The WriTings of eric BooTh

on Teaching in The arTs

Table of ConTenTs

Eric Booth is a freelance consultant in the arts and arts learning fields. He is the author of five books, including The Everyday Work of Art and The Music Teaching Artist’s Bible. This publication was produced for Eric Booth by the Philadelphia Arts in Education Partnership.

What is a Teaching Artiist? p. 1

Finding the Smallest Unifying Particle in the Human Universe p. 11

Thoughts on Seeing El Sistema June 2008 p. 16

El Sistema’s Open Secrets April 2010 p. 26

A Conversation with Eric Booth is presented in collaboration by the University of the Arts, Continuing Studies, the Philadelphia Arts in Education Partnership, The School District of Philadelphia, and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, a state agency.

What is a Teaching Artist?

There is no consensus definition of “teaching artist” in the evolving field of arts education. Five years ago, even the term would spark arguments from those who preferred the tradi-tional labels of “visiting artist,” “resident artist,” or even “artist educator.” Part of me hopes there will never be a consensus definition for a practice so varied and dynamic. There are no consensus definitions of the words “creativity” or “art” either. For very good reason—sometimes there is no single term to capture a deep truth. (Leonard Bernstein said his definition of art was that it had three attributes: it holds a complex and profound truth; it cannot be expressed in any other way; and the world would be worse without it.) Perhaps a term like teaching artist must be sounded, gestured, drawn or performed in a room with engaged learners to capture its genuine connotation. And the world would be worse with-out teaching artists. We still live in a time when you are a teaching artist if you say you are. That, incidentally, is the original meaning of the term “profession”—when you pro-fessed a vocation rather than got a degree or certification. Whether the profession of your vocation brought you a living depended on the quality of your work, not on your credentials. This is still true of the field of teaching artistry—with no official creden-tialing, you work if you are good, and you mostly get better by through experience.

One clunky definition of the term I use is: an artist who chooses to include artfully educating others, beyond teaching the technique of the artform, as an active part of a career. Yes, this could and should include just about all artists, all musicians, because we all find ourselves teaching in bits and pieces throughout our lives. We teach when we talk to family, friends, strangers and colleagues about music. We teach by example. As you will read in these essays, I believe that eighty percent of what we teach is who we are, and like it or not, our example in the world teaches people what it means to be a musician. And for the sake of our art form, I hope you teach as artfully as you perform.

This book is dedicated to helping you teach artfully and effectively—in perfor-mances, in schools and after school, in dialogue with colleagues, friends, family and strangers. This book aspires to change the way you define what teaching and art can be to one another, to your life, to music and to our culture. Most of this book is specifi-cally focused on music teaching artistry, but there are some sections, like this chapter, that include our teaching artist colleagues in dance, theater, the visual and literary arts to address the concerns of teaching artistry as a field. These broader sections present the context of an emerging profession, of which music teaching artists are an essential, leading, part. Certainly there are differences among the different disciplines, but in this first-ever book for our field, I feel the need to present a foundation for all teaching artists, truths across the disciplines, so we can work together to advance the field, not only suc-ceed within the discipline-specific piece we represent. Just as someone with a passion to become an elementary school teacher must study the history and psychology of learn-ing, the developmental stages before and after the elementary school years, and various philosophical approaches, so we should learn a little about the history and practices of teaching artistry to deepen our practice in music. I feel I would be doing music teaching artists a disservice if I did not present a context for our work that illuminates the big pic-ture and the shared vision, before we delve into our beloved part. Here are two additional definitions of a teaching artist that resonate for me:

• A teaching artist is the model of the 21st century artist, and simultaneously, a model for high-engagement learning in education;• A teaching artist is the future of art in America. I believe those statements to be true, and when you finish this book, I hope you will too.

I believe that eighty percent of what we teach is who we are.

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By the way, that statistic cited above—eighty percent of what you teach is who you are—is a made up number. That invented percentage captures the actual truth that what-ever the teaching techniques, whatever the words or activities, it is the understandings and the spirit of the individual teacher that sparks the potential to transform others. If you doubt that number, just recall the great teachers in your own life. It was not the quality of their handouts or presentations, nor the cleverness of their curriculum, that inspired you to change the direction of your life. It was the quality of who they were as people, theirteaching artistry as humans, that had such an impact on you. If you adopt some of the messages in this book, you will be on the path to having more of that kind of impact on others. You will become an active contributor to revitalizing the art of music in a culture that predominantly promotes it as entertainment. You will become part of the solution rather than a frustrated part of the problematic status quo.

Let me clarify the difference between art and entertainment. Entertainment is not the opposite of art—please Lord don’t let entertainment be the enemy of art, be op-posed to art in any way, or we are goners. What distinguishes entertainment is that it happens within what we already know. Whatever your response to the entertain-ment presentation—laughing, crying, getting excited—underneath the surface, it confirms. Entertainment says, “Yes, the world is the way you think it is.” It feels great to have your worldview confirmed in the many dynamic, imaginative, exciting ways our entertainment industries provide.

Art, on the other hand, happens outside of what you already know. Inherent in the artistic experience is the capacity to expand your sense of the way the world is or might be. The art lives in an individual’s capacity to engage in that fundamental act of creativity—expanding the sense of the possible—every bit as much as the art resides in the what’s being observed. For example, imagine, three people sitting next to one another listening to a late Beethoven string quartet. One is having a life

transforming artistic experience as she enters that musical world, expanding her grasp of what the human heart and spirit can contain and the depths to which such knowing can be expressed. The man next to her is having a very entertaining evening, enjoying the beauty of the music, admiring the way the ensemble works together, drifting off to think about some problems at work, thinking how cute the violist is, but coming back to relax in the beauty of the occasion. The next guy over was dragged there by his wife, hates the event, and is getting nothing out of the music. The same musical offering becomes a work of art, a piece of entertainment or an ordeal based on the individual’s capacity to create personally relevant connections inside the music.

Those internal skills determine the difference between art and entertainment every bit as much as the music being played. We can’t label something art just because the experts say it is. I have heard audience members describe experiences at pops concerts that inarguably are powerful artistic experiences for them. Conversely, I have heard far too many symphony attendees describe their experiences at a classical concert of officially certified “art music” as barely entertaining. I have heard teenagers describe theirexperience of dreadful-to-me rock music in ways that make it clear they are having arts experiences. Art resides in the participatory experiences as much as in the objects that ignite them. Art lives in the verbs every bit as much as in the nouns.

Teaching artists are the designated experts in the verbs of art. Their skills can support, guide, educate and illuminate people’s capacity to individually succeed in creating artistic meaning in our best artistic offerings. What teaching artists know and can do is essential to engaging new audiences for classical music, and for leading the entire field toward a culturally-relevant future. Artists create in the artistic media that produce marvelous nouns; teaching artists create in the medium of the verbs of art.

We can’t label something art just because the experts say it is.

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For centuries we have defined art by its nouns—the performances we pay to go see, the objects that grace our homes and museums. We live in a time when a majority of the public does not know how to engage well with those nouns to create personal mean-ing, to grasp the art they contain. Many Americans are rudimentary in their skills with the verbs of art with which we create artistic experiences; they feel incapable, unsuccessful, and so, too often, disinterested or averse. Today, the verbs of art are as important as those nouns. Good teaching artists know how to work with the verbs together with the nouns. That is their hybrid gift, and that is what makes them invaluable in bringing new audiences into the richness of works of art.

For most Americans, art events seem expensive, and if they are only going to have entertaining experiences (at best) at an ensemble’s performance because of their limited inner capabilities with the verbs of art, there are many more stimulating entertainment events available for a lot less money. Our future lives in the experience economy, wherein people get valuable, rewarding personal artistic experiences inside the music—experi-ences worth the substantial investment of time, attention and money—and risk—in buying a ticket. Teaching artists possess the skills to help individuals, groups, and artistic organizations accomplish that goal upon which our future lies.

Teaching artists are also artists, very often superb artists—this is what makes them mod-els of the 21st century artist. Teaching artists recognize and take active responsibility for the fact that it is no longer enough just to be able to play the hell out of an early Mozart piano program. Musicians now need additional skills to engage audiences, to help them tap the richness inside that world made by Mozart. I know that condescending attitudes still exist that assume any artist who chooses to also educate can’t be a first rate artist. Well, it just isn’t true. People are welcome to cling to their outmoded prejudices, but in the mean time many of the finest young artists want to develop educational skills; they don’t want to perpetuate the 19th and 20th century prejudices about teaching. I encounter hun-dreds of artists in the top orchestras and arts organizations who work hard to learn edu-cation skills way too late, angry that they didn’t have a chance or a conservatory climate that encouraged them to learn teaching artistry during their schooling. The fine young artists who want to expand their kitbag of essential skills will be grabbing the jobs and redefining what the arts can be in our new century.

You may have noticed that my definition of the artistic experience—the capacity to expand the sense of the way the world is or might be—is very like a definition of learning. You might say the core activity of both art and learning is making personally relevant connections between yourself and new things.—we are talking about the same fundamental human act. Teaching artistry is the artful, effective, engaging, suc-cessful, joyful, transformative, proven way to guide humans into and through those experiences.

I hear many musicians agree with such ideas in principle, and then immediately exempt themselves. They say they are not good at speaking; they hate teaching; kids give them the creeps; they don’t want to learn new skills because it is hard enough just to make the music well and scramble to make ends meet. They respect musicians who are good talkers, and are willing to let them carry the responsibility in their ensem-bles. I watch them sit, benignly smiling, through the audience interactive stuff, waiting to get to playing the music, which is all they really care about. Two comments to such musi-cians: 1) With thatattitude, you and your ensemble are going down—smaller and smaller audiences, less income, less excitement—and taking the rest of us with you. 2) There is a role for every musician in the teaching artist’s world, even if you are not a good talker and get hives around eight year olds. We all need to join this work of supporting audiences’ capacity to succeed in the crucial act upon which the future of classical music depends—making personally relevant connections inside the music. This is not the responsibility of a

I think “arts education” is a redundant phrase.

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designated charming few; it belongs to all of us. There is a role for everyone, a way every musician can contribute without being embarrassed, or being forced to do things that are not personal strengths. If you take in the perspectives and suggestions in these pages, you will find many ways to contribute well, happily, comfortably, creatively, importantly.

The preceding paragraphs hoped to provide some reasons for thinking seriously about developing your music teaching artist skills. In Chapter 4 you will find an even better reason: teaching artist skills make you a better artist. An improving music teaching artist is an improving musician. I will save the arguments for that chapter, but I find that the

rewards of music teaching artistry are altruistic (it can revitalize our culture’s embrace of the art form), financial (it is one of the few sure ways of increasing income in a musician’s life), personal (it is directly rewarding on a regular basis), and even artistic (it provides new kinds of creative satisfaction).

As you adopt and adapt the skills described in these pages, you join the history, burgeoning present, and promising future of teaching artistry. Artists have been going into schools since there were American schools. Music programs construct-ed for educational purposes have been going into classrooms and auditoriums for fifty years or more—Young Audiences (YA), the first major national arts education network, began with an in-home performance for children by Yehudi Menuhin, and YA started sending classical music performances into schools in 1952. They now have 33 active chapters around the nation and 5,200 teaching artists in their network.

In those early years, there were fine programs developed by many individuals and orga-nizations, and some heroic experiments around the country. Teaching artistry as a field really began in the 1980s. In response to the arts education cutbacks in schools in the Reagan Administration, arts organizations began to provide services directly to schools, and artists became key deliverers of those services. Arts education organizations like Lincoln Center Institute (where I started learning how to be a teaching artist), Urban Gateways in Chicago and others, began to train and send teaching artists into schools in growing numbers.

Story has it that the term was officially coined by June Dunbar at Lincoln Center Institute in the early 1970s. She told me:

I guess I was the originator the term ‘Teaching Artist.’ I came up with the words as a reaction to the dreadful one used by my predecessors at what was then known as the Education Department at Lincoln Center. The words they used to describe the activities of artists in schools sounded to me like a description for a typewriter repairman, plumber or an irritating educationalese term: ‘resource professional.’ Anyway, my term seemed more direct and specific, and it stuck. [‘Resource professional’ was actually inherited from language in the federal gov-ernment grant that established the Lincoln Center education program.]

So, at its origin, the new term shifted the identity of this “resource professional” away from the needs of the institutions and funding authority involved toward the unique hybrid practice we still struggle to define. The neologism “teaching artist” put “artist” at the center where it belongs.

In the early years, teaching artists encountered some tension with music and arts teach-ers. I recall many music teachers expressing fears that musicians coming into schools were a cheap way to replace their jobs. They proclaimed, rightly, that a teaching artist coming into their school as a visitor cannot provide the consistent skill-development and embedded presence that builds a lifelong love of music. Sadly, some TAs in those earlier years didn’t ease those tensions: they arrived with a self-important attitude that put off teachers; they didn’t adequately learn about and accommodate the realities of schools;

Teaching artistry as a field really began in the 1980s.

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they did not respect school music teachers as artists in their own right, and as their best allies in enriching the creative lives of students. I have seen such tensions all but disap-pear in recent years, as history has shown that TAs do not become replacements for music teachers when the school budget axe falls on music programs (indeed they often become advocates for rehiring music teachers); and the professionalization of teaching artistry inculcates respect, more preparation and inclination to build good partnerships with school music teachers, and a greater range of ways to succeed within school culture.

Having seen hundreds of programs around the country, I can state that the best music learning for students springs from the collaborative efforts of three kinds of profession-als working in coordination—a teaching artist, an inschool arts teacher, and an informed classroom teacher. The teaching artist brings in that spark of energy and outsiderness that can serve as a catalyst and inspiration for the in-school work. The TA is an emissary from a strange and different culture, wherein people dedicate their lives to creating in an artform. The commitment they carry and the risks they take to live an artist’s life resonate in their eighty percent, in the feel of the person who enters the room. Music teachers can provide the sequential skill building and consistent improvement that enables a young musician to learn to find success and satisfaction within the discipline—that is, if schools allow them the time and support to do what they can do. The informed classroom teacher can integrate the work of the other two into the many other kinds of learning that matter to young people and schools; they can provide context and connections.

Recently, I have noticed the field agreeing that the music teacher actually belongs at the top angle of this equilateral triangle of contributors. The triad is optimum, but the teaching artist and classroom teacher add resources to that essential spine of learning provided by a passionate music teacher. Teaching artists are increasingly becoming outspoken advocates for stronger school music programs.

The numbers of TAs in the U.S. grew through the 1980s, and so did their expertise. Dur-ing that time, most programs hired artists who seemed to have the teaching gene, and shed those who “didn’t get it.” The notion of teaching artistry as a trainable practice, as an artistic discipline of its own, emerged slowly. In the early years, programs and schools hired artists who happened to be good with kids, and basically asked them to work some creative magic in classrooms. If the teacher and kids were happy, that was a great TA. There were training programs, and they focused on readying them to contribute to the particular needs of the program that was hiring them. Such trainings tended to be speedy and strategic, often only a day or two, with the hopes that new teaching artists would learn through experience. Some trainings were deeper, but very few were more than four or five days. Ongoing professional development, once hired, was inconsistent and problem-focused—for example, a two-hour, one-time workshop on multiple intelligences (MI) or learning disabilities was (and frequently still is) typical. A dedicated educator could take years adjusting their teaching to include MI or greater inclusivity, but the quick one-shot workshop, with no followup, was all the TAs got.

In the ‘90s, new challenges appeared for TAs. The National Standards (voluntary) for the arts were cobbled together, prompting almost all states to create their own arts learn-ing standards (mandatory). Creating national standards for arts learning was a challeng-ing and healthy process for a field that had never been required to come to agreement before. State standards were different because laws required that work in schools align with the newly adopted standards; so starting in the late 1990s, what teaching artists actually did in classrooms was actively impacted. Quite a few TAs participated in the development of those standards, state by state; and then TAs faced the transition in our work from “creating magic in the classroom” to “guiding learning that aligns with state learning standards.” Along with many, I initially bristled at the implication that I needed to change my delicate work to accommodate legislated norms. I balked at the very word “standards”.

If the teacher and kids were happy, that was a great TA.

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However, in working with the Standards in practice, I, like many TAs, discovered: they were rather benign; they aligned readily with what I wanted to teach; they prompted better conversations with teacher-partners; and they reminded me that artists themselves carry the highest standards, and live by them—so the whole notion of applying standards was artistically authentic.

This taught me a lesson you will find in these pages—teaching artists are at their best when they stay grounded in authentic artistic practice, rather than over-accommodating the needs and demands of schools or other institutions with whom we partner. I believe arts practice is so deep and flexible that we can almost always find ways to stay both

artistically true and effectively guide learning in many settings.

In the ‘90s other challenges came into the work of many teaching artists. They were asked to create professional development workshops for teachers and other professionals. They were asked to become effective partners, trying to actively plan with teachers to deepen and expand the impact their in-school time can have. They were often thrust into the role of facilitator to enhance the quality of work in their partner institutions. They became involved in many of the arts learning experiments that cropped up around the country, sometimes working as program designers, data gatherers or researchers, in projects such as: the Empire State Partnerships, A+ Schools, Bernstein Center Schools, the Annenberg Initiative, CAPE (Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education) as well as programs led by the Getty Education Institute and the Galef Foundation.

Teaching artists were asked to take on assessment challenges—to develop ways to document and illuminate some of the learning that happens with their students. This was a difficult, even distasteful, step for many because it was too much like testing,

and felt to many like a violation of teaching artists’ most basic goals. However, artists are marvelous assessors of the quality of work, and TAs found practical ways to bring the best of what we know from the arts into the necessity of sharing the learning benefits of arts engagement. TAs were asked to become advocates too, learning how to present a case for arts learning that can change the way funders support and understand our work.

As TAs grow into the 21st century, the greatest challenge has been the largest arts learn-ing experiment happening in the country today—arts integration. Arts learning is infused into the study of other subjects—for example, bringing music learning into a social studies curriculum. The gamble is that the learning in both subject areas is boosted by bringing them together. If we lose the gamble, then the arts become a handmaiden to other sub-jects, actually diminishing their impact on young lives. If we win, and we have to be smart and rigorous to win, then the arts have a much larger contribution to make in American schooling. It is too early to say how the adventure is playing out (see Chapter 20)—I have seen examples of failure on both extremes, of using the arts merely to pep up a boring curriculum and conversely, or conversely, overemphasizing the arts component of an arts-integrated project. I also have seen extraordinary work in which music provides access to deep inquiries from which both the study of history and music bloom. I recall a music and American history unit of study built around the theme of the ways music has been used tokeep people alive. They investigated songs of the Civil War era underground railroad, work songs, protest songs, and also the songs the students themselves treasure so strongly they feel they are a lifeline. The musical exploration catalytically launched students into much more invested learning about history—because they were artistically involved, because they felt the relevance of the history in their hearts and guts.

All these new challenges teaching artists took on added up to a dramatic increase in what was expected of them, and what they had to know to be successful. TAs couldn’t be ex-pected to know how to address state standards, facilitate, assess, advocate for funding,

Teaching artists are at their best when they stay grounded in authen-tic artistic practice.

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build strong partnerships, and integrate their artistry with social studies, just by having a knack. They needed training. And the training had to connect well with their artistic aspi-rations, or we strangle the artist in the teaching artist.

Such professional development programs have started to arise, and teaching artists have taken on the commitment to expand the scope of their practice. The teaching artist lineage welcomes you to this growing profession. There are many signs of growth. We have a peer-reviewed professional journal that is flourishing (the Teaching Artist Journal, now based at Columbia College Chicago, and published by Taylor and Francis: http://ta-journal.com). When I started this journal in 2002, I had to confess in my sales pitch that no one had any idea of how many teaching artists there are in America. I made a few guesstimates that landed around 15,000 making a significant percentage of their living through TA work. But the true number might well be lower or four times as high. I had to admit there was no national association, no annual conference, not much evidence to the public eye. The publisher Lawrence Erlbaum finally shook my hand, saying, “OK, we will publish it, but let me tell you, of the eighty two journals we publish, this will be the first put out for an audience that has no visible evidence it exists.” Within four years, it was in their top ten percent of bestselling journals.

There are over thirty regional efforts by teaching artists to build local professional com-munities—groups like NECAP (New England Consortium of Artist-Educator Profession-als), TAO (Teaching Artists Organized in the San Francisco Bay Area), and Artist to Artist (in Minneapolis/St. Paul). Courses in teaching artistry are offered at Manhattan School of Music, Juilliard, Columbia College Chicago, and many other schools of music, and a new program has just been launched at the Meadows School at Southern Methodist University. Every month I learn of another arts organization offering a new program to develop and support TAs. The Association of Teaching Artists is an online site based in New York State (www.teachingartists.com ). We have a first major national research study of Teaching Artists underway, and several states have launched research on their own teaching artist population’s identity and needs. We are in-creasingly working in non-school settings: in senior centers (as a part of the creative aging movement, which was founded by dance teaching artist Susan Perlstein), in businesses (to provide professional development and creativity training), in health care and high education settings. I was asked to give the closing keynote address at the first-ever UNESCO (United Nations Education, Scientific, Cultural Organization) worldwide arts education conference—how significant that they turned to a teaching artist to bring this unprecedented event together!

Welcome to a flourishing, if still somewhat disorganized, field. We need your partici-pation. So do the arts. So does music. So does American education. So does your own checkbook.

Permit me a little autobiography. Since there is no established pathway into teaching artistry, it may be helpful to give some sense of how I found my way to the understand-ings in these pages. I was a hard-working, conservatory trained New York actor who hated doing eight performances a week. As a sidegig, out of curiosity more than commit-ment, I began working at Lincoln Center Institute in the late 1970s as a theater teaching artist. I learned their approach, called aesthetic education. I got fascinated and poured myself into the work. I studied, took every kind of gig, started projects, worked with many organizations, wrote, talked, experimented. I began training teaching artists in the early ‘80s, and have continued to expand my practice. Work led to work, as it often does when it is filled with passion. Even though much of my teaching artistry has been played out at national conferences, with large organizations and includes making speeches in recent years, I make sure I spend time in classrooms, time with teaching artists, and time think-ing about teaching artist practice every year. I also make sure I continue to make art, all

Teaching artists have taken on the com-mitment to expand the scope of their prac-tice.

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the time—the philosopher’s stone in the alchemy of teaching artistry. It is tough to re-hearse and perform in plays when you are on the road so many weeks a year. So, everyweek I complete a poem—to walk my talk of primary creation. Every event I lead is always grounded in the principles you find in these pages; while the examples are all about music in these pages, the principles apply to all teaching artistry. For example, not long ago I led a half day workshop on “creativity, but not art” for the Board of Directors of a Fortune 500 company. It is a sad truth that mainstream America sees a huge gap between the importance of creativity and the gooey irrelevance of art. That is the most common workshop/speech I am asked to do in the corporate world. My task is to closethat gap, without hitting the art-alarm until they themselves discover the innate connec-tion between creativity and artistry. I use my teaching artist skills to come in under the radar of their prejudice that art is a fluffy waste of serious business time, and make

sure they get enough learning about creativity to validate their investment of half a day of their valuable time. That day, we began with a fun, fast competitive word game. They reworked their word list several times following steps I gave. In the last step, I sent them back to their word collection with one final assignment to revise according to an important personal experience they had once had. Half way through this step, they realized they were composing something that looked suspiciously like a poem. But it was too late!—they were already creatively engaged. They insisted on complet-ing their poems, sharing them, comparing them, and having me judge the best—so we had to create a rubric for assessing the quality of such a poem. This was all beau-tiful artistic work, exactly what they wanted in their workshop—all from my teaching artist skills.

With my longtime colleague Edward Bilous (composer and Chairman of the Literature and Materials Department at Juilliard), I started Juilliard’s Art & Education program, connected with the Morse Fellowship, in 1994-1995. It included a full year’s class-room preparation for the students (described in Chapter 12), and then a subsequent year or more placed in two New York City classrooms as a Morse Fellow, inventing and delivering a year of classes for the same students. I have little musical back-

ground, can’t read music, never studied it. Juilliard was the first time I delved deeply into training music teaching artists—until then I had trained artists either in my art form of theater, or in mixed disciple groups only. The years that I led and developed that program provided a profound opportunity to explore the ways to bring musicians into their teach-ing artistry—and the ways not to!

I have now worked with thousands of musicians, in hundreds of trainings, with many hundreds of ensemble musicians, with players at many of the largest orchestras in the country, and with teams from many orchestras through The Knight Foundation’s Magic of Music Program, and The Mellon Foundation’s Orchestra Forum. I have taught the profes-sional development of the N.Y. Philharmonic’s teaching artist faculty for ten years now, with many of those teaching artists coming out of the program I led at Juilliard, making great careers as musicians and teaching artists—I have worked with some of them for a dozen years in a row. Do you have any idea how challenging (and terrifying) it is to teach the same gifted people for twelve consecutive years? The opportunity has pushed me to keep going deeper in the work we care about. They have taught their teacher well, which is why I have dedicated this volume to them, those named and the many others. (One of them, David Wallace, co-wrote Chapter 26 with me, entitled Interactive Performances. I highly recommend his book Reaching Out: A Musician’s Guide to Interactive Perfor-mance (McGraw-Hill, 2007, ISBN#: 0073401382). Three decades of work in this field have taught me what works and what doesn’t, and those understandings fill these pages.Having worked with teaching artists of all disciplines for many years, I have heard end-less debates about which discipline is the hardest, easiest, most accessible, most fun. Judiciously, I never offer an opinion on the subject, but this seems like a good place to fess up. Music teaching artists are the most in demand and the hardest to find.

I use my teaching artist skills to come in under the radar of their prejudice.

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I have had the same conversation in five cities in the last few months—local arts educa-tors want to expand a program but can’t find music teaching artists strong enough to do the work, so they give up, or downscale the ambition. Music is the hardest art form to talk about. Teaching artistry is the most challenging to develop in music, partly because it is so opposed to the predominant ways the artists were trained for so long and partly because it confronts traditions of the discipline. As you will discover in several chapters,becoming a good music teaching artist challenges some traditional ways of thinking, preferred habits of mind and unquestioned professional norms. I believe the confrontation is not only healthy but essential. However, it does make things more difficult for the musi-cian than the actor or dancer. Painters and writers and media artists have their ownchallenges. But musicians, with their enormous potential, with significant demand for good practitioners, and with their art form struggling, are the focus of this book.

I began this Introduction with the admission that we can’t precisely define what a teaching artist is. Let’s return to that unanswerable question. Teaching artistry is an improvisation in the verbs of art, as is the kind of reflection that tries to identify what a teaching art-ist does. Here are the improvisations from eight smart colleagues of mine, all current or former teaching artists, who responded to my inquiry in 2003 to create a definition of a teaching artist:

A Teaching Artist is a practicing artist whose teaching is part of that practice. Teaching Artists don’t necessarily have education degrees, but they might. Teaching Artists are role models for lifestyle, discipline, and skill. They pass on an oral and experiential tradition in ways of thinking, seeing, and being. They are educators; in the truest sense of the word (the root of the word educate is to draw out) they ‘draw out’ rather than ‘put in’. They are guides/facilitators/bridges to creativity. Teaching Artists are social activists.Tina LaPadula, Arts Corps, Seattle

Teaching Artists are arts translators, whose primary responsibility is to use their own artform’s language, precepts, concepts, strategies and processes to translate the per-sonal and collective arts events of other individuals into a meaningful experience.Richard Burrows, Los Angeles Unified School District

A Teaching Artist is a practicing artist who is steeped in (lives in, thinks in) an art form—and who has made a substantial commitment to share her artistry with students and teachers in schools.Judith Hill, music teaching artist

A teaching artist is one whose proficiency in one or more arts disciplines is comple-mented by knowledge and experience in facilitating the acquisition skills and knowl-edge in and through the arts among students, teachers and other practitioners.Richard Bell, National Young Audiences

A teaching artist is a practicing professional artist who extends the definition of practicing professional artist to include collaboration with classroom teachers with the goal of ad-vancing teaching and learning. This goal is achieved through the design and presentation of activities that aim at illuminating the curriculum by engaging students in the medium of their craft, its skills, procedures and social/historical contexts.Daniel Windham, The Wallace Foundation

A teaching artist is an artist who actively engages learners in consciously developing the aesthetics of their own processes for learning.Arnold Aprill, CAPE (Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education)

Teaching artistry is an impro-visation in the verbs of art.

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When an artist “teaches” through his/her work (and by teaching I do not mean giving infor-mation as much as opening possibilities), art is produced. When a practicing artist agrees to break down the components of art making to fit some more linear model, then Isuggest that art is being taught about rather than taught. When a practicing artist, on the other hand, is able to tap those more aesthetic and original ways of communicating that have made his/her art production deeply satisfying, then I think the real potential of theTeaching Artist is achieved. He/she is not teaching about art; she is teaching aesthetically, is being an artist in the way he relates to learners and situation.Linda Duke, Krannert Art Museum

A Teaching Artist is an artist who has both extensively engaged in and reflected deeply on the creative, perceptive, and reflective processes inherent in making and viewing works of art and who has made a commitment to turn this reflection into action by guiding others tomake works of art, perceive works of art, and reflect on the connections between art and the rest of life. … A Teaching Artist does not want to shape those they teach in their own image, but support learners to become more of who they are.Christine Goodheart, arts learning consultant

Let’s conclude at the beginning. Etymologically, the word art comes from an Indo-Europe-an root meaning to put things together, and the word teach comes from the Greek mean-ing to show. So, the term teaching artist is born of two verbs (appropriately, since the work of a teaching artist is more about creation than information), and might be said to mean: one who shows how to put things together. Let’s put together a new future for music.

Chapter One of The Music Teaching Artist’s BiblePublished by Oxford University Press, 2009

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We share a long human history of proposing theories to unify disparate truths. This yearn-ing to find greater meaning in separate bodies of evidence may be one of our distinguish-ing human traits. You have probably noticed this aspiration in your own life: a series of experiences prompts the vague sense that there is something hidden in the bundle of them, something underneath that connects them in an important and meaningful way. Your inner smarts work on the challenge—with thinking, intuition, unconscious processes, even while sleeping. The “aha” moment of identifying the deeper pattern in the evidence that was staring at you is satisfying and joyful; it launches a whole new set of possibilities for you as a person, as an artist.

I see the fields of arts and arts learning in that light—disparate, separate bodies of truth, with a vague sense of something meaningful and important that unifies them hidden in plain sight.

You would be hard pressed to argue that we currently comprise a unified field. Adherents to the separate artistic disciplines don’t think of themselves as part of a larger functional entity. I was part of a series of focus groups of arts pro-fessionals in several cities in 2007 (the groups included a mix of job types and disciplines), and it was painfully clear that none believed they were members of an arts community—except occasionally, usually in crisis moments, and even then, mostly in name only. In spite of increasing interdisciplinary merging in performance and presentation, the various artistic disciplines feel more competi-tive than cooperative and that the concerns they share are less significant and urgent than the ones they face on their own. A regional theater company looks at a choral ensemble and does not see much resemblance; a string quartet looks at a small dance ensemble, or a struggling art gallery, and does not see itself mirrored there.

Similarly, the divisions within arts education never seem to resolve; we waste energy on the same familial tensions and tiffs we have had for decades: disci-plinary instruction vs. arts integration, arts education for arts sake vs. arts edu-cation to produce other learning benefits, in school vs. all the other learning that happens outside of school, certified arts instructors vs. teaching artists—and what about the granny who plays the ukulele? There are turf wars, old hostilities and prejudices and a pervasive culture of scarcity that distorts and desiccates the expansive, inclusive arts learning im-pulse that got us into the practice or profession in the first place.

Exacerbating our sense of separateness is a U.S. culture in which “Art” is balkanized into a specialized Capital A offering, apart from the real business and life of the nation, and usually located in special buildings. This sequestration of the definition of art cuts it off from other areas where Americans recognize the importance of art, not calling it that but valuing it nonetheless—art in commerce and pop culture, art in our church choirs and on our Thanksgiving table settings, even the art of bricklaying, which reminds us of the an-cient truth that any endeavor taken to its highest personal expression becomes the work of art, whether the practitioner or others call it that or not. The excellent new book, The Art Instinct, by Denis Dutton argues compellingly that art is a human evolutionary advantage that goes back to our Pleistocene roots. So, how have we let the identity of art get quaran-tined as an occasional pricey event in a special building?

The divisions within arts education never seem to resolve; we waste energy on the same familial tensions and tiffs we have had for decades.

Finding the Smallest Unifying Particle in the Human Universe

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Arts organizations understand themselves as and function as separate entities. As a consultant, I have had many opportunities to try to build local partnerships and consortia of organizations in order to identify some common goals that foster a commitment to com-mon actions that will raise the level of all their boats. Sometimes progress is made, and there are inspiring examples of success in a few cities, but the separateness is palpable, pervasive and painful, the caution and disbelief are entrenched, and there is no language of common understanding. This last point takes a while to surface, and is hard to admit—

we don’t really know what we are talking about or at least don’t agree across our separate fields. You don’t believe me?—have a discussion with an artist from another discipline on what you think creativity really is. Could it be possible to find a deeper unifying truth that is irreducibly essential to the arts?

Sometimes it is easier to understand your own situation by looking somewhere else. We may not be Einsteins in the arts, but let’s take a couple of minutes to look at the example of particle physics. Particle physicists know of five fun-damental kinds of bosons. Boson is the term for the smallest particles in the universe that carry force, and the “fundamental” kind are those that cannot be broken down into more basic particles. Four kinds of the five fundamental bosons have been observed experimentally, while one, the Higgs boson, is hypothesized yet still unseen.

The Higgs boson is, in theory, the ultimate elementary particle in the universe. Physicists know something about the ways the rest of the family of infinitesi-

mal particles work—how quarks and leptons and the four kinds of gauge bosons func-tion—but the Higgs boson remains a tantalizing theoretical construct. If we come to know how it works, the Higgs boson may unify the currently separate force fields of gravitation, electromagnetism, strong and weak nuclear forces. Some physicists believe that the Higgs boson will provide explanations to ultimate mysteries such as why matter becomes mass and why there is something instead of nothing—no wonder that the Higgs boson is sometimes called the God particle.

Physicists who seek to understand the constants that underlie separate bodies of knowl-edge pursue what is called the unified field theory or the Theory of Everything. The drive to find this unifying foundation is not altogether theoretical—it was one of the aspirations that led to the recently completed construction of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) by the European scientific consortium called CERN—a 17 mile circular atom smasher now underground near Geneva Switzerland, the most expensive construction project in hu-man history. Only through LHC evidence can the Higgs boson hypothesis be tested, and perhaps, proven to the degree that scientists will agree, and humankind will adopt a new understanding. The term Unified Field Theory (also colloquially called the Theory of Everything) was coined by Einstein and captures the drive of his mature years, as well as a yearning that began long before and still inspires many: the passion to find a deeper unifying truth be-neath the persistent separateness of related fields. Einstein sought to bring together the separate fields of relativity, electromagnetism and gravity by discovering the fundamental particles that interact in all.

The same burst of energy you probably felt with your “aha” moment that you remembered at the beginning of this article happens in science too. Isaac Newton’s theory of gravity (1687) provided a deeper unifying truth for the separate evidence about the patterns of tides, Galileo’s theory of earth’s gravity, and Kepler’s laws of planetary influence. New-ton’s unified field theory was adopted by scientists, and then by Western culture, erasing the truth as it was known, writing the new understanding of reality, and sparking a new explosion of inquiry into forces of attraction in physics. This ongoing search for a unifying understanding has led to many discoveries, like quantum mechanics and string theory, and now searches for the theoretical Higgs boson.

Could it be possible to find a deeper unifying truth that is irre-ducibly es-sential to the arts?

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As unifying theories are proposed in physics, there is an organized and a disorganized vetting of such proposed new unifying principles. Supporting evidence brings the theory to a critical mass of acceptance, and it becomes a new foundation for human under-standing—evolution in action. The striving of a field to create a verifiable unified field theory drives the evolution of the field, provokes groundbreaking hypotheses and new discoveries that move the seemingly complete field forward to a whole new level, and brings humankind along in its wake.

For those outside of particle physics, the search for a unified field theory can be seen as quixotic and pointlessly conceptual, and it is often derided as the work of egghead geniuses who can’t boil an egg. We live in an aggressively anti-intellectual culture, particularly unfriendly to meta-headed endeavors, but even that bias cannot deflect the truth that the impulse to find unity underneath seemingly-disparate phenomena has led to some of the greatest breakthroughs in human understanding.

I think the time is now for our field to grapple with a unified field theory. The urge is springing up spontaneously and widely. I hear colleagues across the artforms complain of feeling stuck in the same conversations and problems. I see and hear of dozens of cities and regions trying to build a local arts and/or arts education community to bet-ter their future—as I write this, information about this impulse in Dallas, Richmond, VA; Portland, OR; Philadelphia; New Orleans; Providence, RI; and New York came across my desk in various forms in just one day, yesterday. The 2008 National Performing Arts Conference, the largest gathering ever in the performing arts, was explicitly dedicated to building a more unified field in the arts, and the thousands of participants voted on com-mon action strategies to build a national community. Even at the local level, I am seeing partnerships between institutions I have not seen before. We have lived and struggled separately and sometimes fear we may die separately; there is now an emerging belief that we have much in common, and that we enhance the visibility and viability of all if we identify and act on our com-mon ground. The current painful economic constriction may be the catalyst we need to change our habits of thinking and jump us out of our ruts. As Rahm Emmanuel said with his appointment as White House Chief of Staff, “A crisis is too good an opportunity to waste.” Biologists tell us that environ-mental crises put species to the test—evolve or die.

The keynote speech at that National Performing Arts Conference in 2008 made a couple of points that lie right at the heart of our challenge. Jim Collins was the speaker; he is a highly influential and credible business “guru”—the author, consultant, and leader of the bestselling “good to great” research on what makes businesses succeed. I confess I was none too thrilled that a business leader was positioned as the keynote for this his-toric arts conference; part of me cringed that we would be asked to use a business model to come together as a field, a message that I resist. Grant-ing that he had studied non-profit organizations extensively, and was an expert on what organizations must do in turbulent times (which we certainly have now) and that he is a passionate lover of the arts, I listened with an open mind. Lucky thing, because he made two points that I found essential to the consideration of an arts Unified Field Theory.

His first, and widely acknowledged, point is that in turbulent times, organizations must: get the right people “on the bus,” recommit to focus rigorously on their core values, and experiment boldly in new ways to fulfill those core values. His second point is a follow up so challenging that many people didn’t take it in. Those in the arts usually mistake what their core values/beliefs/missions (let’s not get stuck in semantics) really are. They as-sume they are the artistic canon we love, the presentation of the greatest artworks, old and new. Collins suggests our core values are exactly not that; our favorite artworks are the means by which we have tried to fulfill our core values, and according to his

Even at the local level, I am seeing partnerships between institutions I have not seen before.

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research, that is exactly where we must experiment boldly to discover new ways to fulfillour abiding core values now. To rediscover our purpose, to live long and prosper, we must detach from our fidelity to favorite artworks, old and new, and boldly experiment with inno-vative ways of engaging people in artistic experiences. We must reconnect to the human art instinct.

Our core values are the reasons the arts have been around since day two in human history (ornamental jewelry goes back 80,000 years and the impulses that led to it go back far further); our core values live in the way artistic expression still appears spontaneously, irrepressibly, through-out life, mostly in places that are not called Art with a capital A. Not only does art appear in the art of bricklaying, and in every endeavor raised to its highest level of expression, but more commonly in our conversations, hobbies, homes, party dancing, … anywhere people slip into the work and play of art. The art experience universally prompts a sense of mean-ing, richness, “specialness” and satisfaction. It feels good; really good; the kind of good feeling that is hard to find in our over-stimulated, materialistic, multi-tasking lives.

In order to unify this disparate set of fields in the arts, we need to find the quintessential elements that comprise that human experience of art. We need to identify the fundamental particle or particles at the basis of the at-traction, a Higgs boson for the human movement toward the artistic experi-ence. And if we can find agreement around that unifying priniple, I believe

we can begin to answer the Jim Collins challenge in a powerful way—experiment boldly to bring people into that common, universal, highly-valued human experience of art. Not just those who already value the arts, but those who aren’t in the club and don’t think about or care about the arts but still yearn for fullness in their lives—we discover core ways to change the peripheral definition and position of the arts in America, and reclaim the homo sapiens’ cultural birthright of artistic engagement.

What is it that is happening in the soul stirring gospel choir-and-audience singing that can fill the recital hall? What is the irreducible core element that turns a good conversation into a great conversation that can be delivered in every theater? How is it that an encoun-ter with a violinist in a fifth grade classroom can spark a kid to be more curious about social studies? What is the sine qua non, the irreducible core, of all the different ways in which the artistic impulse has appeared in human history?

Our field needs the debate as much as we need the resulting answer. To get us started, let me offer an invitation to all to join the inquiry, and posit my own first hypothetical answer to spark further answering by others. Get mad at my opinion, please, to fuel the sharing of your own. I think the fundamental act is the spark of connection. The spark may be literal, as the firing of a new synaptic link in the brain, and it is also metaphoric for making something new. The etymology of the word art means to put things together. The Higgs boson of art is the individual’s act of creation, of putting together things that matter to that individual. This makes us human and makes us feel human, feel alive. Making a connection, look at the idiom: creating something that bridges a gap of separateness.

This fundamental act of art occurs when we find the right word in a poem or the dance move that captures what we know and cannot say. We spark the arts connection when we enter a “world” made by someone else (a work of art, a spoken image, a story, an eloquent gesture) and make a personally relevant connection inside it. We fire the art connection when we pick just the right song to play for a suffering friend and when we listen deeply to a friend’s story and connect to its unspoken core. We slip into the physics of art when we resonate inside with the note just played, when we experience a sense of eternity under a night sky.

The art experience universally prompts a sense of meaning, richness, “specialness” and satisfac-tion.

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The power act is not just “understanding” the world of a work of art, or “appreciating” it or even “enjoying” it. The boson is the creative act of making a new connection inside it. The fundamental power is tapped not only by completing a work of art, but by making any meaningful new connection of your own.

Fundamental particles don’t just exist, they influence each other in ways that manifest as electromagnetism and gravity. Similarly artistic bosons do not passively exist, but accrue force that manifests as human affinities like: intrinsic-motivation (doing things from your personal energy and yearning, as opposed to extrinsic-motivation which drives all the other ways things happen in the world), curiosity, playfulness, satisfaction and gratitude (they seem linked in my experience), the recognition of beauty, the experience of love, and the cohesion of groups and communities. No wonder the arts have sustained since the beginning of human history—this is the list of the best parts of being alive. They pro-vide cohesion, attraction, and the reason there is something to being a human instead of being nothing.

The unified field theory then challenges us to answer: What can we do, as believers in the power of the fundamental act of creation, to align our actions, our creations, or organiza-tions, our interactions with everyone inside and outside the arts to maximize that power? How can we create environments that effectively, irresistibly support and nurture that power? What events can we devise that are dedicated to that power, not merely to the presentation of artworks that we hope will contain it for those few who pay to attend?

Are you whining, “Why can’t we just play the heck out of Haydn quartets? Why should we bother with all this eggheadery?” Because fewer and fewer people are able to feel the spark of connection inside the canon of artworks we love no matter how well you play the Haydn. If you are content with being part of the slow demise you complain about, fine. Our culture is not losing the art instinct but turning it away from the fields which we believe are its most fertile ground. If you want to help the arts thrive and reclaim their ancient human birthright, start experi-menting, boldly with the clarity and care of a physicist to find out how you can spark that act of creation in everyone you meet.

And, the more important reason to graple with the awkwardness of this chal-lenge is that it recharges us as artists, in our most important cultural roles, as the voice of human truth, as re-creators of human relevance amid the dehu-manizing forces of society, as fierce warriors for the human birthright of artistry in our brief time together. Our field does not have expensive new machinery to produce the evidence that will unify our field, but we can collide with each other in dialogue to find the evidence that guides us to experiment boldly, bril-liantly, effectively as artists do to tap our must fundamental human force and channel it into artistic encounters.

The power act is not just “un-derstanding” the world of a work of art, or “appreciating” it or even “en-joying” it.

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Thoughts on Seeing El Sistema June 2008

Sir Simon Rattle calls it “the most important thing happening in the world in classical music.” I had heard a lot about it. I had been a part of several events that considered ways to adapt its success to American soil. So I had to go see Venezuela’s El Sistema for myself. I had to hear not just their top orchestra, the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchesta, which raised hairs on my neck and raised-rock music-like cheering ovations when I heard them in Los Angeles, Boston and at Carnegie Hall. I had to hear the beginners and average youth orchestras. I had to feel where the excitement grew in the poorest barrios where each “nucleo” (their word for the community music school) lives. I had to sniff out the truth of the implausible claims.

So I spent a week inside Venezuela’s El Sistema, exploring it in and around Caracas, visiting classes, talking to teachers, watching, asking, attending rehearsals and perfor-mances, hosted by El Sistema staff, who answered my endless questions and translated with equal patience. I can affirm Rattle’s claim and raise him one; it is the single most amazing thing I have ever seen in arts learning. I spent most of the week with my jaw dropped, with tears and visions of new possibility brimming in my eyes.

El Sistema began 33 years ago when 11 children gathered in an underground parking garage in Caracas to play music

together, led by organist, engineer, politician José Antonio Abreu. Today, FESNOJIV (the Spanish acronym for the State Foundation for the National System of Youth and Chil-dren’s Orchestras), more commonly known as El Sistema, teaches 300,000 of Venezue-la’s poorest children in the nationwide music learning program. Many begin attending the “nucleo” as early as age two or three, and the vast majority continue well into their teens, attending six days a week (sometimes seven days a week), three or four hours a day af-ter school, plus retreats and intensives on vacations and in the summer. The country now has over 60 children’s orchestras, almost 200 youth orchestras, 30 professional adult orchestras, dozens of choruses. Participation is free for all students.

Thirty-three years ago, the nation of Venezuela had a total of two orchestras, and a clas-sical music audience of about one thousand. Now they have a parade of the worldwide classical stars wanting to work with El Sistema, and major world orchestras signing up to perform in their soon-to-open new hall. Catch—an orchestra can rent the new hall only if they agree to give free lessons to El Sistema students.

The all-star orchestra is the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra, which has taken triumphant world tours, and is compared favorably with the Berlin Philharmonic and the other best orchestras in the world. The players are 15-27 years old. This is what makes El Sistema so mind-boggling—it is not only an effective nationwide social service program that turns around the lives of hundreds of thousands of at-risk kids; it also produces capital A art as well or better than anyone in the Western systemas can manage. The 27 year old conductor Gustavo Dudamel, a product of El Sistema, is the new Music Director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and has achieved international music star status, a long way from his barrio home and small town nucleo where he played second violin as a child.

How is this possible? How can a sports mad country have more kids learning classical in-struments than playing on organized teams? How can it be the poorest kids in a desper-ately poor nation (let’s just say the billions in oil revenues seem not to trickle down very far) comprise 90% of the students? As the success grows, more affluent parents increas-ingly bring their children to the barrio to learn music, and El Sistema keeps a careful eye

Part 1: Background

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on the socio-economic balance.) How can kids from the most dangerous barrios in the world (the murder and gun violence rates in Caracas are the highest of any non-war-zone in the world) play Beethoven, Bernstein and Bartok as well as the best players in theworld? How can it be that the street vendors in Caracas, a city in a country with no particular tradition of classical music before El Sistema, sell as many pirated classical CDs as hiphop and pop? The answers make it the most important thing happening in the world of classical music.

There are many factors contributing to this miracle. There is a little research that has been done to ascertain some of the measures of impact and reasons for it. Iter-American Bank has done one study (http://idbdocs.iadb.org/wsdocs/getdocument.aspx?docnum=1002635) and the UN Development Programme has completed another. The data is good to know, but doesn’t capture much insight into the success. Certainly, I was not undertaking a formal study, and had only a week’s intensive. Nonetheless, hereare some of the crucial success factors I spotted and some of the distinctive elements that make it so remarkable.

Funding

The program is almost entirely government funded, but not a penny comes from arts ministries, all is from social welfare. There are some private and foundation funders, but they are not major supports. The program was conceived as and still works as a way to support the lives of the neediest young people. Abreu has brilliantly politicked the govern-ment funding so that it has steadily grown through six swings of government from highly conservative to very liberal over its three decades. The current Chavez government hascommitted to expand it to one million children in ten years, partly because government as well as previous administrations are well aware of the international prestige of having the world’s awe for El Sistema, and they recognize and support the enormous contribution made to their country. The Chavez government has committed to expand to one million children, including moving its impact into the school day (currently it is almost entirely an afterschool program) to dramatically increase the presence of music in all Venezuelanschools.

It is one of the most mission-driven large programs I have ever seen. At every nucleo, all the educators and staff can tell you exactly what the goals of El Sistema are—a stuningly unified vision and purpose. Even more impressively, each individual uses her or his own words, images and stories to describe these goals. This is powerful advocacy: consistent, unified vision and message, from the national leaders to the local leaders to all the teach-ers to every janitor. But the message never sounds canned; it is always personal and passionate. They all have their eyes on the same prize, and they never lose sight of it. In a typically clever move, many years ago Abreu anticipated the cost of instruments could become a major problem, especially as the program grew and the top orchestras got better and better. So in 1982, Abreu garnered UNESCO funding to bring in one renown European luthier. He trained seven Venezuelans to make string instruments. It takes five years to get good enough as an instrument maker to teach others, and several genera-tions of instrument makers have now trained new generations. There is a partnership with a vocational high school to bring in new talent; there are over fifty new instrument maker-teachers in the pipeline now. They all take the long view, like the cathedral build-ers, knowing they are rebuilding a national and international industry, with seven training/production centers planned around the country. The world’s greatestinstrument makers come and do residencies to teach the best techniques. The pride in these instrument makers, from ages 17 to 80, was palpable. Many are themselves gradu-ates of El Sistema, and in one workshop, four players whipped out their just-completed and just-repaired instruments and played a few rambunctious Latin American folk tunes. They are learning how to make the best quality instruments, not how to make them fast.

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Recognizing the effectiveness of El Sistema, the Chavez government has committed to triple the funding, to triple the number of students involved, in the next ten years. The leaders of FESNOJIV are clearly concerned about such rapid expansion, but you feel this fire in their guts that says they have to go for it because they could have so much im-pact on the lives of a million of their nation’s poorest kids. They have the vision of entire culture change in their eyes: Imagine if we could instill love, safety, hard work ethic, belief in personal value, trust in group endeavor, and deep joy to a million kids’ lives, instead of the darker alternatives that are poised waiting to grab those vulnerable lives. One of theirbiggest challenges will be training enough teachers to work so closely with one million children; to accomplish this they are encouraging their best students to become teachers, which is already the case with most of their teachers. This retention of talent and commit-ment affirms why the vision remains so sharp, and the practices so elegantly effective.

Teaching and Learning

One of the most obvious reasons for the miracle is that they have the students for so many hours a week, for so many years. They see students for three or four hours a day, six days a week, and seven sometimes. Some start at ages two or three, but this requires a lot of parental participation—they visit the homes of those prospective very young stu-dents to make sure the family can sustain the commitment. When they can start kids that young, they work on body expressiveness and rhythm, doing work that doesn’t sound too different from good work done with pre-schoolers around the world. Most kids join around five or six. A number of students leave around age 12 (percentages were not available, the dropoff is not drastic, and certainly some number do drop out at other ages along the way), when they complete primary school, but even by that point the large majority had six or more years of learning, and are, both by FESNOJIV report, and my sense of them, deeply changed by the experience.

They leave with a sense of capability, with strong social skills, with endurance and resil-ience, owning a confidence about taking on enormous challenges, a deep sense of value and being loved and appreciated, a trust for group process and cooperation, and a feel for excellence in their own hands. Also, students who spend some years in El Sistema, complete high school at higher percentages, and go to college in higher percentages, than their peers.

Discipline is relaxed but unbending. Attendance is reportedly not an issue—students want to be there, and certainly the sense of responsibility to the group, the section and the teacher, is a part of the motivation. Students always start with choir and keep that going right into their instrument years, and often sing and learn and play instruments in a mix,starting around age five. The singing gets them working in ensembles from day one to build community.

One nucleo started the idea of having the four year olds create a “paper orchestra” in which they make cardboard replicas of their favorite instruments with their parents and, with the parents, “play them” along with recordings. This teaches them how to care for an instrument, how playing it feels, and it prepares them to handle their first real instrument a couple of years later. It also introduces the music they will be playing in a few years. Their first instruments are recorder and percussion, which all learn. I saw a string orchestra of five to six year olds (their sound was far more advanced), while mostly they pick their firstinstruments around ages six and seven, obviously, some who are ready start earlier; wind instruments have to wait for the kid’s new teeth to come in. Kids can pick and change instruments, but shifting is taken seriously and not done casually. They start with singing because it enables the kids to learn to stay in tune, work cooperatively and develop con-trol of musical variables. Their early orchestral instrument instruction includes singing and playing with the instrument, often playing single notes within a group song—they work

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with a single note for quite a while to develop a sense of quality sound. I heard a cho-rus and recorder-playing ensemble of 6-10 year olds (four adults in the room with 60 students), and was astonished at the quality of the artistry at such a young age. Some students follow the chorus track rather than the orchestral track, including the “white hands” orchestra of deaf students who “sing” with choreographed movements as a part of the singing chorus.

They ease their way into the use of full standard notation over years, and seem to have a feel for escalating the challenge in such a natural way that there is an easy natural learning of the language, braided in seamlessly. They have three levels of practice every week—whole ensemble work, section work (which is heavily emphasized, with the older students serving as peer-teachers to the younger ones in the sections), and private les-sons, usually twice a week. The teachers told me that since the one-on-one teacher is also usually the section teacher and sometimes also the orchestra conductor, they are able to accelerate learning because students keep advancing between private lessons, catching mistakes, and guiding improvement throughout the rest of the week. As ateacher told me, “there is no time wasted in mistakes.” They don’t ingrain bad habits because the teacher is right there to guide their improvement every day.

I also noted that there is frequently more than one adult in the room working with stu-dents. In that chorus group just mentioned, there were sixty students and four adults—two chorus leaders, a piano accompanist, and a quattro player (a traditional Venezuelan small-guitarlike instrument) who performed in some of the folk pieces (and couldn’t help singing quietly along with the others from the side.) The conductors were passionate and demanding, pulling the best out of them as if they were on a major stage, and it was clearthey were extending the singers/recorder players’ level of finesse and nuance through the performance for this group of strangers who showed up in their concrete room in the former racetrack that got mothballed by the state, and got picked up as a nucleo because of its location near a barrio.

They reduce the pressure of performances, make practice and performance not very different, by getting students in front of viewers as often as possible, so that it is a natural part of their playing life. They perform for audiences (often other students) as often as every week or two. When I watched practices, I was struck by how natural the students were with strange foreigners popping into their room. The Nucleo Director of La Rinco-nada says it is no big deal, it happens all the time; he delights in it because he says it shows the students lots of people are interested in what they do.

A very significant feature is that the students frequently watch other (especially more experienced) students perform. So they see their colleagues creating excellently, in es-sence they see “themselves” onstage. Little students see orchestras of musicians three years older, and six years older, and the top city and national youth orchestras—they see their teachers performing in the adult orchestras. They all see the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra—and there they see “themselves” performing as one of the best orchestras in the world. What could be more empowering and inspiring? They get the sounds of excel-lence in their ears, so it is easy for them to imagine themselves succeeding as advancedplayers—as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

Another feature is that musicians are encouraged to keep their bodiesalive and active in their playing. They move around much more than Americanand European orchestras, without losing technique. Perhaps this priority beginswith the two year olds they start with, emphasizing body expressiveness tomusic. You can feel the extra vitality and expression that comes with this bodyinvolvement.

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Yes, there is some competition within El Sistema—students audition for places in the more adept orchestras. But there is much less sense of pressure and failure around the results. They celebrate those who move up, and continue to have fun all the time in the orchestra they get to stay with.

Focus

The first and abidingly primary focus accounts for much of El Sistema’s success in my view—building self-esteem, creating a daily haven of safety, joy, fun, and sense of value in each youngster. Dudamel told an audience in Los Angeles of two crucial features: “We start by making sure each child feels like an asset, because they don’t come in feeling that; and we make sure that we never forget fun.” You can feel it in the nucleo—all the children are proud, punctual, disciplined, determined and having the time of their lives.The teachers really do attend to individuals—if they notice a child has missed a second day at the nucleo without prior notice, they usually go to the home (which may be little more than corrugated iron and spare wood shanty) to see what the problem is. They keep the theme of building self-esteem prominent through all its levels. For example, just about every student who gets into a youth or city orchestra receives a stipend; this not only honors their accomplishments in a way that really matters, but places real value on the music making for the family, so they don’t need to pull the child out of El Sistema to work. The more I have thought about it, the more I grasp the subtle difference in the way their teachers view their students. They see the social and the musical mission, the develop-ment of the individual and the development of the musician as completely suffused—they don’t develop character through music, they see the individual person and the musician at the same time, deal with both, love both. This is not to say American teachers don’t love their students, or don’t develop their characters, but El Sistema teachers look at their learners through a slightly different lens.

They use what I call a proleptic curriculum, borrowing a term from literary criticism that describes an image that recurs throughout a written work and each time it reappears, it accrues deeper meaning. Across El Sistema, the Gypsy Overture (Obertura Gitana by Merle John Isaac) is the first work students master. When students move from chorus and recorder and percussion into orchestras, the musical curriculum starts with simple ar-rangements of big pieces with big sound—because it is so satisfying and thrilling—1812 Overture, The Great Gate of Kiev. Tchaikovsky’s March Slav is the first piece they play in nonreduced arrangement. There is an established sequence of pieces across El Sistema, but there is significant variation locally. However, they reintroduce those big sound, heart-pounding masterworks—1812 Overture, The Great Gate of Kiev…then Tchaikovsky, Beethoven—repeatedly across a young musician’s career. It is no wonder the Simon Boli-var Youth Orchestra plays Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony as well or better than any orches-tra in the world. They have grown up inside it; it holds who they are, the best of them. As Dudamel told me in Los Angeles, “We have lived our whole lives inside these pieces. When we play Beethoven’s Fifth, it is the most important thing happening in the world.”And the audience feels it. In Caracas, I heard the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra re-hearse and then perform the single best Tchaikovsky 4 I have ever heard. I was incredu-lous that they could know so much and feel so deeply at their young ages, but they invest all of themselves into it, and it reads. Also, the orchestras are big to include more chil-dren. It is not unusual to see 150 or 200 members of one of their youth orchestras. It is all the more amazing that they play with such precision, given the sheer number of players.

A significant change in the last decade has been the inclusion of Venezuelan folk music and the music of Latin American composers. (They are very proud of being champions of Latin American composers.) So folk and Latin music is braided with classical in a fluid mix that appreciates them all equally. I was very aware that the Latin music developed a far more complex rhythmic sensibility than we see in American youth orchestras—my

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colleague Jamie Bernstein spotted a chorus taking the standard Dominican version of themerengue, which is in 4/4, and slipping into the Venezuelan version which is in 5/8—and the kids handled that with ease. Jamie’s jaw dropped, “How do they do it?” You get that kind of rhythmic sophistication when musical genres are integrated. The leaders of El Sistema claim an unanticipated benefit of the expansion of the musical repertoire in the past decade—a dramatic growth of interest in jazz in Venezuela, new clubs and perfor-mance venues popping up, with El Sistema musicians leading the way.

By ages of eleven and twelve, the youth children’s orchestras take on Beethoven, work-ing on the 1st, 5th and 7th symphonies, in that order. They work in sections at great length, with a teacher and lots of peer-coaching and mentoring. They may spend as much as three days on 12 bars of music, culminating in the whole orchestra coming together to work on those 12 bars. Almost all students join in annual retreats around holi-days and vacations, for one to three weeks. While on retreat everyone works on pieces in a variety of ways for ten hours a day; no wonder they jokingly call it boot camp.

One tiny incident struck me as telling. I attended an all-Penderecki concert, conducted by Penderecki himself, by the Simon Bolivar Senior Orchestra (professionals with the original Simon Bolivar Orchestra, now called A, who keep performing because they are so good and in demand, as the next age cohort became the Simon Bolivar B, and so forth—down to E currently). You can imagine what a 2,400 seat concert hall in the U.S. would look like on a weeknight for that concert. Well, the hall was nearly packed, almost half with El Sistema students, some as young as seven. The audience was overtly enthu-siastic and clearly sophisticated. The image I will remember was the two 13-year-oldviolinists sitting in front of me. Clearly they were a romantic item. During the performance, every time there was a tricky or flashy violin section, they spontaneously grabbed one an-other’s hands and pitched forward in their seats in breathless excitement. The response you might see in American kids at an action thriller movie. This demonstrated authenti-cally to me how deeply El Sistema informs the lives and hearts of the young musicians. I also heard one of Caracas’ two all-city orchestras, comprised of excellent, but perhaps not the very top players around 15 years old. They played the most inspired version of Scheherazad I have ever heard. I said, “That warhorse was never so fresh and ready to run.” You could feel them playing beyond what they thought they could do, breathless in excitement, but never out of control. I also heard an orchestra of 10-15 year olds play Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld Galop, the “can-can” music, and it was techni-cally excellent and just exhilarating. They were clearly having the time of their lives, and I found out later this was the local nucleo orchestra that had just lost a number of its best players to one of the city orchestras.

New Center

For many years the administration of FESTNIJOV scrambled creatively to find spaces for their nucleos; now they are constantly approached to start new centers throughout the country. Next month they are opening their extraordinary new center, The National Center for Social Action Through Music. It is a huge downtown Caracas complex with four major concert halls, soundproofed so five orchestras can be rehearsing at the same time; it has dozens of other performance spaces, dozens of practice rooms and classrooms—space enough for 4,000 students. And at Abreu’s demand, no (well, few) administrative of-fices—all music. Major orchestras from around the world are seeking bookings in the new central hall, which is purported to have the best acoustics on the continent; but rental requires that they do education work with El Sistema students. The building is wired for Internet 2, and will make their entire enormous video archive of performances and classes available to the world digitally. One characteristic feature in the new hall is that it is situated on one side of the largest public park in downtown Caracas. The park is now too dangerous for citizens to use. So the building is creating a large outdoor stage that opens into the park, and they are working with the police to make it safe for the public to attend free concerts there—giving the park back to the public through music. 21

Parents

Work with parents. Some kids who have no family board at the school. When they begin at age two or three, teachers go into the family home to assess the situation because children that young require a lot of parental/adult care, and they want to be sure the fami-ly can sustain it before the kid begins. Around age four kids are ready for group activities, and by age seven they are pretty much working in their first orchestra. They instruct par-ents on how to support the student well in their practicing; parents, and whole families, often sit and listen to the child practice at home, giving feedback and encouragement. I wasn’t able to ascertain if regular involvement of families is the norm, or the exceptionas in the U.S., but understand that families are included in a variety of ways and follow the student’s learning quite closely and proudly.

Relentless, honed focus, on key goals: building self-esteem, and a sense of each child’s value. I could feel the power of 33 years of unrelenting improvement—the focus has remained clear and unwavering, and they

have refined, polished, refreshed, and deepened their practices to achieve those ends. You can feel the system’s collective intelligence and educational elegance. They reach for excellence with astonishingly high standards and expectations for hard work over extended periods of time, but they support the reach not with pressure but with ongoing satisfaction and consistent images of their peers and colleagues succeeding at those high levels. They teach kids not to be afraid of things that are hard. They work early and uncompromisingly toward a sense of real achievement, continually upping the challenges and stakes. And then they see their older peers achieving at the highest levels.

Building community. From the first day, they make a safe, joyful place of equals (they wear uniforms, or at least the same shirts) who take care of each other. El Sistema marinates their students in love, high aspirations and expectations, belief in themselves and the group, and stick-to-it-iveness of the highest order. El Sistema grows from loving children first and loving music second. Love and high achievement coexist, both pour out of the teachers and the teaching environment, and there is no sense that love is condi-tionally based on achievement.

Learning theory, educational psychology, and now even neurophysiology confirm that people only learn through the positive path, through reward, love, encouragement, suc-cess and joy. Yes, we can train and guide people through fear and control, but real learn-ing only springs from personal motivation and the rewards that ensue form self-perceived success. El Sistema is remarkably devoid of fear. Students never appeared nervous or stressed (or even bored) to me. They all, and I mean all, appeared relaxed, poised, as if they were in their element and having fun. Yes they ran and played like kids when fin-ished for the day, but the energy was not that of escape or release, as much as moreeasy fun. Students feel deep support, and are supported to succeed in every possible way. As Dudamel said, “We make sure each child feels like an asset.” With that commit-ment to the positive, no wonder they learn so fast.

On final reflection, I recall the words of the great 20th century physicist David Bohm, who said that anytime we encounter seeming polarities in opposition, we should look for the larger truth that contains them both. El Sistema has accomplished this impossible dream of including seeming opposites that we struggle between in the U.S.. Their foundation in those larger truths is a way of understanding why the work goes so far and deep. In the face of the seeming opposition of creating arts learning for artistic vs. social purposes, ElSistema is about love of children, and of course, love requires both kinds of success suf-fused—the either/or debate in the U.S., which has such a long history, makes no sense there.

Part 2: Additional factors that make it work.

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In the face of seeming opposites of “classical” music as opposed to pop or folk music, El Sistema is clearly about the joy of making music and listening to all kinds of great music. Music making of many kinds of music is explored and revered without losing the depth demanded of classical capacity or the fun of Latin rhythms in every day. No wonder they play the complex rhythms of Bernstein’s Mambo with such exhilaration—they live in musi-cal pantheism and fusion. Yet they pour themselves into what is fundamentally a classi-cal music path. What is profoundly important to classical music is that the young musi-cians discover that the great masterworks are great music they love—the process brings youngsters into the discovery of the relevance, power and profound vitality of classical music to their 21st century lives. This is the “holy grail” for classical music—to have those who are seemingly the least demographically likely to own the value of the orchestral tradition become the most passionate proponents and practitioners of it.

Facing the challenge that many “national” programs in the U.S. have faced or “going to scale” as so many local programs have sought to do in wider expansion, El Sistema has found the balance between a national structure and local customization, and the dynamic balance seems to be the national structure and local experimentation. When a local experiment produces good results, it is shared and possibly adopted everywhere. It is a constantly evolving relationship, never codified or rigid, but always growing with its collec-tive eyes on the same prize.

Facing the perennial tension between longterm goals to create orchestras that are the best in the world and the short term goals of the hundreds of steps along the way for the thousands of individuals involved, they have found that joy, fun and collective hard work as the every hour realities produce the short and longterm goals. This may be another way of celebrating the way they have found to bring a program of this size live in serious play. Rodrigo Guerrero, the director of FESNOJIV’s Office of International Relations best describes the miracle of social service vs. musical goals. He says that the students are so excited by and dedicated to the musical fun and creation, they don’t realize until they leave El Sistema that it is really a social development program more than a musical one. The music is a means to change lives. And the means is so fully engaging that the partici-pants are don’t even notice how it is changing the trajectory of their lives.

Let me add one final note about why this arts learning marvel grows so well. The prize that everyone involved keeps their eyes focused upon is one that is profoundly human and spiritually resonant. I found the entire endeavor to be spiritually infused in an unar-ticulated, unmistakable, undoctrinaire way. It is more than a sense of mission; it is a mis-sion that matters widely and achieves its ambitious goals with beauty, love and stunningly effective teaching and learning. As Dr Abreu states, “Music education transforms and dignifies the individual,” and “Material poverty can be completely overcome by spiritualrichness.” Abreu believes that music and music education is one way to break the “cycle of poverty” that economists say Venezuela and Latin America are condemned to be trapped within. It is as much a movement to change the future of the nation (and now possibly other countries as Scotland has begun its program, and other Latin American nations move into pilot phases, and the U.S. begins to join) as it is a program to change young lives. That is why many of their leaders grimace slightly when they think of tripling the size of the program in ten years knowing how difficult that goal is, but they want to go for it because the chance for greater impact is irresistible to them. This is God’s work—whatever that means to you.

Reflecting on what I saw in Venezuela, I distilled the following challenges for myself and for those who are engaged in a process of planting El Sistema seeds on American soil. The following points intentionally do not suggest easy solutions but are offered as deep challenges: If we sought to create American

Part 3: Adapting El Sistema to American culture

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Sistemas that hold as rigorously to the Venezuelan model as possible, what would weneed to consider? Please note that these daunting goals are not intended to providea roadmap as much as a refreshing icewater bath to our thinking. We gravitate toward the practical in U.S. arts learning; this list hopes to nudge us out of the practical long enough to invite new ways of thinking. These are not suggestions but provocations.

Top priority on what the young people need and want. What can we do to have the center where children come for the music program be the most enjoyable, encouraging, successful, meaningful, community-focused place in their lives. So they would love to come six days a week if we could organize it. What would it look like if our programs fo-cused on the value of each kid’s contribution and person-ness first and on music second. What would it look like if every person involved held a laser-like personal commitment and focus to exactly that goal of individual empowerment first and foremost and never ever forgot that fun is the most important feel for music.

Multiple years. Whatever ways we may start a program, whatever ages students begin as our programs begin, invest in the highest quality experience and fullest expenditure of energy on the youngest new beginners to allow for a multi-year arc of development. This doesn’t mean giving up on those already past beginner’s stage, but it does mean to invest in envisioning and building a many year developmental sequence. Recruit a cadre of the youngest students possible and have parental/family support built in as part of the process.

Logistics. It is free. It is after-school. It is local, ideally within walking distance for stu-dents. It is four hours a day six days a week. How might we make it that appealing for students, and how might we convince parents that such a commitment of discretionary time is good for their children in a society that values grazing and broad experimentation.Early and consistent musical challenge and success. Prioritize success and satisfaction, and escalate the challenges quickly. Probably begin with singing, work into singing with simple instruments, and then into orchestral instruments. Have children listen to, and interact with, older more experienced young musicians. Have students see their teachers perform, too, regularly. Make sure the music is interesting and relevant to their lives, and take the time for students to discover the relevance of Beethoven.

Minimize musical notation hurdle. Use pedagogy that eases the step of reading stan-dard musical notation, so the flow of success and satisfaction is not impinged. Is there a way to make the process of learning a musical language a fun advance, an acceleration of the success and satisfaction? When and how to best introduce it?

Three level teaching. Have the one-on-one teacher also be involved in sectional and orchestral rehearsals to speed the skill-building, to minimize the repetition of mistakes and provide more support.

Lots of section work. Dedicate a lot of learning to section time in orchestra work—e.g. give the violas a lot of time together working on their part in a new work the orchestra is taking on before all the sections come together. What if the section took responsibility for the quality of its work, and peer coaching and tutoring were a big part of the learning.

Mix musical genres. Certainly include great classical compositions because they are so powerful—get students involved with them early (through reduced arrangements), often, and let them grow up with and grow into a few major works. But also include other great music with meaning to the community.

Reduce performance pressure. Narrow the gap between practice and performance, by bringing in observers more often, perhaps actively involving them. Have more frequent

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performances, even to other student groups, rather than holding off for one or several “big events” that increase anxiety and seem apart from the learning process.

Involve families. What if families were actively included and nurtured as assets to this process? What if there were ongoing communication with families about how the students are doing, and what the focus of practice could be. How could you make it joyful for fami-lies to be involved, so they will want to stay involved for many years?

Do not rely on arts funding. What if the focus on advocacy were on social service funds and other public and private ways we support youth and families? What if a rule of advo-cacy were (like Abreu’s practice) getting the potential funders to physically see the work before making the pitch?

Keep aspiring. El Sistema is currently making connections with dance and theater educators to include them in the expansion of El Sistema. The boldness of this work is that they plan together to make a major place for the arts in the school day, a major place for the arts in the national curriculum. They are building partnerships with youth sports networks in Venezuela. And they are building a 23 nation network to support youth music education throughout Latin America. And we must remember, it took 33 years of relent-less focus and humble improvement to get to this point. May we all live so long to see such a banquet of learning for young people everywhere.

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On my first trip to observe El Sistema, I was dazzled by the sheer enormity, astonishing quality, vibrant joy and aliveness, and mind-boggling implications of this accomplishment in Venezuela. After a week, my jaw muscles ached from so much dropping, my brain was exhausted from surfacing so many questions and processing so many observations, and my heart and spirit were soaring. I discovered that the talk I had heard from El Sistema enthusiasts was not hype. I found a deep affirmation for my belief (almost buried by decades of difficulty and disappointment) in the life-transformative power of the arts, a belief shared by many in the Americas. I launched my commitment to extend the power and potential of this achievement in Venezuela to young people elsewhere, without los-ing its core essential truths, even though the embodiment of these core truths may be inconvenient and challenging in different cultures.

During my recent second weeklong experience of El Sistema, nearly two years later, the enormity of its accomplishments loomed larger, some of its fundamentals grew clearer, and its power grew less explicable. The observations were deeper; the questions more confounding; and the implications more challenging. I left roiling around in a sense of “mystery” because I was struck by how much their teaching and learning practices resemble those practiced in good youth orchestra work around the U.S.—how can teaching practices that are not remarkably different produce such different results? This conundrum has prompted me to inquire into the less evident aspects of the work that lead to results so powerful and pervasive.

I often hear people attribute the success of El Sistema to the nature of the Venezuelan culture and the “character” of its people, if there is such a generalizable set of traits. Since the program has grown in this particular soil, I am sure there are many truths of this kind, and I do see some of those personality features embodied in their teachers: exuberant energy, emotional expressiveness, and vibrant physicality in everything they do. These make Venezuelans delightful to be around. These traits pour new energy into classical music and give their touring orchestras the distinctively communicative powerthat earns fervent fans all around the world. I was fascinated to discover on this second trip that they don’t teach students to move physically when they play, they merely allow the natural movement to emerge from the priority of emotional connection to the music. The result over 35 years is orchestras that move like schools of fish, in the flow of the music and the aliveness of creating something life-essential together. There is power in these “Venezuelan” traits— students in U.S. El Sistema programs seem as electrified in occasions of work with Venezuelan El Sistema conductors, particularly lit up by their pas-sion and drive, as Venezuelan kids are. These embodied priorities may be the genesis ofthe impression of “a pedagogy of passion-precedes-precision” in developing technique that I and others have written about elsewhere. I have come to believe this works more like: “A yearning for excellence produces passion and precision.”

While these cultural traits may be true and influential in the success of El Sistema, they are not the sole or even primary elements. Kids in El Sistema related programs around the world, in Latin American as well as the U.S. and European cultures are beginning to engage well in their cultural soils, probably as well as Venezuelan kids did 35 years ago. So, let’s admit, admire and delight in those national character traits that nurtured the growth of this worldwide phenomenon, and let’s take on the challenge and opportunity of cultivating those seeds in other national soils. Let’s not accept the dismissive viewsometimes aired that success of this kind is possible only in a relatively homogeneous culture such as Venezuela’s (or throughout Latin America’s, or Finland’s or Scotland’s). Heterogeneous cultures (such as the U.S.) have different but equally rich advantages to be tapped. That is part of the opportunity that awaits us as we bring the Venezuelan discoveries to life in our young people’s lives.

El Sistema’s Open Secrets April 2010

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In writing elsewhere, others and I have identified key aspects of El Sistema’s success: The intensity of the work (including the sheer number of hours they involve kids, the in-tensity of the focus during those working hours, and the number of years of involvement). The quality and duration of student attention, and the force and durability of the motiva-tion throughout that intensity. The start in early years and elegant transition into instru-ments and notation, all with an “ensemble” focus. The inclusion of family and community.The immediacy of the examples of success. The frequency of performing. The balance of personal emotional connection and focus on technique. The use of peer teaching and teachers in various roles. Those elements invite detailed analysis in order to support the discovery of success in other cultures, and the Abreu Fellows, scholars, researchers, and writers are delving into that work for the benefit of us all.

But there are other, less visible attributes of the Sistema which may be of equal or even greater significance. These are the philosophical and almost spiritual elements of the pro-gram that grow clearer in my reflection and two years of fascinated study and musings on this most significant arts-learning program in the world. It should be no surprise that philosophical and spiritual factors hold the key to El Sistema’s success, since Dr. Abreu articulates and prioritizes these elements every time he speaks.

This essay focuses on the less visible attributes for three reasons. 1) They fascinate me. 2) They hold the deep power of El Sistema that we must tap if we wish to bring its transformative power to the lives of children in other nations. Copying the pedagogy and curriculum alone will not produce the transformative power of El Sistema. 3) They offer a direct challenge to our traditional Western music practices. If we do not address these subsurface essentials, we build new structures on old foundations, foundations that have proven to have serious limitations that El Sistema has surmounted. I certainly do not dismiss the value and excellence in many Western traditions. I celebrate not only bril-liant and successful programs that bring young people into music, but also many great teachers and teaching tools that I have seen and heard about across the U.S. My hunger is to learn from the unprecedented accomplishment of El Sistema, in order to advance, deepen, connect and change aspects of our status quo that none would claim lives up to our hopes to have music transform our neediest kids’ lives.

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Material reprinted with permission of the author. All rights reserved.© Eric Booth