I am finding it pretty difficult to get excited about Arts Education Week, as recognized by the US House of Representatives. Arts Education Week is a good thing, of course, no one is likely to argue otherwise. And yes, I am big on the idea of building steps in a ladder and it would be fair to view this designation as a step in the ladder of all of our work in arts education.
I wanted to do something on Dewey21C about Arts Education Week. It won’t be much of a celebration, and it certainly won’t overstate the importance of Arts Education Week. It will be more in the category of reflection. So, as I make my way on a very slow moving Amtrak up to the state capitol, Albany, for the first meeting of The NYS Board of Regents Task Force on Teacher and Principal Effectiveness, I present to you something that was twenty years ago.
I worked for a long time as a teaching artist, back in the days before the term teaching artist was commonly held. Parenthetically, I should mention that there are a number of people who don’t like that term and wish to see it changed to something along the lines of artist educator. That’s for a future entry!
The work I did spanned K-12, and included a wide range of work from one-shot or drive-by as some like to call it, to sequential residencies, lecture demonstrations, classroom work, master classes, discipline-based education, side-by-side, arts integration, private lessons, professional development for teachers, etc.
During that period, I was also active as in pure performance, and also did a fair amount of substitute teaching in the New York City public schools. I also taught brass chamber music at the Manhattan School of Music. There might be some, not knowing my background, who question my understanding of discipline-based instruction, in other words: music for music’s sake. After two degrees at Juilliard, teaching on the college level at the Manhattan School of Music, and winning a Naumburg Chamber Music Award among others, believe me, I get discipline-based arts education.
Funny enough, the best thing I ever did as I teaching artist, the things I look back on the most fondly, was not discipline-based, nor was it integrated, strictly speaking. Instead it was in the realm of youth development, more specifically drop out prevention, or as it was known formally back in the day: Attendance Improvement Drop Out Prevention (AIDP).
It was 1989-1990 and the program was a partnership among Young Audiences New York, The New York Philharmonic, and the New York City Board of Education. It was called the Musical Arts Experience Program, or MAX as we called it.
MAX was designed by Mitchell Korn, who was at the time a consultant and co-artistic director at Young Audiences New York. It included roughly 20 comprehensive New York City high schools with a high percentage of kids at risk of dropping out. The program focused not on teaching music, per se, but instead on teaching life-skills by engaging about up to fifty students in each school in an exploration of what life was like for five chamber musicians, only a few years out of college.
Our program was titled: “If You Want to Play, You’ve Got to Pay.”
Let me explain.
The kids: Over age, left back, hanging by a thread in their high school; but, they were still coming coming to school.
The artists: Barely a decade older than the students, and younger than most of the high school teachers and administrators. Each of the artists was trying to make their way as a freelancer, while also joining together to try and make their way as a collective, in this instance as a brass quintet.
The program: “If You Want to Play, You’ve Got to Pay,” was based upon the love of music we all shared, and how much we wanted to be able to play brass chamber music. But, there were innumerable roadblocks that we had to deal with, all real, no bullshit, no talking down to the kids. We shared our lives, our hopes, our dreams, and our difficulties.
After the first session, where we played and then shared what the music and group meant to all of us, we began to address what it takes to play, to be able to have the privilege of playing brass chamber music professionally. Plain and simple: in order to do what we loved, which was to play as a brass quintet, we had to pay. And pay we did!
We unpacked the inner-working of the business of the ensemble, a business for which we were not trained. Each of us addressed the various non-musical roles we had to learn and perform to support the business:
1. Maintaining the music library.
2. Bookkeeping.
3. Fundraising, including grant writing and donor/friends development.
4. Relations with booking manager, and arts education organizations where we were on the roster.
5. Development of arts education support materials.
6. Public Speaking/Audience Engagement.
7. Competitions and other performance issues, including stage fright.
8. Touring support.
10. Key issues related to children and schools: age and grade appropriateness, partnering with the teacher, assessment, participatory elements in the program, etc.
And I am sure there was more, but hey, it’s 20 years ago!
The work include such things as the French horn player, who was also bookkeeper, bringing in the actual check book and financial records, including tax returns. It included bringing in copies of grant applications, tour itineraries, contracts, etc. The students gave us feedback on program ideas, choosing composers for commissions, selection of publicity materials, and more.
And perhaps, best of all, that year, as we prepared to compete in the Naumburg Chamber Music Competition, we practiced our competition program for the students, asking them to give us feedback, help judge program order, give us a sense of how we looked, our levels of confidence, and we shared with them how much the competition meant to us and how anxious we all were. And yes, we worked with them on how to judge us musically. I have no doubt that the work in the MAX program helped us prepare for the Naumburg competition in ways not ordinarily available. Did it help us win the competition? I believe it did.
To those who say “that’s not music education, that’s music experience,” I say in return, who cares? What I remember best of all, was that over the course of the five sessions we did with these students in each partner school, we connected with them as people, and established a shared relevance: a 360 degree relevance, for the the lives we all led, the meaning and fruit of work we did not necessarily want to do, and of the importance of music in our
lives. While the kids might not necessarily have come to like what we were playing for them, I have no doubt, even 20 years later, that they came to respect the meaning of the music, and felt the power that flowed through us, the chamber musicians.
lives. While the kids might not necessarily have come to like what we were playing for them, I have no doubt, even 20 years later, that they came to respect the meaning of the music, and felt the power that flowed through us, the chamber musicians.
(I do remembering the students responding more favorably to the contemporary music than many of our more traditional chamber music audiences. They got the edge and certainly came to respect our commitment to the music. We really dug that!)
And, I shouldn’t forget, the students also had the opportunity to attend specially designed concerts of The New York Philharmonic.
As to the efficacy of the program, well, I cannot say, as we never saw any evaluations, something which was not unusual back then. Don’t laugh, but we heard great things from all involved! Really!
There’s another thing quite remarkable: a number of the people associated with MAX are still around and kicking quite hard:
Daniel Windham, then director of education at the NY Philharmonic, as just about everyone knows, is the director of the Arts Program at the Wallace Foundation.
Eileen Goldblatt, then executive director at Young Audiences New York is working hard at the New York City Department of Education to ensure a quality arts education for all DOE students.
Carol Fineberg, then program evaluator among other consultancies, remains an active and important figure in arts education, including as project director for two concurrent USDOE AEMDD grants at The Center for Arts Education.
Tom Bellino, then program associate at Young Audiences, is a force to be reckoned with up in New York’s Hudson Valley, where he has created jazz festivals, has a record label, manages the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra, and has just started a radio series.
Mitchell Korn, former owner of Artsvision and then program director at Young Audiences New York, is at the Nashville Symphony where he is director of education.
No wonder the younger generation has some issues with opportunities for advancement!
So, that’s it, my reflection on something I remain very proud of to this day, and when I think of things I miss now that I no longer play music professionally, well, the MAX is tops!
Thanks for a most thoughtful and positive article.
I truly enjoy reading your work on a weekly basis.
Thank you so much for writing and posting this. I really enjoy your blog, and read it frequently. As a teaching artist and freelancer, I think a lot about what my work means to me, and to my students, and how I might think about it 20 years down the road. Your “where are they now” section is also fascinating– I have always thought that teaching artistry could take me places that I maybe hadn’t anticipated during my years as a performance major, but it is nice to see concrete evidence that my hunch is correct!
Keep up the amazing work, your blog keeps me inspired.
Richard…A powerful demonstration of what a group of gifted and authentic artists can do when they share who they are, what they do, how they do it, and why, transparently. No, it’s not “arts education” but it is the preparation for open hearts and minds for the next steps of study in music, about music, for music etc. It sets the stage. Too bad you didn’t get to return and develop and cultivate the ground you so beautifully “plowed” and made ready for fertile understanding.
Jane
Great to finally see a photo of you holding a trombone, Richard! We need more “teaching artists” in education, and programs like the MAX seem the way to go.
Itzhak Perlman: “teaching music education without the students playing instruments is like teaching trigonometry appreciation. It doesn’t work!”
Thomas Jöstlein
(associate Principal Horn, St. Louis Symphony)