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Art at the Heart of Learning |
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by Eric Booth [Adapted from a keynote address given at Chorus America's 26th Annual Conference in Kansas City, June 5, 2003.] When I walked into the lobby today, I saw all these tables with name cards and people engaging in one-on-one conversations at each one. When I asked what this was, my host explained, "These are some of the leading people in the choral field, who make themselves available throughout the Conference to share what they know with people who might find value in it." I was struck by how different this is from the rest of the arts world. Something is happening in Chorus America that is not only different, but is exactly what the rest of the arts need to be doing in order to reengage the American public. American arts are full of serious questions; I have been thrilled to discover that Chorus America is brimming with answers. The American people currently feel more alienated from the arts than any people have in human history. As I've been getting to know Chorus America, I've been discovering more and more that chorus members are the embodiment of a direction in which the arts need to head. Part of that reason has to do with the word "amateur," which from its etymology means "participation based on love." Choral music is the healthiest branch of the arts, where the love of creating is still alive. Within its professional ranks also, the amateur aspect is alive and well. Also important is this notion of participation, that the art is not about standing back or judging, having lots of intellectual things to say, and requiring lots of education to appreciate its difficulty and complexity. Rather, it is about engagement, about pouring yourself into it and knowing what it feels like to be a part of the arts. The arts are about experiences - and chorus participation is about being inside the sound, about creating something extraordinary with a community of fellow artists.
The Verbs of Art What I mean by the verbs of art are not only the verbs that the artists engage in to create the nouns, but more importantly, the verbs that we as listeners and performers engage in to bring them back to life. It takes our participation, both in the creation, the recreation, and the appreciation of the nouns to create the vitality that brings people into the arts of their own volition. I was also impressed by the way that those of you attending this Conference began your morning: by singing. How remarkable. You didn't begin with a lot of talk. You didn't hire a group to give a stirring performance - no, you performed yourselves, and within seconds, you slipped into the process of making a choral work. It wasn't enough that you sang it nicely, but Alice Parker brought you into "how do we make it better," and without anyone saying anything, that's where the group wanted to go: into the process of improvement, of making the work more rewarding, richer, more surprising. Then Mary Lyons shared Chorus America's vision statement for education and outreach, awarding a program that personified arts engagement and collaboration. This Conference began not with a statement of nouns, but with a statement of verbs. This is the state of mind that the arts in America need to adopt - to love the process of growing together, to have fun in improvement and experimentation. This is how artists work - as opposed to much of the rest of America's arts institutions, which hide process, celebrate only virtuosity, and seem to enjoy themselves so rarely. I want to tell you the story of my first day as a teaching artist. I had worked in theater for a number of years, and one time after my show closed on Broadway, instead of taking a job as a waiter, I decided to work as a teaching artist. The first gig that came along was with a ballet company. The occasion put me in front of an audience of 400 teachers and students in an auditorium, with the ballet company onstage, and I was supposed to be an intermediary who would turn this performance event into an educational event. So, there's the ballet company dancing up a storm onstage, and nothing good is happening in the auditorium. I realized that this was my moment. So I stopped the dancing, stepped forward onstage, and attempted to get the audience a little more hooked into what was happening. I asked, "Does anyone out there take ballet?" I scanned the audience and not a single hand went up to help me out, until over in the fourth row, I saw a hand rise. It was a little boy, so I headed over to him to get a dialogue going and relate it to what was happening onstage. Just as I was about to speak to him, his teacher leaned over and said, "Johnny, put your hand down. You don't take ballet!" And I actually heard Johnny whisper back to her, "Take ballet? I thought he said 'HATE ballet!'" That was my first day in the arts education world, and it was a harbinger of the next 30 years in that I learned just how great the gap is between what happens on the stage and what happens in the audience. I also learned that there is a role for an intermediary, a go-between, someone who takes an audience and finds ways to draw them into the performance. That's another reason why I have found such excitement around Chorus America. Choruses do not separate the roles of educator from artist. More than any other art form I've encountered, choruses embrace the outreach vision as part of the art itself, including the audience as fully as possible, in understanding what it means to be a choral participant. I think this is the standard the other arts need to aspire to. In an orchestra, for example, you have an education department, Balkanized in the periphery of the organization, getting grants, and sometimes doing good, but usually quite discrete, separate programs. In the chorus world, I have the sense that it is everyone's job to openheartedly invite in as many people as possible, and help in every way you can.
Art vs. Entertainment Art, on the other hand, happens outside of what we already know. Inherent in the artistic experience is an expansion of the way the world is or could be. The art is not in that noun up there onstage. The art is in that amazing human capacity to be able to expand your sense of the way the world is, or might be. We know for sure that the art really lives in that verb. You can have three people sitting next to each other at a performance of Mozart's Requiem. One person is having a life-transforming experience; the second is having a relaxing, pleasant time, enjoying how pretty the music is; the third is having a bad night out. It's the same performance, but because of the different verbs those people are able to engage in, they have entirely different experiences - from miraculous to monstrous. I believe everybody in the arts has the same job description. We are all agents of artistic experience. In fact, when I give speeches to the "suits" of the arts, I make them take out their business cards, cross out their job titles, and write in "agent of artistic experience." That's what we all do, whether we are ushers, performers, or marketing directors. We serve as agents for other people to wake up to the arts experience. Some of the findings from Chorus America's Chorus Impact Study affirm the impressions I've had about choral singers. The study shows that their participation in philanthropic work is much higher than the general public, and their arts participation (not just in music, but in all the arts) is twice as high as non-chorus members. Choral singers are also more engaged in their communities and civically active and aware: They read newspapers and participate in politics at rates twice the national average. And there is a great deal of evidence that indicates how choral singers' social lives are enriched through their arts participation. This is exactly the kind of vitality that we don't find in the rest of the arts. When you go to some of the other arts conferences, you will find very professional looking people, but there is negativity, a sense of sticking within the boundaries of their tradition and a caution about sharing what one knows - all of which are the opposite of what I've experienced here.
Two Arts Engagement Exercises [Ideas from the audience include comments about the staid, institutional look of room, the fact that there were two podiums, and only one had water and a mike, exit signs, the different level stages behind the podium; speculation on what those might mean.] Now stop, and look at the way we were observing for the last two minutes. Not what we actually concluded, but the experience you had looking at the stuff that is up here for the previous 15 minutes. All these things -- like the podiums and the various levels of the stage -- your eyes took them in, but it was only when I invited you to slip into participation, into the work of art, that you began to participate. All it took was a simple "what if" game. Notice how different it feels. You could feel the whole temperature in the room go up when people began to offer ideas about what something could mean, or pointed out something. We began to appreciate each other, to hear little grunts of approval, a little laughter of recognition, and we began to get ideas of our own. What a different mode of experience than the kind of attention we were having for the previous 15 minutes, when you were kind of sitting back in your chair, looking at me, thinking something along the lines of: "That's kind of amusing, boy that guy has a lot of hair, what is that on his tie? I wonder if my car parking is going to be all right, what am I going to get for dinner tonight?" That's the kind of jumble of attention that comprises 95 percent of our day, and indeed comprises almost 100 percent of students' lives. How different that becomes when we slip into the work of art. And how much more we're able to do when we're engaged in the verbs, and not just sitting back and judging the nouns. Again, I notice how evident this seems in the choral world. I'd like to do another little exercise with you. It is equally easy, but it takes a little bit longer. It has a live performance in it, so we've hired the world's cheapest theatrical troupe -- that would be me -- to do a live performance after we have a bit of preparation. It's almost like a little art sequence: we'll have preparation, a live performance, and then we'll reflect on it a little bit. For this exercise, the culminating experience is going to be the performance of a Shakespeare sonnet. I wish I had some kind of gizmo that let me hear people's inner thoughts. Because I have the hunch that lots of you aren't thinking, "Yahoo, I was hoping my morning would begin with a sonnet! When I woke up this morning, I had the sense that there might be a sonnet in my day." Indeed, I believe almost everyone in this audience has had some mixed experience of the art offering that is about to follow. Maybe you were brutalized by a mean ninth grade English teacher, or forced to sit through a four-hour King Lear, but you probably have a mixed experience of success and pleasure with Shakespeare. Which is so akin to how almost all Americans feel about the arts. They don't think, "Mahler, yippee!" They don't hear, "Oratorio! Let me drop everything and get there." All Americans bring this knapsack not only of personal difficulty, but of cultural disinterest to the arts offering. So we have to become increasingly more adept at the ways that we can invite them in. So if we have three minutes to prepare for a Shakespearean sonnet, what are some things that I can do in three minutes before the performance that would actually enhance your experience of the sonnet? [Suggestions from the audience included: be reminded what sonnet form is, a little historical context around sonnets, some information about why Eric Booth picked this particular sonnet, what the theme of it is, some guiding questions, what are the meanings of some the unfamiliar words.] Okay, here's my three-minute preparation, which looks very different. I'm going to ask you four questions, and I'm going to ask you to just write down your answer, whatever comes to you. Then I will speak the sonnet, and right after, quickly jot down some notes about your experience during the sonnet, so we have those notes before you forget. Here's the first question: I'm going to name a general state of emotion, something everyone feels at some time or other in life, and I'd like you to write down a title for what you might call it when it happens to you. A specific descriptor that captures your personal experience of it. The general emotion is: You're down in the dumps, as low as you get. What would you call that state of mind? Second, think of a couple of things you might find yourself doing in your everyday life that would be indicators that you're in that low state of mind. Like, I just ate a pint of ice cream, I must be down in the dumps. The third may be the hardest. Imagine you're in that low state of mind, and jot down a couple of thoughts that might shoot through your mind about other people. (You might want to write in code!) The last question is, what is something that could or does happen in your life that takes you right out of that state of mind? Okay, it's sonnet time. Keep your pens handy to jot down notes about the content of your experience afterwards. Sonnet No. 29
When in disgrace with Fortune and men's eyes, OK, let's check in on your notes. [Participant remarked that she felt that she could stay with sonnet all the way through, and feel some of what Shakespeare had felt.] Big success for that preparation! Imagine, you could connect with a work of art that is over 400 years old, written in archaic language. With just a few minutes of preparation, you can set aside all that difference and go right in there and make a connection, so you thought, me and Willy, we've been there together! That's a huge accomplishment that we don't usually recognize. And I picked a sonnet. I purposely chose a totally archaic art form. We don't deal with sonnets in the 21st century. They're way to fussbudget-y, persnickety in their form. They seem old-fashioned and irrelevant. Usually that kind of antiquity of form precludes the possibility of having a real experience of it, or at least makes it much more difficult. Yet with just a little preparation, we can set aside all those prejudices, put aside the fact that it doesn't look like a 21st century, immediately charming and entertaining media product, put aside the fact that it's in an old-fashioned form, that we don't even understand some of the words in it, and go in and do the personal work of making relevant connections. What a huge testament to power of the verbs of a participant in an audience, and to the power of art, that we can, with just a little bit of effort, instantly reach across 400 years, and have the personal satisfaction of connection across human history. I want to point out a couple of features of the work we did in preparation for reading the sonnet. Number one, I didn't make a single declarative sentence. It was all inviting you to do the work. I gave you authentic artistic work. And I didn't tell you a single thing about the sonnet, even though the way America usually brings people into the arts is through information. There's nothing wrong with information, it's just a lousy provoker of artistic experience. Most of the suggestions that came from the audience about how to prepare for a sonnet were about telling you "sonnet stuff." Let me give you a transcript of what the experience of listening to that sonnet would have been if I had followed those directions: "Okay, here comes the sonnet, Okay, yeah, I'm hearing that iambic pentameter he talked about, goes da-da, da-da, oh, there's a rhyme, he told me that rhyme pattern. There's bootless, I know what bootless is. This guy seems kind of sad, I guess. Oh, there's another rhyme. That wasn't iambic pentameter, what's going on? Oh, right, he said things kind of switched between the eighth and ninth lines, so we must be in the latter part of it now. Oh yeah, different rhyme scheme. Couplet? Couplet, it's over." You would have dutifully applied yourselves to the information I gave you, and in so doing, would have completely precluded your chance to doing anything of personal importance. I would have strangled the chance for you to give a damn about sonnets. I would have confirmed all your preconceptions about sonnets - that they're old-fashioned, they're boring, they don't give you anything, it's just about form, and you never want to hear one again. And what's so poignant is that I would have created that with only the best of intentions. I would have been trying to give someone all the valuable things that would help them connect and care the way I do, but because of that tendency to think that arts agency is about giving information, it would have confirmed the American prejudice that we don't belong in arts.
Attend, Respond, Connect… I did some experimental research with some teachers who had no musical background at all. I played them two minutes of a Samuel Barber woodwind quartet - one of those modern-sounding pieces that can result in subscription cancellations when programmed frequently. I asked them to take careful note of what they did with their attention all the way through. I found that the teachers used an average of six different listening strategies. What I mean by a listening strategy is: "Here comes an unfamiliar piece of music, I'm going to listen for melody. Okay, there's no melody. I'm going to listen for repeated patterns of things. Not hearing that, I'm going to kick back and hear if I have an emotional response. No, nothing there." The skill of attention is to intentionally redirect the way you attend to something. It's not just to give it a vague effort and bail out if you don't immediately connect, which is the standard way that Americans relate to the arts. Instead, you intentionally believe that by slight adjustments, or by using your common sense or just kind of making an experiment, that you are actually going to succeed in finding something of personal value. I believe the arts train these skills of attention better than anything else. That's partly why I'm so passionate about including the arts in the education of all American students, because when we train them how to pay attention, we wake them up for the rest of their lives from the many anesthetics that our culture marinates them in. John Dewey, the philosopher of education, was asked to define what "aesthetic" meant: Aesthetic, the flagship word of artistic egotism! Being a heavy-duty philosopher, he set out to do it, and two weeks later, he came back and said he had determined that he could not define what aesthetic meant, but he did know its opposite was anesthetic! That's the kind of aesthetic education we're talking about. Waking up. Not standing back and appreciating the structure of a musical piece, and the complexity of the counterpoint, but waking up to seeing what is there. Just as we woke up to notice what was on the stage, when I invited you into that simple arts activity of "what if," and suddenly what had been a neutral background became alive with possibility and interest. The arts don't need to be impressing people with the fanciness, with the complexity of what we do artistically. Indeed, we are woefully guilty of emphasizing the difficulty, of wanting people to know how hard it is to do what we do, and making them believe it requires a lot of education to understand it. The chorus world is way ahead in minimizing this approach to the arts, but even you need to be mindful that engagement is about helping people find a way in, a personal connection. The second of these four verbs of art is one I call "response-ability" - that is, the capacity to have an authentic response. Not the response they told you to have and not the response you're supposed to have, but the response you have when you encounter something new. This capacity to reach inside and touch something personal, something that is really you, is a skill of art. It's the beginning of having a personal voice. It's the beginning of believing that your judgment is to be trusted. It's something artists are brilliant at, the capacity to tap into who they are and come forth with something unique and fresh that's really theirs, that captures an essential idiosyncrasy that is them, and offer it back to the world as a kind of gift. Indeed, the word respond etymologically means "to promise back." It's not just a knee-jerk reaction. It's a personal commitment, a personal gift back to the world. And all of us have a birthright to engage in this creative giving back on a regular basis. It is, of course, the basis of feeling that you have a place in a community, be it a family, a school, an arts group, or a society. It certainly is the basis of feeling that you are a participant in a democracy. Having the "response-ability" not just to vote or not, but to offer back what you truly believe in response to what's going on. The arts train this and build its confidence better than anything else. The third of the verbs of art is making connections. Because of your unique experience, every time you make a personal connection to a work of art, it is the first time any person in the world has ever done it. It is a creative act and it brings the same kind of artistic satisfaction that making art does. That moment of "Aha!", that capacity to expand your sense of the way the world is even just a little bit, is an act of enormous consequence. Certainly schools encourage people to make connections. Schools are all about making connections. The trouble with schooling is that it has almost entirely put its chips on making logical connections. And humans are born with a wide array of ways that we can make connections to things. Indeed, we spend most of our lives using all those other ways to make sense of the world. We connect emotionally, kinesthetically, intuitively, spiritually, associatively, and in ways we can't even name. The arts are one place in a young person's life, and one of the few places in the lives of our society, where we're invited to throw wide open all the ways to connect, which is why arts participation has so much heat when people engage.
Awaken the Yearning I think we in the arts, we in this Chorus America gathering, are in the yearning business. Our first and most important job is to awaken the yearning in ourselves and others, and to guide that yearning energy into rewarding engagements that give us a pleasurable experience that makes us want to come back again and again, to go deeper and deeper. I think yearning is the capacity our country is flailing to find, and it lives in abundance in the arts, when we can find ways to engage it. When the word yearning first came into English it described the baying of hounds at moon, which is vaguely appropriate. I picture some big old hound looking up at the moon and feeling this ancient urge to connect, but not knowing what it means or how to express it and so letting loose with this big old yowl to express that reach. Just as we, when presented with the opportunity, are willing to reach out, reach forward, and try to connect. People are shaped by what they extend themselves into. We must be careful with the objects that we present to ourselves and to our children, because we are changed by them. Art lends shape to passion and yearning. Art is the best container for yearning because it is so rich, so human, so satisfying on so many levels. Art gives serious outer shape to serious inner yearning. And if these yearnings are informed by less rich objects, they go to sleep, they die, or eventually express themselves in the harmful symptoms of search that fill the pages of the daily paper. Plato once said that there is one thing a society must accomplish above all others if it is going to succeed. It didn't have to do with economy, government, or politics, but simply this: A society had to teach its young people to find pleasure in the right things. And there is no righter thing than artistic engagement, both the creating of things we care about, and the participation in things that others have made with love. Which is where we get back to the amateur ideal that Chorus America brings to the rest of the arts world. Not to say that it's not a profession. The choral arts are highly professional. But they have not lost that amateur spirit. I could feel it the moment I walked in the room. Love is alive in this making, and that is what draws people into the yearning work that can re-engage their birthright to have a place in the arts: To sing forth as worthy individuals who are a participating part of a community committed to quality and goodness. There's a rule of thumb I use with my students at Juilliard and elsewhere, that I call the "Rule of 80 percent." I see them cringing when I'm heading toward it, because it places such a hard burden on us. It's a made-up number, but it captures a truth, which is that 80 percent of what we teach is who we are. 80 percent of the impact we have as educators, and indeed we are all educators all the time, is the quality of the person in room. We have the 20 percent that's important - our curriculum, the outreach program, our education program, our guidebooks, all that stuff we work so hard to make beautiful. But the 80 percent is what finally has the biggest impact. If you don't believe me, look at the great teachers in your own lives. It wasn't the quality of their curriculum that changed your life, it was the quality of that 80 percent. That's another advantage that the chorus world seems to have over the rest of the arts. Every chorus person I have encountered is radiant with that 80 percent, is resonant with the benefits of a life around the arts. In many of the others, they aren't: they are grouchy people of the arts, or ungrateful, or just too burdened, but coming up to them, we don't immediately feel the radiance of that 80 percent. One of the responsibilities of people in the arts is to keep that 80 percent healthy and alive and vibrant. We cannot let ourselves get too burnt out and so overextended or focused on the wrong priorities, that we don't glow with that delight to have active satisfaction and participation in the arts. I want to end on a note of reality, recognizing that as highfalutin' and grandiose as these aspirations are, certainly we need to remain mindful of the difficulties of a life in the arts, and the difficulties of the practical side. I think the ultimate art form of people in the arts is to be able to maintain this balance; to continue to yearn and aspire to those highest of ideals without losing touch with the practical necessities that keep a chorus alive, keep it performing, growing, finding new audiences, getting the funding, and all the realities of our professional lives. The balancing act is not to let one of the other predominate. Too often in the arts, I see people losing some of their highest aspirations in the strangulation of those practicalities, and sometimes I see people not attending adequately to the practicalities because they are only in love with the high aspirations. That balance was best described by Robert Frost, in the last stanza of the poem "Two Tramps in Mud Time," which I want to speak in closing:
But yield who will to their separation, My final word to you is thank you - thank you for going the extra mile again and again to engage audiences in participation, to stay in love with the quality of your work, and engage the verbs of art in your own and everyone's lives.
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