the very beginning was an independent school in the best sense of the word, which means we were free from other people’s bureaucracies and curriculums. And we were just all of us, not only the music program, but exploring, experimenting, trying out what worked, throwing out what didn’t, following what did, always watching the children to see what seemed to serve them. And it worked beautifully. And Orff was a perfect addition to the school because that describes a lot about the Orff approach, the idea of exploration and trying things out and trusting your instincts. And through my work there, I’ve gotten very interested in rituals and ceremonies and created this whole ceremony, a calendar with music at the center that really to this day defines the school. So I retired from the school in 2020. I’m still teaching all sorts of places, but James Sophia have continued the program beautifully and the rituals and ceremonies are continuing full force. And so it’s a Cinderella story. 

It’s just not often that that happens, but when it does, what a special, special legacy.

I want to dive deep a little bit into Orff a little bit, if you’re okay with that, because, and our audience can handle it, because we focus a lot on arts integration and strategies and tools. As a music educator myself, that’s my background in training, but my background was as a vocalist. So I went to Westminster Choir College. So a lot of my training is Kodály based. So, but we had a lot of classes in Orff and Dalcroze, and lots of different kind of methods to see what kind of methods would stick for each of us, which I appreciated. And so probably my second, my neighbor to Kodály was probably Orff. Dalcroze is not my fan. But I’m curious, can you share with our audience what specifically you mean by the Orff approach, what that looks like in music? And you talked about Orff instruments for classroom teachers who may not know what that means or what that is. Can you talk a little bit about that and why you chose that method? Why that method you feel like works really well with kids? 

Dough

First of all, I have the highest regard for both Kodály and Dalcroze. And in my ideal world, every child would experience all three on some level, because they all offer different things, but it is worthwhile to look at what makes them different. So Dalcroze came from somebody who was frustrated teaching university students who were just reading from the page and not feeling the music. So he got them away from the piano, away from the violin, said, sing the phrase, move the phrase, bring it more into your body, bring it into your voice, now go back to the piano or violin or whatever it may be. And so he had a very specific goal is to make the mostly Western compositional repertoire more musical through these methods. Kodály had a very specific thing, and correct me if I’m wrong, but his idea was to create music literacy in the Hungarian population through singing. And so he did that masterfully, right, and that continued to echo in the years and across geographical borders to everywhere they went. And Orff came from a, you know, he’s familiar with Dalcroze. I think Orff was a little bit before Godard. But he just had a vision of what he called elemental composition. And he began working with dancers. These were like 18 year old young women in an experimental school for dance education that was kind of called gymnastics, but it was really modern dance. And his vision matched the founder, Dorothy Gunther’s vision of music and movement as one piece. So out of movement comes music, out of music comes movement. So Orff was the music teacher in that setting and was really just getting the dancers to create music from their bodies, from simple percussion instruments, from their voice. And at first on piano, but he wasn’t happy with the piano and he stumbled into a xylophone sent to him from Africa. And it inspired him to have an instrument maker make instruments like this, or xylophones basically that were inspired from Africa, but also metallophones inspired from Indonesia and glockenspiels inspired from Germany, right? So he created these what called Orp instruments and added the extra little bonus that you could take bars off and on to create different scales. And because the xylophone was really unknown in Western music education, except for, you know, Saint-Saëns, a couple of little exceptions to that.

Glockenspiel and Mozart was there, but it allowed for a completely experimental and new approach to composition that had no baggage to it. It wasn’t like you had to make the xylophone sound like Chopin. So also the xylophone was not friendly for reading because you can feel the keys, you know, the mallets were far away. So it’s still very difficult to read playing a mallet instrument, not impossible.

But that steer things more toward the ear, more towards listening, and more towards understanding on the keyboard arrangement how patterns worked. And so the Orffan Instruments are a unique part about Orffe show work because it’s really the only child-sized orchestra that exists in all of the alternative education. I mean, Suzuki has violin, but you have to practice and learn their technique, but the xylophone is very technically friendly so that somebody who has no musical background, formal musical background, can create some wonderful music because it’s very simple. I mean there is technique to play it well, but still it’s very simple. You don’t have to go home and practice for an hour and a day. So that’s one of the things that attracted me is this unique child orchestra that allowed you to create music in all sorts of styles and also which became obvious to me as I became more interested in applying the instruments to jazz and what we call world music. Because the instruments already came from a world music perspective, from Africa, Indonesia, and Europe, they were very friendly, they are very friendly to play Zimbabwe, you know, marimba music or Ghana music or music from Uganda or from Bali or similar instruments like steel drums or Mexican marimba, Afro-Columbian marimba. So there’s a wonderful foundation on the instruments for a world music foundation that was very attractive to me. Kodály and Dalcroze feel more European oriented to me, but this opened up the world a little bit wider.

Plus all the percussion instruments that our teachers use aren’t from other cultures. There’s a Google bells and shakers and scrapers and woodblocks from China and symbols from Turkey and tom toms and it’s already connected to world music instruments through the percussion instruments. And then the use of the recorder is

Likewise, the flute or the whistle and the drum is the oldest human instrumental combination. So, and not to mention the voice and the body percussion and movement. And so that was attractive to me. It felt like it opened the possibilities of musical expression much wider in a way that was very, very attractive to me. I think the other thing that really appealed to me is the

The feeling of play, like the playful feeling of, first of all, like children’s games is a huge part for me at least, of your experience, but also a playful approach, like just having fun, trying things out. That didn’t work, let’s try this, let’s try this. And not having to be so serious about, you play that note wrong, that’s not gonna go well in the concert.

And you go home and practice. Now, nobody practices at home. They don’t have work instruments at home. For a while I made kids practice recorder, but I realized that it wasn’t really making them any better recorder players and just was another thing they had to do in their day. So I let that go and it’s amazing what they could do just by playing once or twice a week in the music classroom. So I would say that the breadth of media is like the body percussion, speech, the organ instruments, the xylophones, the movement, the folk dance, was something that really was and is attractive to me, as well as the emphasis on the ear and the body and improvisation and choreography and composition and this, yeah, exploration. And also all of those things can be, and we talk about integration all the time, all of those things integrate across every other area that we’re working on. I mean, with math and science and social, I mean, they all work together. You’re just using those skills in a different way when you’re playing Orff instruments. And I hope that people can kind of get this, if they can think back to their elementary experience and think back to those instruments that have the long wooden bars or the glockenspiels, those are what we’re talking about with Orff instruments.

And what I really love about Orff Instruments is that you could take the bars off. And so you can make a pentatonic scale, which is gonna sound beautiful no matter what you’re playing. And so, and again, to your point, it makes it almost, you can’t make a mistake. You can’t make a, you know, you can’t be wrong, right? You can just continue to play and experiment and see what works and how to do that in combination with others as well as by yourself which is a wonderful skill again to contribute. And I wonder how did, because watching your TED talk I kind of got an idea that you love improvisation and that jazz has become a part of that. And I can kind of see how that would be a part of the Orff approach as well. How has improvisation and jazz really impacted who you are as an educator and how you teach?

Yeah, well, you know, jazz is, I think, one of the deepest dives into improvisation of almost any musical style. But many musical styles have all sorts of levels of improvisation, you know, from Indian Raga to, you know, Bluegrass or rock and roll, you know. But jazz, it’s really the center of the experience because nobody’s interested that you play the song exactly the way Gershwin did played it and nobody’s interested that you copy the way that Art Tatum improvised on it because you can’t by the way. But the idea is to make it your own. Also, nobody’s interested that you played it tomorrow the same way you played it yesterday. So improvisation is the very authentic experience of bringing your whole self to the music and who you are in that moment, you know, which is, you know, who you are as a person and who you are as a musician, from my point of view, is not a noun. You’re not a thing that you’re, this is my identity. It’s a verb. It’s a constantly changing and flowing kind of process. And so jazz is the practice of revealing that moment in time, you know, the moment you stepped into that stream. And you’re never gonna step into that same river the same way twice, but you are completely authentic in that moment responding to everything you know. You know, I did write a whole article about improvisation and I almost came up with the definition, which is, here it is in this Orffeco.

Improvisation is the art of responding in the moment to what the situation demands, musically and otherwise, drawing from all previous knowledge and experience. It is the act of discovering both what you know and what you didn’t know that you know, until you tried that out, you know? So I think that’s a pretty good definition. And…

It means that you are fully present and you are fully alive to the moment and you’re not just depending upon what you did yesterday. You are really this ongoing kind of work in progress that I just appreciate as a model for human beings. The other thing about improvisation is that

So much of the problems that we have, musical and otherwise, is trying to solve a new situation with an old strategy. That doesn’t work. We can see it everywhere in our country and in the world. People trying the same old thing that’s not working, which is the definition of insanity. Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

So improvisation in a very broad sense is really how we survived as human beings because we had to continually adapt and improvise our way through different conditions, climate conditions, political conditions, all evolution conditions. So for me, improvisation is not a little luxury on the side that only jazz musicians do, but it’s something that is essential to our actual survival that article is called improvisation, the pleasure of survival, because it’s training ourselves to meet each situation with the full measure of our intelligence and our feeling. And that’s whether it’s musical or otherwise, that’s exactly what we’re doing. And it does demand preparation. You know, you do have to do some concrete work and you know, learn how to dot the I’s and cross the T’s.

But in the moment of improvisation, every jazz musician will testify you forget about it. And you just let everything you’ve done come forth and speak for itself. Yeah, absolutely. 

So speaking of your TED Talk and thinking about this, one of the things that struck me most in that talk, and I want to get this right, was that your belief that everyone is musical and that as educators we’re just drawing out that which we already have.

So I would love for you to expand on that for our listeners because I think that’s a really powerful statement. So many of our teachers think, I can’t bring music into my classroom, I’m not a musician. I can’t do that, I can’t sing, I’m not. So I think it’s really important for them to hear from you why that’s not true.

Well, the first thing is people have a very narrow definition of music, a very narrow concept of music, which means you choose an instrument.

You know, you learn how to read and write notes that somebody wrote a long time ago. You go take a lesson with a teacher who tells you yes, no, or maybe so. And you practice a lot when you’d rather be out riding your bike or playing baseball, whatever you know. So that’s the people’s concept of musicianship. But if musicianship is expanded to much wider and much simpler ways, of expressing yourself musically, people discover, oh, I’m more musical than I thought. So for example, the hard thing about the TED Talk was it was very short, and it was almost the only talk I gave like that where we didn’t do something first. We always do something first, right? But if we had an opportunity to do a five minute thing, like I do a little thing with sitting postures, and so we learn a little rhyme like.

Crisscross, applesauce, crisscross, applesauce, crisscross, applesauce, pepperoni pizza. Can everybody do that? Yes, you can. All right. Can you, what if you’re groggy, then you’re going to use a low voice. If you’re excited, then you’re going to use a high voice. What if you combine the voices? Crisscross, applesauce, crisscross, applesauce, crisscross, applesauce, pepperoni pizza. Could you do that? Yes, you could.

How did it sound? Not bad. All right, how about patting on crisscross, clapping on applesauce, and stamping your feet? So now you have boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And could you do that? Yes, you could. All right. So how about we do it in two parts? Let’s do it as a round. Let’s do it in four parts. Come in sooner, crisscross, criss, criss, criss, criss, criss. And within 10 minutes, you have this really pretty exciting piece of music. And at the end it’s like, did you do it? Were you successful? Was it musical? Boom. Right. I proved my point. You are musical. You just didn’t have the right idea about what music means or the right way to get to it, which is much simpler than all the other things. Yes. We also can call it the access point, but recognizing, and I think to your point, we’re all, we have a heartbeat, right? Everybody has a rhythm, everybody is walking around as a musical instrument. And the other way to kind of prove that point is the name of this movie that was made about me called The Secret Song. And I’m glad I had that title because it’s a little activity I do with five-year-olds, but it’s a playground, just go play, you know? But what you have to do is understand that inside of this bars of wood is a secret song that’s buried and waiting for you to discover it. And all you have to do to discover it is put your hands on the mallets and try to lift it out of the instrument and then listen and notice when the song has come to you. Because if you just go blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, then that’s nothing. But if you go blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, ooh, I think the secret song is coming up. See if you can remember, follow it and see if you can remember what you did and then come back and share it. So I send the kids off into the corner and I just say, go. And they come back with fantastic things. So they are musical composers, not only they’re musical, they’re composers from the very beginning without a single lesson, right? Yes.

And I had some video documentation of what kids come up with, and it’s amazing. So it just is a game changer, that idea. 

Yes, and I think, and so for those people who didn’t quite catch that, there is a documentary out about Doug and his final year of teaching, and it’s called The Secret Song. It’s streaming on PBS. You can go find it. I happen to watch it. It is so inspiring.

And it brought back so many memories for me of teaching music to young children. And it’s just, it’s a breath of fresh air. One thing that I did notice though, was that this happened to, it just happened while COVID-19 kind of hopped in, right? And you had to navigate teaching music online, which I think I’m blushing, I don’t know how you do that. So what was the most challenging thing about that? And maybe, also, what was most successful that was surprising to you about that? 

It came from a school parent who had never made a film in her life before. You know, talk about that kind of can-do confidence and just let’s try this out, see what happens. So she just wanted to document some things before I left and none of us could have predicted, of course, COVID and everything else had happened. But she ended up following me around and my colleagues, James and Sophia, who were an integral part of the film.

The work is really, the movie’s spurred on by me leaving, but it’s really about the program that we all created. But she had like 150 hours over two years that got whittled down to 90 minutes. So for me, having that film crew just around all the time was just such a wonderful way to know that somebody was witnessing the constant miracles that happen in a music class, the little breakthroughs of this kid and that kid, and the funny quirky things that happen. And of course they get an only show, a teeny bit of it in the film, but what they show is really, really sweet. And then not only for them to witness it, so after the class I can say, whoa, did you see that? But also to know that some of it would be shared.

And that what people would see is happy children and fearless children, you know, children willing to take risks, you know, children willing to connect with each other, confident children who are free to just say, you know, when you did this, I did the opposite of you. And, you know, and then I have to respond. Actually, that’s a good idea because the two things together make something more interesting, you know.

So that kind of very real on the spot kind of ping pong game that I consider excellent education. Teacher goes ping, the student goes pong, the game is on, right? So then to the COVID thing, the ping pong game, you can’t play very well through the screen. So it was a nightmare. And as I say in the film, I had to learn six different things, technologies that is not my strong suit because I don’t care about that that much, you know? But I had to do what I had to do. And I think, so, you know, it’s like playing, you know, teaching that way was like playing piano with gloves on, but actually, you know, it’s like playing piano with mittens on. You know, it’s really thick mittens. You know, it’s horrendous because, you know, you can’t play that ping pong game.

Sophia in that movie says such a beautiful moment where she says, I can’t see them, I can’t touch them, I can’t smell them, I didn’t help them untie their shoes. That’s what the real teaching is. This is just a holding pattern. And she was so deeply distraught as well, we all, that when you’re on the other screen, you’re like an entertainer. But education is not entertainment.

And even though a lot of people are thinking in those terms, education is that live interaction between the living, breathing student and the living, breathing teacher. So, I mean, I would say that there was nothing I learned that said, ooh, I’m gonna use these screens more when COVID’s over. No, it’s the exact opposite. But except for some things, I mean, like the…

I taught a jazz history course to adults and that was possible because I could, you know, tell about the history, I could show videos, I could play piano, and then I could reach people who couldn’t come all the way to my jazz course, you know, in person. And so, you know, there was some benefit to that. But especially with the children, you have to get them away from those screens. And it’s such a huge disappointment that…

When it was over, I thought that was one of the big lessons we could learn, ah, that was horrible. Let’s put these things away until we need them or until the screen can do something that I can’t do live. Like show Dizzy Gillespie and Louis Armstrong on the Jackie Gleason show, right? That’s a good use of the screen. Watching the Secret Song, that’s a good use of the screen. Right? But not for teaching. But I guess the last thing I would say is that

It was amazing that, you know, if it was a choice between not doing anything with those kids and doing the screens, it did mean something to the kids and myself to see each other, even in those little dots, you know? And just that even through the most challenging of, you know, screens, screen in terms of like a screen between things, you know, is a good double use of that word but that something’s still connected. And it only connected because we had already had the live experience and the muscle memory was there. There was a brief time at the beginning where I thought, you know, the three year olds, four year olds, five year olds, they can’t do this by themselves. So their parents have to be with them. And now their parents are gonna get to see what we do. And I said, okay, do this clapping play with your parent. Okay, dance down the hall with your parent. And

That lasted for about three classes and the parents were saying, I’m too busy, you know, kids just push that button, you got to figure it out. Yeah. So anyway, that’s the short story. Oh my goodness. 

Well, before we head out, there’s a question that I always ask everyone on the show. And I think I’m very excited to hear what your answer is gonna be. From your experience, how can creativity impact education today?

Well, creativity is the final exam of everything, and not just in music. Everybody thinks the test says, oh, you check off the right answers and the computer corrects it and, oh, okay, you’re done. And we all know what that’s like. You get the 100 on the history test and you forget it five minutes later, right? But creativity is when you take everything you know and you work it and you do something with it, and that’s true in all subjects. So the science area, for example.

That’s a great thing where kids choose a project and they also have some agency when they get to choose what they’re interested in. They choose a project and they study it and they figure out how they’re going to present it and how they’re going to do it. It’s an excellent example. Or math class, make up your own math problems. Or P.E., make up a new game with three balls.

Well, whatever it is, certainly writing, you know, you write a short story, write a poem, and certainly music in the ORP approach, you know, create a composition, create a choreography for the piece. You know, let’s improvise the scene in the play the way that you feel it, and then we’ll put it down into a script later on. So all these things are the things that are motivating to kids, exciting to kids.

But it’s not just fun for them. It’s actually the deepest learning and it’s the most memorable, you know, nobody’s gonna tell you About their math sheet that they got a hundred on in third grade But they will tell you about their science project that they’ll never forget or their their history study where they got to Study the history of chocolate, you know, whatever and present something about that so this kind of project-based learning that some creative agency is, you know, we’ve known this for a long time, but we just forget it day after day after day, and just go back to the same old, same old stuff that never worked in the first place. Again, the definition of insanity. 

So Doug, where can people learn more and stay in touch with you?

Yeah, so it’s just douggoodkin.com is probably the easiest way to do that. One more thing about getting in touch, I am doing two courses this summer and there’s still room. One is only in seven days, or 12 days, but a jazz course in New Orleans, jazz 24 seven in the place where I was born. Everybody, you don’t have to be even a teacher, but for a teacher who doesn’t know jazz, for a jazz musician who doesn’t know much about teaching. And then the level courses that I am in charge of this. San Francisco International Orff Course, and that’s at sfOrff.org. So those are two other ways to get in touch. Wonderful. 

And we’ll put that in the show notes as well so that people can quickly find you and get in touch. 

Can I give a closing quote? 

Please do. Yes. Yes, please do. 

Because I mean, the one question that we didn’t get to is, what do I say to somebody who said the arts are superfluous in the 21st century. And the first thing I said is, I’m so sad you’re asking that question, because you didn’t have a beautiful artistic experience and your family, the neighbors, the school, the culture failed you. They didn’t give you what you deserved, which is a deep experience in arts. That is something that every human being is owned. And so…

Again, the pandemic was nature’s way of telling us, go to your room, time out. You have to learn how to be better people. And one of the things that we learned in the pandemic is it’s really terrible to feel lonely and cut off and isolated, right? And one of the beautiful moments of the pandemic was the people in Italy singing on their balconies. And so hopefully you learned that music is what brings comfort and brings healing, brings beauty to our lives. And that is way more important than anything else that you can try to convince me of that we learn in schools is those things. So in Victor Hugo’s great classic, Les Miserable, there’s this little quote. Somebody says to this bishop, “‘You’re always eager to make everything useful, “‘but here is a useless plot of land.’” It would be much better to have salads here than bouquets of flowers. And the bishop replied, “you are mistaken. The beautiful is as useful as the useful. He added after a moment’s pause, perhaps more so.”

Thank you so much for joining me today. This was such a beautiful conversation. And I love your perspective on not just music, but on life in general. So thank you.