Unveiling the World of Teaching Artistry

The interview features an engaging conversation between host Devin Patrick Hughes and Eric Booth, a teaching artist and a central figure in the field. Right from the start, Eric shares his passion for teaching artistry and his extensive experience in working with orchestras and ensembles around the world. As you listen to their conversation, you'll discover the true essence of teaching artistry, its purpose, and the significant role it plays in opening up the world of classical music to broader audiences.

Teaching Artists vs. Music Teachers

One of the most intriguing aspects of teaching artistry is its distinction from traditional music instruction. Eric Booth emphasizes the difference in purpose between a music teacher and a teaching artist. While the former focuses on imparting the knowledge and traditions of an art form, the latter aims to activate the artistry within individuals, helping them discover and express their own creative potential. By unraveling this distinction, Eric challenges preconceived notions and provides a fresh perspective on classical music appreciation.

The Power of Activation and Connection

Teaching artistry operates on the principle of activation – awakening the innate creative capabilities within each individual. Eric Booth draws upon his vast experience to illustrate how teaching artists tap into the art history of other people, allowing them to connect deeply with a work of art on a personal and meaningful level. Through the teaching artist’s ability to open up musical works, even listeners who are not part of the "art club" can find beauty and significance within the music. Any musician, teacher, or administrator who wants to increase community engagement will want to hear and implement these techniques. 

Engaging Audiences Beyond the Concert Hall

As an orchestral conductor, Devin Patrick Hughes seeks to engage audiences who are outside of the classical music profession. His experiences in community outreach and educational concerts have revealed new avenues for connecting with diverse audiences. Eric Booth applauds Devin's efforts, highlighting the teaching artist approach of tapping into people's competencies and beginning with hands-on activities rather than relying on standard pre-concert lectures. This approach allows for a more inclusive and engaging experience for all participants.

Embracing Mistakes and the Joy of Process

Another significant aspect of teaching artistry is the emphasis on embracing mistakes and valuing the process rather than fixating solely on the end product. Eric Booth shares how the teaching artist mindset creates a safe space for experimentation and encourages learners to explore and discover. By shifting the focus from perfection to growth, teaching artists inspire and empower individuals to take risks, learn from mistakes, and unlock their artistic potential.

Teaching Artists as Catalysts for Social Connection

Art has the remarkable ability to bring people together and bridge societal gaps. Teaching artists play a pivotal role in fostering connection and dismantling the "us versus them" mentality. By activating artistry within individuals, teaching artists create a shared space where listeners become co-investigators, exploring and appreciating the nuances of works of art together. Through teaching artistry, the potential for connection and collective understanding expands, offering a transformative experience for all involved.

Unlocking the Artist Within

Eric Booth's Law of 80 Percent states that 80 percent of what teaching artists teach is who they are as artists. This principle emphasizes the significance of the teaching artist's presence and authenticity in creating a powerful impact. By embodying their own artistry and attending to people and circumstances with full attention, teaching artists spark curiosity, inspire exploration, and ultimately elevate the experience of participants.

Conclusion

In teaching artistry, the power of music is unlocked and shared with a broader audience. Through thought-provoking conversations, engaging examples, and personal anecdotes, Eric Booth and Devin Patrick Hughes shed light on the transformative potential of teaching artistry. You will gain a deeper appreciation for classical music, a fresh perspective on teaching and learning, and insights into the limitless possibilities of connecting with art on a personal level.

Devin Patrick Hughes: Eric, it's so great to be with you today. I would love it if you would just start by introducing yourself and talking a little bit about your work. 

Eric Booth: I am not quite officially the oldest living teaching artist, a lifelong freelancer who actually has a background in theater and I got into this strange subculture of classical music when I was hired to start the teaching artist program at Juilliard. That led to a subsequent thirty five years working with orchestras and ensembles and individual musicians about: how do you open up to the world what's inside these amazing works of musical art so that more than just the art club can love it?

This is a challenge around the world to open up what orchestras know and can do to reach satisfaction for new listeners.

I would love for you to talk about what is a teaching artist two terms that are very familiar to people inside and outside the arts world. How do you combine them? Are there teaching artists out there who don't know they're teaching artists? Is there a way that one becomes a teaching artist? I would just love to hear about that. 

Oh, that’s my favorite thing to talk about.  A teaching artist is not exactly the same as somebody who teaches an art form. And the difference really is in purpose. The purpose of a music teacher is to bring learners into the traditions and excellence and understandings of that art form. The number one job of a teaching artist is to activate the artistry of other people. And when that innate power in all human beings to make stuff they care about is awakened, it can be channeled in many different directions. That's partly why the field of teaching artistry is so broad. It has appeared organically in every country of the world. 

For artistry to accomplish different ends, I think it goes all the way back to the cave people. I think those were teaching artists doing those paintings because they weren't just paintings to decorate the walls for increased cave sale value.

It was performing an important act for the community. Teaching artists take as one of their expressions, which is the classical music one, they take what's inside those powerful works of art and are able to open it up so that almost anyone can discover what is beautiful, what is valuable, what is meaningful, for them inside that work.

I should mention teaching artistry does go by many different names. When we had the first international teaching artist conference, people showed up from twenty six countries and half of them had never heard the word teaching artists before. They're community artists and social practice artists and in England participatory artists. In countries where it's common for artists to work in communities, they're just plain artists.

There's things that unite them. There's differences by culture, but the uniting thing is their number one job is to activate the artistry of other people and then channel that capacity they've awakened to achieve a number of different ends. 

In my life as an orchestral conductor, we're always trying to activate people who are outside the profession. We're trying to bring people into the classical box, into this orchestral music box. I just realized some of the things that we do by the nature of community outreach or engagement we call it. Going to Senior community centers giving lectures, engaging people, getting them to stand up and sing and make rhythms and everything.

On the other end, going to schools, not maybe just the music class, but the entire student body and getting them engaged in education concerts where they're direct participants. 

Can you identify some of these people in the profession? Just outside of the teaching artist field, how would one self-identify in that regard?

I'll get to answer that. But first let me point you out as a good example of being a musician who has the teaching artist gene. Even though you may not think of yourself as a teaching artist, when you said that in your outreach and community engagement opportunities, you are activating the participation of the people who are there, you're leaning toward teaching artist work.

What doesn't lead in toward teaching artists work is what I see in a lot of pre-show, pre-concert lectures where information is given in the expectation that will enhance the quality of encounter with the music that follows. 

Here's the distinction most people in music don't automatically think of. They identify as somebody who knows, lives in and loves classical music, knows what to do in a concert hall. There are things that work for people in the art club that do not work for the other ninety percent. One of which is giving an insider's lecture on what's important about a piece of music. That actually sets ninety percent of the public back.

It makes it harder for them to discover things of relevance and personal meaning in the music, but working the way you work, the teaching artist approach, which is to tap what people can do musically are interested in musically as an entry point for their discovering what's relevant in music.

Because it's a disorganized and a largely invisible field, there is no badge. There's no secret handshake. There's not even much infrastructure for this field of teaching artistry. And yet, every major arts institution hires and relies on them. There are ways that people can learn teaching artists practices really in every major conservatory and every major university music program.

They have optional ways that you can learn those skills. You can pick it up through organizations, but the teaching artist field has never been funded to really have a training track. We've had them a few times, they lose their funding and go away. So that's part of the reason people who naturally are teaching artists don't identify for that because there hasn't been a training pathway or a certification system.

A couple of things you talk about in the book, tapping people's competence. I love these two things, tapping people's competence and beginning with a hands-on activity, as opposed to trying to teach something. You're trying not to do the thing that's in the title, but that's where the artistry comes in. Could you talk about that process in whatever form it may take, whether it's music or dance or theater?

Sure. Let me give a couple of examples from music that may sound a little more grounding for music listeners.For about five years, I was designing the family concert set, Tanglewood. And so we'd come together with a bunch of musicians and young conductors and design what's going to happen for fifteen hundred people at Ozawa Hall. One of our concerts was What Makes Music Sound Heroic. So we began by having the orchestra play the world's most boring version of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and taking suggestions from the audience for how we could adjust the playing of it to get a heroic sound, to turn it into a great heroic statement.

So they're calling out, "faster!" And when the musicians would play it, it wasn't really very heroic until, thank God, some kid near the back yelled out "BRASS!" So finally the brass played the theme and you could feel the audience go, "oh yeah, now we're on to something here." Their suggestions started to come and we ended up in a very few minutes with six ways an orchestra can create, or a composer can create the “heroic sound.”

We hadn't put up any of those six ideas. Their innate competence figured out those six and because they owned that vocabulary, they were able to watch how the orchestra worked throughout the entire selection of pieces in the concert. How different it would have been if we came out and gave a tidy little lecture. “There are six ways that the orchestra creates the heroic sound” would have set them back in their seats. They might have done some identification activity like school, but they wouldn't have been engaged. 

So tapping competence. People can do amazing musical things without any training. We used to list before we'd start that Tanglewood process, we would list all the things we could expect an audience of families would be able to do musically.

We'd come up with fifty, sixty different things that were natural musical competences we could tap to open the door to specific elements in the pieces we were going to play. So that's the way the teaching artist thinks is "What can people do? How can I tap it so they're starting to make stuff that's interesting and how can that be directly related to the pieces that we're about to share with them?" So that's how a teaching artist in music thinks about opening up a musical work. 

To extend that, one of the things that I thought was brilliant that I've done before, but not in the way you talk about it are these open rehearsals and you extend it to being a very open rehearsal. First of all, I'd love you to talk about that for our audience and give away the secrets. And second of all, I was wondering if I can co- op that in my next season because I really love that concept. 

You take it. 

All right bold listeners to this podcast: here's what a very open rehearsal is. First, we all know what an open rehearsal is where the public is invited to witness quote unquote "the creative process," which we all know is not particularly interesting. Part of the creative process, a final run-through where the audience can't even really hear what's being said and can't really tell the difference between what's not so good and what's so good. 

A very open rehearsal, usually with a smaller ensemble and focusing on a small piece of music that really does need rehearsal, the audience sits closer, and they are allowed to raise their hands, the musicians stop and people get to ask questions on the spot. So, the musicians go back and forth between their actual rehearsing and dealing with questions, people come up with, and they're often, excellent questions.

They're questions like, “you just played that little section three times in a row and weren't happy with it. And then the fourth time you thought it was great. And I couldn't hear any difference. What were you hearing? What were you working on?" It's an invitation for the musicians to open up the nuance that most hearers can't hear but is this treasure chest inside music. As the musicians start to share the incredible sophistication of what they're working on, I, as a non-musician for the first time, I'm getting an insight into the incredible technical care inside the music and to appreciate it.

Sometimes you get questions you'd never expect. Like one, I remember a kid say, who'd never heard of what a string quartet was saying, "I have a question. Why do violinists always have hickeys on their necks?" And to hear the musician say, "no kidding it was a problem in high school. Believe me, here's why it happens." it's a real thing for them to get that personal connection to musicians as people. And then an appreciation for this delicacy of their passion and their sophistication.

You will see, let's say they're working on a Shostakovich string quartet at the end of the six minutes when they perform that six minutes at the end of the 90 minute very open rehearsal that audience will stand up and cheer because they have never before recognized what those musicians are actually doing. How profoundly rich their knowledge and ability are t o have that opened up for us is a transformative experience. So that's a very open rehearsal.
Musicians have to be ready to go back and forth between playing and talking. It does help to have a kind of facilitator who takes the questions. It makes it a little easier unless you happen to have a very verbally facile member of the ensemble. But every ensemble I have worked with that has tried very open rehearsals has been dazzled by the experience.

I will say one final story. The first one I know of that ever happened was done with a quartet of musicians from the New York Philharmonic and a group of high school kids from Harlem. We were terrified this was not going to go well. The musicians were dubious about it and the kids didn't know anything about music and we were afraid they were going to be snarky or disrespectful or just not interested. And they asked such good questions. These New York Phil musicians were amazed and interested and said “we'll do these as often as you want,” because the kind of intimacy of the relationship, the capacity to really share what's inside music because we're actually working the medium of music together. It makes it a really powerful tool. 

I love how your principles go against this idea of black and white thinking or the mentality of us versus them, which I think is one of the main issues that keeps people disconnected and art can bring people back together. Can you talk about that at a greater societal level? 

When your artistry is activated, you're in a different relationship to works of art. You are not a consumer receiving a noun and being judgmental as to whether it provides you enough pleasure or not. I'm reminded at Juilliard when I used to teach the teaching artist two-year program, there was one assignment I would give these graduate students of music that terrified them more than any other. They would lie awake at night before this assignment came up in terror of what was going to happen. 

They had to get on a New York City public bus and engage people in substantive conversations about classical music before they got off. They were afraid they were going to be beat up!

What they almost invariably discovered is if you connect music to music, everybody has a big life in music. If you can tap any person's big life in music and share and find connection there, people become interested in this narrow subset that you happen to be a super expert in that you've gone deep in, they want to know more about it and they want to hear more about it.

So, the issue is to meet as equals in the amazing stuff music can do and not get into this, as you were describing, us and them mentality, where they're thinking, “man, people should love this piece. I don't know why they don't.” This is the separation that limits the potential of the audience. 

A teaching artist's mindset and skill set lets us engage as equal investigators into amazing pieces of music. That's not to say, “head for Stockhausen first, because you can make anybody love it.” But it is to say, “when you're sharing with a wider audience, take every opportunity to open the entry point using teaching artist tools so that even people like me with no musical background can get in there and do the thing that matters, which is make a personally relevant connection that matters to my life.”

As a facilitator or presenter, one of the points that you bring up and maybe as somebody who's as a conductor, you're encouraging you're trying to give a lot of positive reinforcement. I find this similar in parenting. 

One of the things that you talk about is don't say “good job,” “I love that,” “awesome.” In presenting outlaw comments about or dislike instead, get more into the weeds of what kind of choices that artist or that presenter make. Can you talk a little bit about that as a facilitator and maybe group sessions where you're just bringing out the artistry and everyone?

There’s a deep body of research around the topic. It's called growth mindset. Basically saying, “People, if you're emphasizing perfection, excellence of a product, people go into a mindset of success and failure, they start to move toward rewards and away from the pleasures of the process.”

Teaching artists are masters of process, of opening it up, discovering all the interesting stuff that's happening along the way. Not discounting product, not discounting the excellence of the final work, but taking all the pressure off of it and opening wider the exploration along the way as coinquirers. So that the expert, the musician or the conductor, Is engaging in questions that are relevant to me so that if they're human questions, they're really interesting, juicy questions along with the technical work that you need to do as well. But I care about the juicy questions that matter to my life.

We then investigate these in ways where I'm learning and maybe I could offer something that's of interest and enriches the knowledge of the musician. It's a different environment where process and product are in a different balance. Attention to process tends to invite people in full attention. On product, tends to separate people into judgment and the teaching artist world is the one where we're together. We're making stuff that matters. 

I also really love how you talk about mistakes. The older I get, the more I love mistakes. I love that. When you're younger, you fear mistakes and society teaches us not to make mistakes. You have a Picasso quote. Every act of creation is first an act of destruction. And sometimes it's easy for us to think of, "okay, you wake up in the morning, you can either choose to create, or you can choose to destroy." They're opposing black and white forces. Can you talk about that idea of mistakes and how you incorporate that as a teaching artist? Then, how creation and destruction play against each other and the creation of art?

Yes, we're right back in the research on growth mindset again, which is if your main energy is about discovery, is about seeing what might happen, experimentation, then failure is not a catastrophe. It doesn't make you think you suck as a musician. It doesn't make you think you're not going to have a career. It just means, "oh, I see. So that doesn't work. So there's this. Oh, we're going to have to figure out another way to do this." That way, which all of us have known in different places in our lives, and it's a freeing place. It's usually a more joyful place than the success failure continuum where there's fear and anxiety.

And boy, I know a lot of musicians I work with live in fear of mistakes. When we're in a workshop where we're exploring through teaching artist approaches, suddenly that just disappears and people are bolder. People are laughing and big mistakes are not a problem. 

There's one teaching artist I work with at the end of every either student class or workshop they vote on the best mistake of the day, and then they all give it a big cheer. And after a couple of times, people are nominating their biggest blunder of the day to have it acknowledged for how successful it was in producing learning. 

It's partly a matter of rebalancing the relationship between process and product, not disrespecting product, but allowing the pleasures of process to have really significant focus and to do it collectively.

One of the things that you repeat a lot is the law of 80 percent. 80 percent of what you teach is who you are. Can you talk about that principle? 

I invented the law of 80 percent and I call it a law to make it sound scary and that percentage of 80 percent creates the false impression I've done some research, which I haven't. As you just cited that the law of 80 percent is true, 80 percent of what you teach is who you are.

What that really means is: your most powerful, influential tool as a teacher, as a presenter, is not the content. It's not the handout. It's not the outline or the syllabus. It is the quality of you being an artist in the room with others, use paying attention the way the artist does, picking up on things that are happening in the room, responding to what comes up in the room in the moment.

That is where people get the visceral feel of what it means to be an artist more than they do from anything written about it. When they feel your pleasure and interest in something that just happened, when you pick up on an idea somebody just said and together you go somewhere with it.

That's where they get the feel for what it is to be inside the arts. And that experience is more powerful than any of our good written workshop sheets, our handbooks and all that stuff. So the challenge for teaching artists is to be your artist-self attending to people and circumstances, the way you attend to the elements of a work of art with people all the time because it's our most powerful tool. 

It's exhausting and it's no wonder that in their early years after teaching artists lead a workshop, they have to go home and take a nap because they have been attending this kind of empathetic, full attention, listening so hard to what people say to find what is musically valuable in what they just said, even though they don't have the vocabulary for it. That is what elevates the whole event. And in fact, it enriches us as artists. That's one of the beautiful things that happens in teaching artistry. It actually. Make sure a better artist it brings new ideas it opens your heart wider so you don't become just very narrow technically focused you remain humanly connected.

It turns out in the actual presentation or activity, the most exciting parts are the parts that went off the rails a little bit, that were a little bit extemporaneous, where definitely they were the ones leading in some way.  So can you touch on preparation for people in an art, but might want to go bring people in from the outside in to that art?

The key first step is finding what I call an entry point. This is going to be the gateway you invite people to engage with this particular work of art. 

Usually when we do preparatory presentations, we offer several ideas. Oh, there's this interesting thing that happens and you might want to listen for this. There's a very important feature of the music that you want to pay attention to—all of that great for the art club. 

But if you are moving outside, what you do is you pick one entry point and you draw people into it experientially, not through information. By something that turns you on about this piece that you love sharing with someone. It could be an emotional connection. It could be a structural feature of the work, but it's something that would matter to a non-musicians world. It is not just a clever use of retrograde and it's not “the mixolydian mode is powerful in this section.” It's that there's a big idea here. 

In fact, I was just talking with the group last night and one came up with the idea. What, if you were bipolar, what would you hear musically because the piece was by a bipolar composer and he wanted them thinking if you're in two extremities of experience, what would that do to your musical thinking and your musical expression? 

They began to explore this and then they began to listen to snippets from the piece that they could identify as, a kind of extended sort of expression that they could see or feel how someone who was struggling in a particular way would go for musical ideas like this. When they presented the whole piece, that was a lens they worked through.

I can give you one other example, a beautiful example by David Wallace the guy who wrote a wonderful book, engaging the concert audience in which he really lays out how to do interactive concerts. He did a solo concert where he played Stravinsky's viola elegy. It's the only one written for a friend of Stravinsky's who died. 

David starts the concert by asking the audience the question, “what are all the things that happen to people in grief? What are the different kinds of experiences we go through?” And he gathers some of those ideas and he said, “what would some of those ideas sound like on my viola? Give me some suggestions for how that sort of feeling numb, what might that sound like? Give me some instruction.”

He develops a little vocabulary of emotional states in grief and he said “here's a little segment from the piece. What emotional quality do you find here?” And people start to identify aspects of grief in the snippets he demonstrates. He plays the piece and people are so inside Stravinsky's grief experience, noticing all the way through with incredible nuance, what Stravinsky was doing because he had tapped this universal element of multiple expressions of grief and how they can be musically suggested. 

And so there wasn't a narrative thread, but there was this emotional world he had opened up as a teaching artist that people could then apply to a much deeper appreciation of the piece. 

So you are living in this world 100 percent of the time, because your wife is Tricia Tunstall. She's somebody who I read 10 years ago, the Playing For Their Lives. Having that resource, having that person to bounce back and forth in your field, what that's like. The book her feature, which you also talk about is based on one of the most successful music education programs to teach people about life, about creativity and, not just about music, El Sistema. 

Oh, Devin, no one's ever asked me that question before about my wife. I love that! It's embarrassing. Our pillow talk about how you can, how does it work? How do we draw people in? What is the inner life of pieces of music that open it up for non-musicians?

When we listen to music together, we're both appreciating, the qualities of the piece and the qualities of the performance. But we're looking for this kind of ripple effect that can be tapped for people who aren't insiders. One of the real treats for us, she's quite a excellent pianist and she's learned a repertoire of about, I guess an hour and a half of music now, and she plays the same pieces over and over.

We listen together and we explore about what else is in there that might be opened up for 10-year-olds. What do you think might be exciting for people of a different culture? So, we're exploring the kind of flexibility and enormity of the world inside these pieces. 

And yes, we met through the El Sistema world. This is a story I don't get to tell very often El Sistema, this amazing musical accomplishment of a million kids in Venezuela, been around now fifty years. I was taking a break from work, and I went as a skeptic cause it sounded a little bit…hyped to me. And it was amazing and came back and was convinced I'm going to do things to bring El Sistema like work to the U S. She decided she wanted to write a book about this and someone told her she had to interview this guy, Eric Booth and so that's how we met. She was interviewing me for her book, Change. We discovered how much we had in common, how exciting it was. And then we wrote a book together about. El Sistema and it's worldwide growth, that book, Playing For Their Lives. It is a big part of our daily life.

We launched a newsletter together that for 11 years has been the communications vehicle for the worldwide field. We live in it, we talk about it, we think about it. It's all this forward leaning like creating potential for new audiences for new work that opens up in ways that get orchestras out of their limitations. That's the interface where we live. I must say, it's a pretty exciting place to live. 

If anyone else would like to get a hold of you, join the teaching artist community. Can you mention the best way to go about doing that, get extra resources for continuing education, et cetera?

The easiest way to reach me directly is through my website, ericbooth.net. There's a contact link there and that'll get to me all the time. If people want to read more, they could read the book Making Change, which came out recently. We're even making copies available free if people want to use them as advocacy tools, sometimes within orchestras, if you want to get that marketing director a little more excited about community outreach. If you want to get the board excited about a new initiative for connecting with schools, Making Change can be a useful tool to get them excited about the potentials of teaching artistry.

If they want to find out about teaching artistry itself on my website, there's a lot of free essays that people can check out. Every major city has teaching artists and teaching artist organizations. A little Googling around would probably find it. It is estimated there are thirty thousand professional teaching artists in the U.S. alone, but it's an almost invisible field. So it might take just a little bit of snooping to find those teaching artists. And I am always happy to help. 

For anyone who might want to support teaching artists across the United States or in general, do you have resources for that as well? 

There is an organization in the U.S. and there is an international organization, I'd like to name both of them, that really work heroically to try to network the field. So in the U.S., it's the Teaching Artists Guild. If you Google Teaching Artists Guild, they're running on fumes and doing beautiful work. Internationally, it's the international teaching artist collaborative. I started that in 2012. We now have four thousand members around the world and it's a super active free membership organization. 

Thank you, Eric, so much for the interview and for the incredible work that you are bringing to the world. You probably don't always get the thanks you deserve. So, on behalf of all of us, thank you for all your amazing work. 

Well, Devin, thanks for this opportunity. Thanks for those thanks. Just one big thanks to your listenership the determination, the resilience it takes to keep bringing this possibility and this beauty forward makes all the difference in the world. With a little bit of extra teaching artist skill, I think we have bigger audiences ahead. 

This interview is excerpted from One Symphony Podcast. Are you a music lover, a curious learner, or someone who wants to discover the hidden depths of classical music? Then look no further than the One Symphony podcast. From thought-provoking conversations with renowned teaching artists to the exploration of the transformative power of music, One Symphony offers a unique and enriching listening experience.