Singing in Slovenia

Do you know where Slovenia is? I didn’t, when the invitation came to teach a workshop there on reflex integration. The producer must have known that; she wrote me that it is a beautiful country bordering Austria, Hungary, Croatia, and Italy. And it is. I stepped off the plane March 26 into the small Ljubljana airport, after a red-eye from Boston via Munich - and I was immediately filled with joy. I don’t think I have ever felt that in an airport before. The energy was just fantastic.

I think that was because the surrounding mountains that cup the valley are so – awesome!  Nothing on the human scale can pollute that high (literally) vibration. Everywhere I went, I was ringed by huge, snow-covered alps. It kind of puts life into perspective.

The people were great, too. My initial three-day workshop contained about fifteen people – all women except for one man, which is pretty typical, I find, for our field. There were special ed teachers, physical therapists, a psychiatrist, Brain Gym instructors, early childhood professionals, art therapists, and parents – and after the initial shyness, they were the friendliest group I have every taught.

But what I most want to say to this audience of Early Childhood Music professionsals – they SING. The first morning, as I was demonstrating a way to get forward/backward motion across the midlines into a song/game activity, I launched into Row, Row, Row Your Boat with a partner – sitting on the floor, holding hands and pressing feet and “rowing” back and forth – and the entire group started singing along. In a round. Beautiful sonority, perfectly blended.

And this was not a group of music teachers. These were regular people.

I’ve taught a lot of groups in schools and conferences in the U.S. and I have never had this experience before. I mean, when I present at an Orff Conference, of course people sing, it is expected, it is what we do. And when I present at public schools I expect half the people to be silent and to hear a lot of rusty, half-speaking voices.

But I have never had the experience before of singing in a culture where “normal” people just still sing, sing growing up, sing for fun, sing without reserve or self-consciousness. I felt as if I had gone back in time to how it used to be, before technology and recorded music and videos penetrated every aspect of our lives – back to a time when people just sang.

I had a lot of great moments in Slovenia, but in a way for me, that was the best one – being surrounded by the innocent joy of adults just singing – beautifully – bringing what was clearly a long experience of singing as children into their lives, their work, and into the NOW as their gift to me.