Saturday, September 12, 2015

NAMM Marches Into Anaheim


With the sound of a pounding drum circle and the braggadocio of being the largest convention player in town NAMM announced on September 10th that it’s “moving into Anaheim.”

NAMM, for those who don’t know, is the National Association of Music Merchants, the trade association for the music industry. In primary partnership with the Anaheim City School District (ACSD) it has formed the Anaheim Creativity Council, a loose collaboration of parties committed to introducing elementary school children to music, not just as consumers but as players; young musicians in the making. ACC (not to be confused with AAC, the Anaheim Arts Council) says this collaboration should not issue in yet more meetings, preferring, according to Mary Leuhrsen, Director of Public Affairs and Government Relations, the softer route of digital information sharing through websites, databases and excellent electronic communications.

Music unlocks the key to children's souls
Those who have shared in the background to the roll-out event at the Honda Center, know that Dorothy Rose, Executive Director of the Orange County Symphony (OCS), was the prime mover of this initiative when she and Dr. Linda Wagner, Superintendent of the ACSD, set about a program to bring after-school instrumental music instruction to 13 (originally) schools, tutored by musicians from the OCS. Mayor Tom Tait pitched in on the initiative earlier this year with a public announcement at the school district’s art fair in May with his vision that within two years it should possible for every child in Anaheim to have access to a musical instrument and music instruction. Bob Gardner, President of the ACSD Board, declared at the same gathering that they would now completely reshape education in the district to address the WHOLE child by making the arts a core component of education.

NAMM was so impressed with this initiative that earlier in 2015 they made a huge donation to the ACSD to further the cause. Local teen singing celebrity, Sean Oliu, with his family, brought his enthusiasm to bear to get Mariachi bands up and running in two elementary schools.

What was not clear in Mayor Tait’s May announcement was whether every child in Anaheim meant exactly that, thereby impacting all the elementary school districts wholly or partly in the city, or just the ACSD, which, with 19,000 students, certainly accounts for a huge proportion of the children in Anaheim.

At the NAMM/ACSD rollout Mayor Tait repeated his vision for all children to have access to musical instruments. Even he was  encouraged to play the sax as  a child!

This is music to NAMM’s ears, because although they are a not for profit organization the prospect of providing and maintaining instruments for 19,000 children is a juicy prospect for the Music Merchants it represents.

The success of this venture will change the city’s culture. Families which have been disinterested in the arts will gradually become supporters and sponsors to the point where they become a part of a movement in which their kids, thousands of them, are now learning to play violins, flutes, clarinets and the like. Less time will be given to the synthetic, commercially overhyped, studio-engineered mush that passes for music as children tap into the rich seams of music that have characterized so much of American and European culture in the past. This is not to say they will all end up being classical musicians; but classical forms of music and instrumentation become the starting point for whatever modern music forms young artists will move into.

Prime movers in the Anaheim music initiative
And beyond question is the huge effect that the very act of learning to play music has on the development of the brain. Mary Luehrsen (left) says, “If you want statistics and science papers on this, we got them all. More than you could possibly read.” She is right. The impact of music is profound across a broad spectrum of child development, learning abilities, motivation, empathy and behavior. Implemented on a wide scale it is revolutionary.

Anyone who keeps abreast of the state of youth culture in many parts of Anaheim will know of baneful influences that rob kids of their innocence, inculcate a spirit of indifference to education, and coerce them into the gang-related activities. The police maintain maps of the gang distributions across  Anaheim! You would be amazed to see how gang territory has been carved out. Poverty, at-risk families, the prospect of finding personal identity through a gang, of quick kicks without the effort of work - all drag on our schools. For it only takes a few determined anti-social young people in a school to turn it into a disciplinary battle ground ...

Editorial note
The following paragraphs have been edited in the light of helpful discussion, September 14th, with the Superintendent of the AUHSD and Assistant Superintendent Manuel Colon.

... Watch these kids grow over the years and see what happens. Naturally, many will survive extraordinarily well, and dedicated teachers are frequently mentors and role models for success. But, we are always concerned about the drop-outs.  And not all who graduate are necessarily successful in college. Fortunately, with an emphasis on career, as well as college, readiness and the improved literacy stemming from Common Core, there are other pathways for young people to tread which are now making an impact. But looking back over the past generation we have still lost thousand of kids to poor education and the sense of helplessness. The reasons for this are manifold.

So what does the ACSD/NAMM initiative have to do with all this? It sets a determined trend that says we can slowly turn this round, affecting the development of every child and family. Music, and I mean the very act of learning to play music,  can be one of the most powerful formative influences on young children.

Here we are at the start of the 2015-16 school year and the ACSD has rearranged its budget so that  it can hire four full time music teachers. By this time next year they plan to have music teachers in all of their schools. This means that music will move from being an after school activity to being an integral part of the school curriculum. The magnitude of this planning is hard to overstate. And this is only a beginning.

Maybe it’s too early to answer this question, but we want to know whether this same strategy will characterize all of Anaheim’s elementary school districts? Magnolia has certainly begun very seriously to address the need for the arts in the classroom. But this time last year there were some school districts where you could not find the word arts in their school budget plan. Mercifully, the tide is turning.

We have our concerns

The grandiose way in which NAMM set the tone at the Honda Center roll-out could have given the impression that they were the only game in town that could make a  difference. Or at least, that they were the leaders. It was soon pointed out that there  are many other Orange County arts agencies that have powerful roles in bringing the arts back into our schools. With an improving economy more money is becoming available, but the changes are taking place with less of the volume and crashing cymbals of a music convention. Any ongoing collaboration needs to give full credence to these potential partners.

There was concern articulated that other art forms (dance, theatre, visual arts) seemed only to be on the periphery of the envisioned change. Those concerns are well founded. It is not good enough to say that these would follow along in the wake of a musical resurgence. Drama, dance, and visual arts are also in need of huge injections of funds and strategic planning to put those subjects back in the classroom.

Whereas it has become obvious that music makes a huge difference to growing kids, it has NOT been adequately appreciated that not all kids are talented at music and that other art choices in schools are essential. There are school board members and administrators who do not understand this, though they might pay lip-service to it. Move to south county, or San Diego county, or look at our local private high schools, and you see the integration and value of the other performing arts. This, however, is substance for another discussion.

The Anaheim Union High School District, represented at the roll-out, will have to make major changes within the next two years to accommodate the number of children coming into middle school with the ability to read music and play non-band instruments. It's a big challenge that needs much discussion to find solutions. We are not sure that this dialog between the ACSD and the AUHSD has yet taken place. All the middle schools have excellent band programs, but it would be a defeat of the musical aspirations generated at elementary school to give trumpets and horns to the new string players and tell them to play these instead. There would, perhaps, need to be orchestral teachers hired in all middle schools; there might need to be structural curriculum changes to accommodate these arts disciplines. Chorus will make a comeback, eventually. Theatre and dance departments will need fresh talent recruited. (Happily, although very underfunded, visual arts departments are strong in most schools.)

It doesn’t stop at middle schools, for even though high school counselors are focussed on steering teens into courses that will prepare them for college this should never, ever mean a diminution of arts opportunities. If Oxford Academy can turn out high quality graduates year after year and sustain a string orchestra (which, of course, means more than stringed instruments) why can’t other high schools? They will need to tool up for this because the demand will come, welling up from the elementary schools. We do not relish the thought of a school board breaking faith with its musical students by not having the teaching competence at each site to progress the talents of its instrumentalists. To have a district GATE orchestra will not be enough. Each school will need its own GATE-style orchestra.

Lastly, the name is a little pretentious. Anaheim Creativity Council. Anaheim Music Initiative might be more accurate. Unless all the arts come into full focus, with equal determination to get dance and drama into all schools, the word Creativity lacks sufficient content for the purpose. Of course the nonprofit Anaheim Arts Council, which has been around since 1977, is a poor church mouse compared with the nonprofit NAMM, or even the ACSD. But did not anybody think to say that the semantic field of arts names is getting a bit too cluttered to have both an Anaheim Arts Council and an Anaheim Creativity Council. Creativity? Arts? Kind of similar? Oh well, people with lots of money have always been able to call themselves whatever they wanted. Anaheim is not short of exemplars of this!

We wish the new collaboration well. It seriously needs to succeed, to change the climate in the city; and maybe, finally, get Anaheim companies to realize that investment in the arts is an investment in their own future. What they sow, they will reap, even if it takes almost 12 years for the first crop to come to fruition.


Thursday, September 03, 2015

Open letter to Kim Davis – Rowan County Clerk, KY

Dear Kim,

You are being very brave in the face of huge opposition to your faith-motivated stand on the gay and lesbian marriage license issue. It must take huge courage.

PART 1. The basic issue

I’m writing because I would like you to be even more brave! Let me explain how, with a little personal ramble.

I used to be a pastor of a Baptist church in England. Like you I was a firm believer that the Bible was the word of God and if it spoke clearly on any given subject then it superseded any laws or edicts of men.

I was very troubled about gay people coming to my church; two gay men in particular. Well, we did not so much mind them coming, but we thought it would be an issue if they wanted to take communion, or become church members. So nobody really said anything because we didn’t want to be rude. But we believed, as I’m sure you do, that the biblical abhorrence of homosexuality was to be taken very seriously.

This put me in a bind when preaching the Word on Sundays. Occasionally I would encounter a passage from the Bible that dealt with homosexuality. I needed to teach my people faithfully, as I understood it, but there were these two gay men, sitting there together, listening and learning. It was quite hard to be true to our evangelical understanding of the Bible and not at the same time appear offensive to these two perfectly gentlemanly individuals. What was to be done?

I happened across a book called “Brain Sex” – quite an old book by now. Very well written, it drew upon wide research into the differences between men and women, and heterosexual and homosexual people in particular. I’m not going to start quoting from it now but I’d like to share with you what I discovered. Here are the points in brief (some of which many of us already know):
  • Basic gender differentiation is determined by the X and Y chromosomes. If you have two X chromosomes you are a female. If you have one of each, you are male. But, of course, it didn’t stop there.
  • The actual development of the very young fetus, and in particular the set of cells that will form into gonads and genitalia, is conditioned by hormones, not genes. That was a surprise. Furthermore, these same hormones impact the wiring of the brain. Yes, the brains of men and women are differently wired. Of course I speak generally and there is no space here to develop this.
  • When this “wash” of hormones (in minute quantities) hits the fetal brain and the primary gender cells, the mix of hormones might be slightly off. Too much (or too little) of one or another hormone could cause cells to develop contrary to the basic genetic sex of the fetus. The results may be mild or dramatic! You could get a genetic girl born with male looking genitalia. Or vice versa. And the effect on the hard wiring of the brain is similar. Here is a girl who feels and thinks more like a boy; or here is a boy who prefers boys to girls and yet who loves girls’ toys and dresses. It’s very confusing. The point is that the child has no control of this whatsoever. It’s how he or she is formed in the womb and molded by sex hormones.
  • When puberty comes these pesky hormones kick off all over again – about which the young teen can do absolutely nothing – reinforcing the sex profile first developed when the child was only a six week old fetus.
  • The growing self-awareness of young teens as to whether they like other kids of the same sex, or the opposite sex, is not a choice; it is a discovery of how they ARE; how they have been from before birth.
  • The effect of the puberty hormone release also affects the brain. The wiring may become more feminine in some boys and more masculine in some girls. These are the gays and lesbians. There is a huge range of possible outcomes. I have made this very simple so that we can all grasp it.

So I began to understand that God could not possibly judge someone for being what they are if they cannot help it. It would be like saying I reject little people because they are little – but they can’t help that. Hopefully God does not reject little people.

Three possibilities are used to summarize why some people might be gay or lesbian. 1) they made a moral choice to go that way; 2) they were influenced by others or some subculture to go for a gay lifestyle, or 3) they had no choice. They were born that way.

The only correct answer is 3. They were born that way. End of argument, unless you live with your head in the sand.

Then I began to wonder why God would be so discriminatory and judgmental about gays and lesbians if they could not help how they were? This made me very uneasy. I mean, VERY!

Of course there are those who then add to all this their personal revulsion about the sexual behavior of gays and lesbians. They do things that the human body was not designed to do! And you know what I discovered? That there are many heterosexual people who do ALL the things that homosexual people do. Do I need to be more explicit? I hope not. So why the revulsion?

This brings me almost to my conclusion – a very brave one; braver than your stand right now.

I had been in the ministry   for 20 years and was a well known and respected Bible teacher. I had two degrees in theology and related Christian studies. I did not really know anything other than pastoring and preaching. Sure, I always had to wrestle with my own doubts and failings – who doesn’t? But intellectually I was solid and honest with my Bible based beliefs.

Until then. Slowly I had to accommodate my mind to the fact that with regard to the Bible’s condemnation of homosexuality it was written before people understood that gay people were as normal as straight people for they were, if you will, as God had made them. They were formed in the womb and popped out with no choice as to the sexuality they developed when only a ball of cells six weeks old. 

Then this: if God was going to condemn people for being what they could not help being then I was not sure I liked his program. That did not seem just, let alone loving. I wasn’t sure I liked him, and I told him so.

What to do? I could have changed my theology and become some pallid liberal who sits loose by the “inspiration” of the Bible and can therefore skip round or reinterpret what the Good Book says about homosexuality. But that would have been intellectually dishonest – to me, anyway. Many theologians hold views like that, and I am not going to debate them here.

Here is what I did. I concluded that with regard to homosexuality, the Bible was wrong! And if the Bible was wrong about this, then everything might begin to crumble. For what else could be wrong? It was no longer the inspired, infallible Word of God.

And I quit the ministry. In fact my discovery that the Bible was wrong was being rumbled by my elders and deacons and they gave me such a push that I had no choice but to go out into a world where I had no idea what to do next.

What do you do when you’re in your late 40s and you discover that the solid ground on which you had built your faith and public ministry is no longer solid? I tell you it ripped me apart. Of course I recovered in time, and I am by far the better for it. But that’s another story.

Kim, I said at the beginning that I wanted you to be yet more brave. And I do. I would like you to be brave enough – even though you have made such a huge stand on principle – to open your eyes to the possibility that you may be wrong. Not just that you may be wrong but, horror of horrors, that the Bible may be wrong.

Does that seem like everything will collapse? That’s where the bravery comes in, because it will. But I ask you to believe me when I say that being divested from a cruel and judgmental belief system is more liberating than you could ever image.

And there will be tens of thousand of people here in the Unites States who will welcome you and your extraordinary bravery. I will be just one if them.

This is the toughest time of your life. The agony will be intense. But it’s a pathway not only you, but millions of others, need to tread.


PART 2. Gay marriage

Let’s come now to same sex marriage. The very term evokes strong antipathy with many people, for reasons we all know. By definition, it is said, the only valid marriage is a union between one man and one woman.

It’s interesting how some Christians have tried to corner the market on the definition of marriage claiming it is a God-ordained institution specified in the Bible.

This resonates strongly for the Christian believer, but in fact the scope and definition of marriage owes far more to history, geography and culture than to the Bible. The ancient Chinese, Greek and Roman peoples did not know about the niceties of Christian marriage. But their men and women still married each other, as they did in countless other cultures where the joining of a man and woman was a great event, often representing some compact between the two families, and with the prospect of children. From slaves, serfs and servants to the high born marriage has had roughly the same definition for centuries.

I find that in many ancient cultures gay marriages also took place! Not surprisingly it seems that the practice, though allowed, was not as widely acceptable as heterosexual marriage. But it was no secret.

In the United States the mindset about traditional Christian marriage has been very deeply rooted in our culture. But cultures and attitudes change. More and more people refuse to be bound by the religious definitions of the few.

Here, in my opinion, is the crucial issue. I have shown already that being gay is not a choice. So the extension of rights and opportunities to gays and lesbians through marriage is a matter of justice.

Gay people who love each other, and choose to live together have, until recently been denied the many hundreds of special provisions made for married people with regard to tax regulations, healthcare, funerals and wills, banking, and so forth.

If there were not so many special provisions for married, straight people, there might not be an issue. But this simple question is unanswerable: why should gay people, who want to commit their lives to each other, be denied the rights extended to straight couples simply because the hormonal “wash” at six weeks in the womb, set them up to be homosexual?

In our modern age it is a monstrous travesty of natural justice that equal treatment should not be extended to gay couples. Of course, there is no way the thousands of relevant rules and regulations can be picked though and modified to accommodate gay couples equally. There is only one quick, simple remedy. Let them be married on equal footing with other couples.

And that’s where we are now. Deep emotional or religious reasons might make individuals balk at the changes. It takes a very brave decision to let go of outmoded principles to embrace the reality of our modern culture.

Remember, I have shown that the biblical attitude to gays and lesbians is hideous, and based on cultural and scientific ignorance from over 2000 years ago. It is morally indefensible to contend that what the Bible says on the subject comes from a heart of infinite justice and love. And if God really did utter all those biblical condemnations of  homosexuals, then I do not believe that THAT God even exists. The Bible was tempered by the prejudices and beliefs of a bygone era. We now know so much more. We have moved on.

So we come to our conclusion. It takes a brave person to change their mind. It can be personally costly and emotionally confusing – as it was for me. But that’s where courage comes in. For whatever the personal cost, we sometimes have to change our minds, free ourselves from the prison of an unreal belief system, and give space for other people to live their lives the way they deserve to.

Kim, ponder these things carefully as you continue your struggle to try and maintain your conscience against so much social pressure.

It is no longer brave to stay where you are. The only brave thing to do is to change. Many have done it before you. You will not be alone.

Wishing you wisdom, courage and humility.

Yours, with care and tenderness,

Michael Buss
September 1, 2015

References
Moir, A and Jessel, D. Brain Sex: The Real Difference Between Men and Women. 1992
History of same-sex unions, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_same-sex_unions.