Okay, I probably should be worrying about other things, but other things have had me so terribly worried lately that I’ve had to seek diversion. The question I’m posing here is not one I sought, but it popped into my head, and it’s now stuck in my brain like a song-worm, and I’m hoping I can find an answer.
So, you know those little ditties that the organist in baseball parks plays during the slow times when they’re trying to get the crowd engaged? One of them is a clapping pattern that I don’t recall hearing anywhere other than at baseball stadiums. That is what is bugging me; it seems to be a baseball only thing, and I don’t recall hearing it anywhere else. To the best of my knowledge it’s not a riff from a popular song, old or new. I don’t remember it as a playground jump rope pattern, or from any other children’s game. Who came up with it? And why only baseball?

Here’s the riff:

Which sounds like this:

I’m really hoping that someone can help me find information on the origin of the riff, and perhaps an idea as to why it seems to belong uniquely to baseball. This may not be the kind of knowledge that brings me power, but it may help me get this riff out of my head so that I can get back to my regular worrying about other things.

Waiting is one of those inevitable states of existence to which we give very little thought, at least during those times when we are notwaiting. We wait in many different situations: at stop lights, in lines at the store, for a phone call that is expected at a certain time, or as I am now, for an oil change to be finished.
Waiting has different weights, hominymic pun not intended. Waiting for news of someone undergoing surgery feels very different than waiting at a stop light, unless of course that stop light is between you and the person undergoing surgery. Waiting for your turn at the doctor’s office for a routine exam, waiting at the DMV, or waiting for the arrival of a traveling friend, all have a different feel.
There are a number of things that can affect the feel of waiting: whether the outcome of the wait is known or unknown; whether the wait was expected or unexpected; the comfort level of the place where you are waiting; whether the length of time you will be waiting is knowable; all of these factors, and other factors as well, can affect your wait.
So how does one manage a wait? I’ve been working on using meditation as a wait strategy. Time where action is stopped is available for mental excursions. I find that I have few opportunities for unstructured thinking, but waiting can provide that opportunity. Meditation and thought are good antidotes to one of the pitfalls of waiting, that pitfall being the frustration of forced inaction. When we were younger, we called this situation “boredom”. I now try to think of it as opportunity for thought. A period of waiting can be a period of freedom: freedom from the tyranny of a schedule, freedom from having to spend mental energy on trivial things, freedom from always having to be “active”.
I hope to learn how to make waiting something to appreciate’ to expand into, to feel as good about waiting as I feel about “doing something”. It’s all part of this life we live. Waiting is as inevitable as death and taxes, both of which are things for which we wait, though perhaps not anxiously. If waiting can become a time of fulfillment, our lives are guaranteed to be more full, for we will always have to wait.

There is something wonderfully satisfying about construction. To be able to start off with something in one form, and with a need or space waiting to be filled, and to engage in a creative process and thereby end up with a tangible result can be a real joy.

The following remarks are from a speech I was asked to make at a Kiwanis scholarship banquet on April 24, 2014 at Shadow Hills Country Club in Eugene, Oregon.

The evening began with the attendees singing together “God Bless America”

and “Oh, Canada” as the event was called to order. My original text included a ruse to get the group to sing “Happy Birthday”, a plan that was rendered unnecessary by the singing of the two aforementioned songs. This version of the speech includes a couple of paragraphs about my grandson, Henry, which time constraints prevented me from including at the banquet. Those paragraphs are included here as italicised text enclosed in brackets.

Good evening. My name is Mike McCornack, and before I get started with my talk, I’d like to ask if any of our honored students has a birthday somewhere near today’s date.

If you’d all please join me in singing. [Happy Birthday song]

Congratulations, [name]. And thanks to all of you who sang along.

So, let’s think about what we just did. Yes, we sang “Happy Birthday” to [name]. But we also came together as a community to celebrate [name]. This was not a performance; this was a manifestation of community.

And what did you, as an individual, do? Most of you sang. Now I’d be willing to bet that if I were to go around the room and ask each one of you, “are you are a singer?” many of you would answer, “No!” And yet, you just sang, as I suspect you’ve done for many birthdays over the years for your family and friends.

So you sing, but some of you are reluctant call yourselves singers. Why do you suppose that is?  This is what I want to talk to you about tonight.

[This last October, my wife and I were blessed to welcome into the world our first grandchild, Henry. We love Henry, as a lot of other people around him do. Now Henry at six months of age has a number of obvious limitations; his vocabulary is negligible, his math skills are lacking, he hasn’t made the soccer team, and I think if he were to take the SAT’s right now, he wouldn’t do very well. But Henry shares one important trait with his peer group of other babies: he is a pretty sophisticated musician. He already knows how to use his voice to get people around him to respond. He uses a variety of tones, a number of inflections, and the tempo of his delivery to communicate his needs and desires. As he grows, he continues to adapt his vocal skills in ever more sophisticated ways as his needs and desires become more complex. He is also a sophisticated listener. It’s not uncommon for Henry’s family to communicate with him using similar vocal techniques to those that Henry himself uses. When he’s upset, long sustained tones seem to calm him. When he’s somber, light staccato ascending vocalizations will often bring on a smile. Some of the vocalizations that Henry’s family employs are just that; improvised vocal sounds. But many are music in the more formal sense, lullabies and other songs. These days a guaranteed way for his mom and dad to make him smile is for them to sing Pharrell Williams’ song “Happy” from Despicable Me and dance a silly dance as Henry joins in.

Henry is not a unique baby in his involvement in communication through sound and music. All healthy babies use and respond to sound in a somewhat similar fashion. I dare say that everyone in this room did the same as a baby. And I suggest to you that this use of sound by infants is something we can correctly refer to as music, a very fundamental music to be sure, but music nonetheless.]

My wife and I have done a lot of performing for children over the years, and we have observed an interesting correlation between some children’s distance from infancy and their level of musical inhibition. Young toddlers are far more universally open in their response to music than older preschoolers may be, and as children age through their elementary school years, some of them seem to become increasingly more musically inhibited. Some children appear to unlearn musicality as they grow.

So why do some of us make the transition from being musical babies to being adults who profess to be not musical? I think that this is a relatively recent phenomenon, and one that corresponds with the increasing availability of broadcast and recorded music over the last three or four generations.

Having high-quality recorded musical performances easily available has changed the way we interact with music. It has made music a commodity, something that we have or own, not just something we do.

When my great-grandparents were children, if they wanted music, they made it themselves. There was no radio, no recorded music available. Singing was something they did to help pass the time. It was something they did while they worked, at church, at family gatherings, and at birthday parties.

By the time my generation came along, broadcast or recorded music was more widely available, but not yet everywhere.

When I was young, a radio in a car was an uncommon luxury, and something that my family didn’t have. So when we went on trips, we sang.

During my lifetime, I’ve seen an explosive evolution of how recorded music has been made easily available. I’ve heard music on records, from 78 rpm’s, to 45’s, to LP’s; on tape, through reel-to-reel, 8-track, and cassette; to CD’s, to MP3’s, to streamed music. Recorded music has continued to become ever more portable, first with transistor radios and car radios, then the cassette walkman, followed by MP3 players, and now smartphones. A visitor from another planet might wonder why all humans seem to have wires dangling from their ears.

To paraphrase The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, “Music, Music everywhere, but not a song to sing.”

I love having any music I want available to me anytime, anywhere. But it worries me that all this music is being made for us, and when we are surrounded by recorded musical perfection, it’s no wonder we listen to our own voices and feel imperfect and unworthy by comparison. And so, many of us choose to become musical couch potatoes, out of self-preservation.

So let me tell you how I became a music teacher. When I was the same age as our honored guests, a senior in high school, I had plans to become either an electrical engineer or an actor; one practical goal, and one pipe dream. I had been accepted into Oregon State University as an engineering major, and I had my dorm room and roommate all set. The job I had at the time was playing music with a wonderful young woman with a beautiful voice. I’ll spare you the suspense; that young woman would become my wife six years later.

But at the time, playing music was my job, albeit a fun one, and a pretty good way to make money to pay for college. To be honest, I did not consider myself a musician with a capital “M”; I was a person who enjoyed making music, was pretty good at it, and got paid for it, but I wasn’t a trained expert. I considered myself a “folk musician”. When I compared myself to so-called classical musicians, to kids who had had 8 years of piano or violin lessons, or to music teachers, I saw myself on the wrong side of a gulf that was uncrossable.

I have a sign above my desk, which reads, “Life is what happens while we are making other plans”.  My college plans, and my music making soon became an example of this axiom. People seemed to really like the music my partner and I were making. We were given opportunities to travel and make much more money than we had ever imagined, just for making our music.

Our musical career began to expand, and that meant that I could only attend college in fits and starts. I became very good at racking up academic credits one or two semesters at a time, and then taking off on another musical adventure.

The things that happened to me while I was “making other plans” were mostly wonderful. Along the way I realized that my musical partner was also very well suited to me as a life partner, and she and I got married. At this point two things conspired to change my life. Though I was not a smoker, I had a highly suspicious chest x-ray that my doctor attributed to the secondhand smoke I was taking in while we performed. Secondly, we began to consider having a family. While we knew some folks had combined road careers and family life, we decided against it. I decided to try to find another career.

I tried my hand at selling recording studio services, running a retail store, attempting to gain an apprenticeship as an electrician, and working for the phone company. In each case I was either unsuccessful or unhappy. My ever-patient wife eventually suggested to me, at one particularly low point in my life, that I might consider becoming a music teacher. I was highly skeptical. But after talking to my wife, I decided to visit a very good friend, the late Gary Brown, who at the time was the choir director at Springfield High School. Gary was very encouraging. He didn’t see the gap that I believed existed between the world of the “regular people music” that I knew, and academic and classical music. I followed up my visit with Gary by a visit to the University of Oregon, where I had the opportunity to talk at length with the man who was then Dean of the School of Music, Dr. Robert Trotter.

My discussion with Bob Trotter was deeply inspiring, for I found that my views of music, which I had thought were rather unsophisticated and naive, were very close to his own. He was ecstatic about his life studying music as a center of our personal and cultural lives, something which happened to have an artistic component as well. He told me he thought music education needed people like me. Given where I was in my life at that moment, it was great to feel needed!

My wife had cast the line, Gary Brown set the hook, and Dr. Trotter reeled me in. I enrolled as a music education major that Fall and I have never looked back.

As I stand here tonight, I am just past the other end of my career as a music teacher and choir director, a career that began essentially accidentally while I was making other plans.

I retired this past June, still loving my job, and loving the opportunity that I have had to work with kids and music and my community.

What I’d like to do now is to see if I can sum up what I learned during the 29 years that I spent teaching about life through music in the company of some wonderful young people. Here’s what I think I now know:

• Music is an innate part of us. Harvard Psychologist Dr. Howard Gardner identifies music as one of the eight component parts that make up our natural intelligence. Our musical intelligence is a distinct and integral part of who we are.
• Music doesn’t have to be perfect, or even good, to be enjoyable. You don’t have to be LeBron James to have fun shooting baskets.
• When we make music together, we create a bond, a sense of community. Electronic Music pioneer Brian Eno said “That’s one of the great feelings – to stop being me for a little while and to become us.” One of the great joys I had in my classroom was to watch and hear a variety of students making music together. These were students who might not otherwise even notice each other. My choirs had 4.0 students singing with special education students, athletes singing with math nerds, social winners singing with the shy and the lonely. But when they sang, they were each an important part of the community.
• Art is part of music, but not all music has to be art. Sometimes it’s just fun. It can be medicine, or spirituality, or politics, or a birthday party, or a way to teach. Can you think of the ABC’s without hearing the song?
• Music can amplify it’s context to a greater level of meaning and power. Many people of my generation cannot think of the civil rights movement without hearing “We Shall Overcome”. The song became the container of the movement, the soundtrack to social change.
• Music is central to life’s rituals. There is a reason we have music at weddings, at funerals, at inaugurations, at memorials. There is a reason that when music happens our feelings surge, our joy overcomes us, or our tears flow.

Finally, there are two things I would like to address especially to the students we are honoring tonight. First, let me go back to that sign above my desk: “Life is what happens while we are making other plans”. I hope that all of you have great plans, and I hope that you find success and satisfaction in your lives. But if what you plan, and what you end up doing, turn out to be different things, try not to worry; enjoy the ride. Success may lie in directions you never even imagined.

Secondly, I want to say something to you that I used to say to all of my graduating seniors. Near graduation time I would pull them aside and tell them this:

It’s okay if none of you want to become professional musicians, or music teachers, or even consumers of commercial music. That’s not why we spent this time together.

But I will ask this of you: If you are fortunate enough to have children in your lives, please, sing to them. Listen as they sing to you. Sing with them. Let them know that music comes from people, not just from electronic boxes. It’s a natural and simple way to create a communion of family from the day a child is born, and children who grow up nurtured by the music of their families will be far more likely to retain their natural musicality, and far better equipped to help us find among ourselves, a community. If you give a child music, you are giving them an important gift that may just help them survive with some grace in the complex world that we are all struggling to live in, as all of us are making other plans.

Thank you.

I have problem sometimes with having too much to do, and too many choices. My thoughts can become frenzied, and a chaotic inertia sets in. This past week I experimented with a self-managed intervention, and I’m pleased with how it worked for me.

The idea is this. When I recognized the impending hurricane of thought starting to swirl, I selected the first item that came to mind among the many that were swirling. In my first test of the technique, the item that came to mind was a speech I’m in the process of writing. The second step was to set a timer. Having one readily available on my phone was a benefit. I set the timer for 15-minutes, and sat down to work on the speech. I gave myself some boundaries: no preparing for the work (getting a drink of water, cleaning my desk off), no distractions (radio, music, phone calls), and strict adherence to the 15-minute limit. At the end of the 15 minutes, I would stop and regroup.

What I discovered was that I was very comfortable during the 15-minute interval that I set for myself. I had no anxiety of having chosen the wrong thing; after all, it was only for 15 minutes. And forcing myself to monotask had the effect of stopping the swirling of thoughts. I had a set focus, and I allowed myself no choices. When the timer went off, I felt better. I also made some progress on my speech, which had been one source of my anxiety in the first place. I found that I was feeling more in control, and was then able to make a plan for the rest of the day that felt more balanced.

I don’t know if the technique will continue to work for me, but I’ve since tried it a couple more times with similar results. I plan to keep it in my repertoire.

Going back to the notion of “too much choice”, I recently watched a very interesting TED Talk by Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice.

I have been blessed in my life with wonderful parents and many wonderful teachers, some by

design, some by effect. When I saw the bulletin on the news last night about the passing of Pete Seeger, it marked the passing of one of my greatest teachers, and a spiritual parent. And while I do feel sadness at his passing, I also feel a tremendous wave of thanksgiving that he came into my life when he did. So much of who I have become in my life I owe to Pete.
I believe I was 11 or 12 when I checked out a copy of one of the LPs in the “American Favorite Ballads” series from my local library. The recording changed me. The audio quality of the recording was horribly primitive, and the songs were old, but the electricity of Pete’s voice, 12-string guitar and banjo lit me up. I checked out songbooks, and made the folksongs he sang part of my own learning process as I struggled to learn the guitar. I didn’t worry that I felt I couldn’t sing very well; part of Pete’s message was that singing was something you just do, not great art that only a few should create.
When I was 14 I bought a banjo, largely because Pete had one. I bought his “How To Play The 5-string Banjo”. The book became my text, but not just for the banjo. It was a philosophy of life, and of music, and in the book the two were inseparable. It also helped me learn the instrument.
Over the years I read his “Hard Hitting Songs for a Hard-Hit People”, which is a powerful book about people during the dust bowl migration and the depression, told in part through songs. I read his collection of writings “The Incompleat Folksinger”, and again found music and life bound together in his unadorned, deeply humanist philosophy.
Pete’s influence on my life has been so complete that I rarely think about it; it is just part of my spiritual furniture, and I believe it has served me well. I believe it has made me a better person, teacher and musician.

What did Pete teach me?

• Music is not an art. It is a life force that is part of all of us. Yes, there is a subset that is art music, but music is the birthright of all of us, and it is something we should do together. We are all musicians.
• We need each other, and we need to take care of each other. It’s no surprise that this resonated with the Christian teachings that were part of my upbringing.
• It’s more important that you try, than that you be assured of success. Peace on earth, caring for the planet, racial and gender equality, eliminating want and poverty, all were worthy of our attention even if we knew that the odds were stacked against us.
• Those in power can try to shut you down, but it’s hard for them to stop you from singing, even if it is with one person at a time.
• Singing with someone is a more powerful thing than singing for someone.
• Singing something is more powerful than saying something.

I realize as I write this list that it could continue on and on. Things Pete helped instill in me are a large part of my personal foundation.
My wife and I got to eat lunch with Pete years ago at a folk music gathering. He was sitting alone at a table and we scraped up our courage and sat down. I sputtered out an attempted introduction, hoping to tell him everything he meant to us, but it all came out as unrelated consonants. He quickly put us at ease, and before we knew it, he had steered the conversation to the importance of children, and encouraging us to keep doing what we loved. He made us feel important, and was as wonderfully warm to us as strangers as he would have been if we were old friends. We felt we were.

It’s important that Pete was a great light, but it’s more important that he lit millions of candles. I count myself as one. I hope that those of us who have taken on the flame will do Pete proud, and sing it on to millions more. If you’re curious as to why I am the way I am, learn more about Pete Seeger. You won’t hear him sing live anymore, but you can hear him sing on recordings or on film. When you do so, close your eyes. Put yourself in the room, and allow yourself to sing along. Get hold of his songbooks, or pick up a copy of “Rise Up Singing”, which is a great place to start a group sing. Read his prose. And sing: with your friends, with strangers, while doing the laundry, and most importantly, for children. Let them know that music is theirs; it’s not just something that comes out of electronic boxes, or a sacred domain reserved for a priesthood of artists. It belongs to all of us.
Thank you, Pete. You made the world a better place, and you helped make all of us whose lives you touched better people.

Don’t try to do everything. Do one thing. If that works, move on.

Sometimes a dream becomes a compulsion. You don’t understand it, you’re not sure where it’s going, but you don’t want to leave it. There is an addictive curiosity about what might be next. I have this same issue with the radio.

When the radio is on, I drift into the flow of the programming even when I don’t pay close attention. I find that as I move room to room, I feel the need to take the radio with me. I may not even be sure what the current program is about, but I don’t want to leave it. I need to see it through to it’s next chapter. It is the same feeling that I have in a sleeping dream. I don’t want to wake up; something might happen.

Things are not always joyous, or always difficult. Sometimes consideration is what we need, and what we need most to exhibit. A few moments of somber consideration can prepare one for meaningful joy, or managed difficulty. Deliberation is the key.