Guest Blog: Ted Wiprud, Director of Education/NY Philharmonic: Arts Education Advanceman for the NY Phil on Tour

Please join me in welcoming to Dewey21C, my dear friend Ted Wiprud, Director of Education at the New York Philharmonic. I’ve known Ted for over 10 years, going back to his days at Meet The Composer. We used to do professional development workshops together for composers, and I have been a big fan of his music (yes, he’s a composer!).

Ted is on the road right now, in Japan, Korea, and Abu Dhabi. He’s leading arts education work in those cities in advance of the New York Philharmonic musicians who are on tour.

Ted wanted to share some of his experiences with you, and I am just thrilled about it.
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Howard Gardner tells the story of his toddler son, while the family was staying in a hotel in China, having fun each morning trying to get the room key into the slot where guests deposit keys when going out in the morning. The slot in the wall matched the unusual shape of the key’s plastic tag, and the child would happily bang at the slot until the tag happened to line up and the key would drop in. After several days of this, a kindly Chinese woman intervened, guiding the child’s hand just so, to make the key slide in perfectly – with an air of pity for an American father’s incompetence in the right education of the young.

How do different cultures view learning? In China, as in much of Asia, learning is a process of internalizing the wisdom of the ages. Creativity is an increment one can offer to the great tradition only when one has achieved some level of mastery. In the West, learning has come to be about constructing one’s own knowledge, with creativity in the very act.

This distinction has become an ongoing obsession and challenge for me and for the Teaching Artists faculty of the New York Philharmonic. For the fourth year running, and the sixth time overall, Philharmonic TAs have touched down in Japan for a residency, building on recent experience in China and Korea. “Become a Teaching Artist – see the world!” may not be one of the standard inducements to the field, but the New York Philharmonic, with its two international tours most seasons and its highly evolved Teaching Artist practice, has lately become a laboratory for international exchange on music learning and Teaching Artistry. On the current Asian Horizons tour, different teams of TAs will carry out different projects in Niigata and Tokyo; in Seoul; and for the first time, in Abu Dhabi, UAE.

Yesterday, in Nagaoka, we visited a lab school run by Niigata University’s Faculty of Education. The school’s literature presents an educational philosophy of inquiry growing out of puzzlement and leading to leading to growth – a cycle quite recognizable to esthetic ed adepts. The faculty of the school and the university had invited us to aid their search for new models of learning and creativity. The elementary music teacher has begun introducing composition into her classes, anticipating a new national curriculum that will demand more creativity. When the Teaching Artists Ensemble played music that had been composed by eight Tokyo ten-year olds this summer, through our Very Young Composers program, they were as astonished as audiences everywhere, but whereas many Japanese musicians react to children’s music by trying to debunk it – someone must have done this for them! – the Nagaoka teachers wanted to understand how it was done and try it themselves.

There is a hunger too among some musicians in Japan for the skills we continually work at in New York, to connect music with audiences, especially new audiences and young audiences. Life With Music Project is a musician-run non-profit that has been our partner in all of our schools work in Japan, and for the first time, two Japanese musicians joined the Teaching Artists Ensemble to help create and perform our interactive in-school concerts (featuring those Tokyo kids’ works along with music of Lou Harrison, Johannes Brahms, and Teaching Artist Justin Hines). Progress is slow but real in spreading the idea of activist musicians, and of schools that welcome professional artists for more than perfunctory performances.

But as we continue this year’s journey, I keep thinking of the weight of tradition, the millennia of wisdom that musicians and educators here must respect as they devise new ways of teaching and learning. Sometimes I even wonder whether our work could be dangerously subversive. Once a Japanese child has heard her own music performed by the New York Philharmonic, how can she go back to being a vessel in need of filling?

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Theodore Wiprud

Director of Education, New York Philharmonic

Theodore Wiprud has directed the Education Department of the New York Philharmonic since October 2004. The Philharmonic’s education programs include the historic Young People’s Concerts, the new Very Young People’s Concerts, one of the largest in-school program of any US orchestra, adult education programs, and many special projects.

Mr. Wiprud has also created innovative programs as director of education and community engagement at the Brooklyn Philharmonic and the American Composers Orchestra; served as associate director of The Commission Project, and assisted the Orchestra of St. Luke’s on its education programs. He has worked as a teaching artist and resident composer in a number of New York City schools. From 1990 to 1997, Mr. Wiprud directed national grantmaking programs at Meet The Composer. During the 1980’s, he taught and directed the music department at Walnut Hill School, a pre-professional arts boarding school near Boston.

Mr. Wiprud is also known as a composer and an innovative concert producer, until recently programming a variety of chamber series for the Brooklyn Philharmonic. His own music for orchestra, chamber ensembles, and voice is published by Allemar Music.

Mr. Wiprud earned his A.B. in Biochemistry at Harvard, and his M.Mus. in Theory and Composition at Boston University, and studied at Cambridge University as a Visiting Scholar.

September 2008