towards a new arts education
Violinist Pekka Kuusisto performing with a dancer at Meidän Festivaali
“I WRITE FOR THE SAME REASON I BREATHE — BECAUSE IF I DIDN’T, I WOULD DIE.”
ISAAC ASMIOV
1. “How you do anything is how you do everything.”
Last year my choir performed the famously challenging Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Musicologists widely consider the choral movement poorly-written. The parts are difficult to sing, and the movement is a marathon that comes after three other marathon instrumental movements.
We had been working on the piece for weeks and were finally rehearsing with the full orchestra on the concert stage. After rehearsal, some of the altos were talking about three particular challenging notes: Finding the correct starting pitch, as well as the intervals between the notes, was difficult in the fast, loud section of Beethoven.
As we talked about the three notes and I offered some suggestions to improve them, one of my choir mates said, shrugging, “No one's going to hear that part anyway.”
I was gutted. I told my partner after rehearsal that night, and clearly I’ve been thinking about it for nearly a year at this point. It felt like a failure on my part as the leader not because of the notes, but because I hadn’t been able to convince this person (and many others, I’m sure), that these things matter.
The Zen saying goes, “How you do anything is how you do everything.” It means that the intention, attention, and commitment that you bring to a task as seemingly mundane as sweeping a floor is the same intention, attention, and commitment that you bring to things like your marriage. Your children. Your work. Your inner self-talk.
It’s a neurologically sound concept. Our brains don’t differentiate between “good” (or useful) and “bad” (or harmful) habits. The brain simply notices what you do all the time and builds a pattern for it in the brain — a habit. This is why you don’t have to look down at the stairs in your house, or the foot pedals in your car. It’s why you always bump into that same piece of furniture when you’re walking by, and why you always react to certain triggers with similar thoughts or complaints.
I make a point of explaining this when I teach music technique. If you keep making the same error, and you keep executing it every time you play a piece without stopping to correct the error, you are simply creating the neural pathway for the error. You’re turning that error into a habit.
(Teachers: This is why I workshop notes with altered rhythms and vice versa, or I have students start and end at illogical places in the music — because it interrupts the autopilot habits they’ve already created and generates a new center of attention.)
Similarly, if you always bring your phone with you into the bathroom, or look at it every time you’re waiting in line for something, you are building the habit of distraction. If you complain out loud every single time something bothers you, then you’re building a habit of blaming and complaining about everything. If you make self-deprecating jokes every time someone gives you a compliment, you’re devaluing yourself in every area of life.
If you are in rehearsal complaining about another artist in the room, or smearing your way through notes you don’t know, or thinking that you don’t matter as a member of the ensemble, then you are compromising your personal dignity and integrity. And I guarantee you are doing the same thing in every area of life.
This is what mindfulness is about: Stop living on autopilot and pay attention to what you’re doing. It’s not about becoming someone different. It’s becoming aware of who you already are.
Learning music is a particularly good tool for mindfulness. Yes, there are plenty of linear technical aspects that require focus and intention, but primarily in the broader sense: One function of art is to create the best, most perfect, most distilled version of our world. Samuel Taylor Coleridge said prose is “words in their best order,” while poetry is “the best words in the best order.” Is music not even more pure, more essential than this? Free from the fetters of humankind’s language, the best sounds in their best configuration and best time and best order?
When we learn music, we are confronted by this Essence: How do I respond to this pinnacle of beauty and order? What character do I bring to these inspired sounds and words? Do I care enough — not about the composer or the text, but about what I myself create in this world — to make this excellent?
We confront the technicalities and artistry, but primarily we confront ourselves.
The old story goes that when Al Pacino was preparing to depict the man on film, Pacino asked Frank Serpico why he had taken the great risk of blowing the whistle on New York police corruption. Serpico is said to have replied, “If I didn't, who would I be when I listened to a piece of music?”
2.
Any discussion of the value of arts education leads inevitably back to the source: What is the purpose of education itself?
During my brief stint as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, I heard the speech all the first-years hear, “The Aims of Education Address.” Some esteemed professor gives it each autumn, describing to the new students what they feel is the point of all this. The renowned law professor Bernard Harcourt was our tutor for the night; his address entitled, “To Question the Authority of Truth.” If I remember correctly, the crux of it was that there at the university we were not tasked with learning truth itself — having already studied well how to read, understand, and write about it — but rather to grab hold of truths, turn them over, examine what effects they have in the world and in our lives.
One wonders whether this applies to artists — not the concept, which is sound, but the idea that it can be done in a school. David Mamet wrote extensively in his book True and False (1997) that once an actor has finished acting school, they are completely incapable of acting. “Formal education for the player is not only useless, but harmful. It stresses the academic model and denies the primacy of the interchange with the audience. The audience will teach you how to act and the audience will teach you how to write and to direct. The classroom will teach you how to obey, and obedience in the theatre will get you nowhere. It’s a soothing falsity.”
The quote attributed to Picasso comes to mind: “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.”
One can easily see how the Industrial Revolution model of schooling which still tyrannically rules the youth of our country destroys not only the immediacy and primacy of creativity, but also energy, curiosity, and interest broadly. Schooling is for memorization and correctness. Life is for something else entirely.
There are educators who recognize this, of course. In the Comprehensive Musicianship through Performance (CMP) model, we identify three outcomes in every lesson plan:
Skill outcomes (a technical skill related to performance)
Knowledge outcomes (an intellectual understanding typically related to music theory)
Affective outcomes (an emotional understanding that can be learned through study of the repertoire)
For instance, my friend and mentor Randal Swiggum delineated these three outcomes for a choral study of Benjamin Britten’s Fancie (lesson plan here):
Skill: Students will read, hear, and sing half and whole steps, and recognize their function in creating tonal centers.
Knowledge: Students will recognize the motif as a compositional device.
Affective: Students will explore the idea of ambiguity—that things can often be open to several interpretations or meanings, and that things may not always be what they seem to be at first.
And each outcome includes several strategies for teaching it and several assignment methods for assessing learning progress.
Those of us who have been through the wringer of school music know: It’s a uniquely rigorous model that addresses much more than most music educators do. The CMP model asserts that the performance of music is not really the point at all, but rather it is a vehicle for inquiry, excellence, and multi-faceted development of music students of any age.
These days I’m working primarily in the world of Western art music, commonly known as “classical music”. It’s a field that emphasizes correctness and technical skill, which many people believe can only be learned by studying at the right schools and with the right teachers. Shortly after joining my choir as a section leader, I explained to a colleague that I play many different instruments. She said, “So is your degree in voice, or piano…?” To which I could only honestly respond, “I don’t have a degree.” Having reviewed the job posting which listed Bachelor’s required, Master’s preferred (not that the compensation reasonably commanded such credentials), she asked, “Then how did you get this job?” And no, she hadn’t seen my resume nor heard my audition and interview.
There is truth that technical skills must be learned somehow, and that a shared language can be established through canonical studies in theory, history, contemporary performance practice, etc., but my experience is that that's not what college is. And that those skills are all merely effects of curiosity, integrity, and perseverance. Nevertheless, our world is wedded to this modern benchmark of the college degree. I rather believe that my 25 years as an apprentice to world-renowned music educators has satisfied the requirements of education and leadership much better than any school ever could.
There is a contradiction of idolatries in this world: “Classical” music people are obsessed both with prodigious, natural “talent,” and also the slog of higher education, and "Which teacher did you study with?" Perhaps it's simply the intensity — any intensity of any thing — that we find stimulating. We feel ourselves challenged (confronted? inspired? It doesn't seem like inspiration) by people who we perceive are working harder than we are, or simply doing it better than we.
But the value of “hard work” is a capitalist conceit. It rests on the notion that a production rate is fixed (as in a factory), and that producing more/better results de facto requires more hours of work.
My direct experience is that in improving artistry or learning, it’s important to do it fewer times with intention and excellence. The ability to diagnose problems accurately is the single most important skill in teaching. A skilled ballet instructor can easily say, “Think about gripping this muscle instead of that one,” and fix a problem forever, the same way that a skilled musician can fix their breathing by standing differently, or a skilled coach can change someone’s behaviors by teaching them to think in a new way.
Eliot Eisner famously posited his 10 Lessons the Arts Teach more than twenty years ago. It includes statements like:
“The arts teach children to make good judgements about qualitative relationships. Unlike much of the curriculum in which correct answers and rules prevail, in the arts, it is judgment rather than rules that prevail.”
“The arts teach children that in complex forms of problem solving purposes are seldom fixed, but change with circumstance and opportunity. Learning in the arts requires the ability and a willingness to surrender to the unanticipated possibilities of the work as it unfolds.”
“The arts teach students that small differences can have large effects. The arts traffic in subtleties.”
Eisner worked primarily with children, but I know a good number of adults (including myself, of course,) that would benefit from these lessons as well.
3. ACCESSIBILITY AND BELONGING
Violinist Pekka Kuusisto performing with a juggler at Meidän Festivaali
There has been a lot of talk about making Western art music more “accessible”. Well, not really making it more accessible, just increasing audience sizes.
What’s the distinction?
The grand old organizations (and I include educational institutions in that list) have been losing old-music audiences for decades. And the higher-ups consistently say that the art form is inaccessible. That it needs to reach new audiences to survive. That people don’t understand it, or they think it’s not for them.
“Accessible” is simple. It describes whether or not someone is able to enter a place. It describes things like ticket price, and language spoken, and whether a person can physically move through a building.
It does not describe whether someone feels they belong there.
The problem with most “outreach” or “accessibility” work among old-music institutions is that leadership believe all it takes to create a customer is getting someone in the door. Suddenly they’ll have an epiphany about how great this music is, and be willing to invest hundreds of dollars a year. In any other context, it’s a terrible marketing strategy.
In luxury consumable product marketing (and $30-, $40-, and $50+ tickets must be considered a luxury in this day and age), a common customer objection and barrier to purchasing is that customers are afraid they’re going to use it wrong. They’re afraid they’re going to waste $48 on a fancy olive oil and burn it. They’re afraid they don’t know how to get the best flavor from a $32 bag of tea.
People who don’t understand something will never value it. And what we purchase is an expression of our values and identity.
We purchase certain things because they affirm what we believe about ourselves. The person who spends $80 on a luxurious scented candle believes they deserve it. And they want to represent wealth, excellence, and exclusivity to the people who see and smell the candle in their home. Another person would never dream of spending that kind of money on a candle because they’re not “the kind of person” who would “waste” money like that.
This is where belonging comes in.
Accessibility is a nice idea, but it doesn’t work at someone’s first symphony concert when they:
walk in the door and notice they’re comparatively under-dressed
clap at the “wrong” time and get sneers from other patrons
are never spoken to directly about the music or what to listen for, and instead are asked to read a lengthy essay by a musicologist using terms they’ve never seen
don’t know, look like, or relate to any of the people on stage
think that they’re not allowed to leave if they are bored or bothered
And so on, and so on. Another one for me is concert length. People complain about our collective diminishing attention span, and then they program 3.5-hour concerts with two intermissions and wonder why no one cares to come.
It’s the seller’s job to prove their product’s value to the customer, something that old-music institutions seemingly refuse to do, despite how incredibly easy it would be to increase belonging.
We already do it at operas. In the U.S. these days, there are supertitles (like subtitles, but above the stage instead of beneath it) projected at every single show, even the ones sung in English. That’s accessibility and belonging.
Performers should stop wearing formal clothes. I saw Pekka Kuusisto perform a concerto in a t-shirt and jeans more than 10 years ago and I still think about it all the time. Yet when my local symphony’s new Executive Director started wearing casual trousers and a sport coat to the Sunday afternoon matinees, his biggest donors chided him for it.
Leaders should start teaching audiences instead of assuming they have prior knowledge. And I’m not talking about the banal pre-concert lecture, which asks yet more time of the patron, and has them sitting in a room listening to someone chatter on. I’m talking about legitimate educational campaigns that emulate months-long marketing plans. I’m talking about taking five minutes right before the piece is performed, when the conductor highlights interesting melodies, motifs, or structural concepts, has the musicians play that excerpt for the audience, and explains how they will hear it during the piece. Here’s another place where supertitles belong: A live-action teacher pointing out key musical elements while the music is playing. (Imagine a Shostakovich symphony, rife with symbolism and musical references and in-jokes, actually illuminated and explained in just a few words as it’s happening. Groundbreaking!)
Organizations must create programming that is actually for children, in which they have an interactive classroom experience where they’re allowed to talk, dance, and ask questions at various times, with age-appropriate educational topics and behavioral expectations. This is for parents exactly as much as it is for their children.
I admit that I really don’t know if any of these changes are happening. My critique is based entirely on the very few Western art music concerts I’ve attended in the last many years, because they have become so insufferable to attend (and, to be honest, to perform) that I simply don’t. The cost, the artifice, the formality, the endless repetitions of the same pieces created by the same people, with no explanation of their value proposition for me today.
But my suspicion is that these changes are not happening out there in the world. Why? Because a big appeal for a lot of fans of complex music is the exclusivity. They like hearing the in-joke. They like knowing the thing the other person doesn’t. How do I know this? Because we demonstrate our values through our behaviors. How we do anything is how we do everything.
Seth Godin describes culture as, “People like us do things like this.” That’s all. Culture is a collective agreement made among its participants.
When we create and enforce arbitrary rules about formality, we tell people in every single moment, “The way you’re dressed is what matters most here.” Not talking or using your phone during a performance is simple kindness and respect. Those values are important. Everything else, not so much.
4.
What does a new arts education look like?
Recognizing the breadth and depth of whole-human education available through the study of the arts. That arts education is not fundamentally about producing art, but that making art is a process by which we are put in closer proximity with our Essential human Spirit, and that that is a valuable end for education of all kinds.
Education of children, adults, performers, leaders, and audiences. That all producers and purveyors of art-work seize the mandate of point #1 above and accept their leadership role as educators of all people (including themselves) through the process of art production. That regardless of our personal motivations for art-making, we recognize the incredible opportunity and responsibility we have when we are entrusted with leadership roles as art-makers.
That art is not a luxury, but an essential. That full audiences are essential — that organizations have a responsibility to provide life-giving art to as many people as possible, and, through the organization’s actions, teach those people that they belong.
Many years ago, when I was interviewing for an administrative role with a renowned orchestra, the first question I was asked by the President of the organization was, “Why do orchestras matter?”
I told a board member of an arts organization just a few weeks ago: The arts are not just some nice thing we do. They’re not just some bonus for the kids whose parents get it, or for the adults who happen to have the money and time.
In the beginning of January, I attended a memorial service for an absolute titan of an educator and advocate in our local arts scene, Risé Dawn Jones. After many other music and dance performances during the service, two of her mentees performed the Native American Honor Song and the Jingle Dress Dance. The drummer explained that the Jingle Dress was given to an Ojibwe girl in a dream. She received instructions for how to make the dress, and a dance to perform to cure her village of the illness they were experiencing. The drummer said, “That’s what Risé did. She had dreams and made them real.”
That is what the arts are for. Not some banal entertainment, or intellectual exercise, or show of superiority. They are here because at the end of our lives and beyond, this is what we will leave behind. Creation or destruction. Desolation or Spirit. Those of us who have been entrusted with stewardship of the arts ought to take up the mantle with the complete devotion it requires. Our very lives depend on it.
