Art & Social Action: Aesthetic Experience and Social Imagination: The Legacy of Maxine Greene

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So I think we'll get started again.
A quick announcement because one of the questions
provoked a good connection.
Rebecca is where?
Rebecca in the bottom here has pointed out
that there is a symposium here in Granoff Saturday, March
5 called Designing the Next Steps.
And it's a day of workshops, community classes, discussion,
design, lecture, demonstrations, and art installations.
Here's the part where it has particular relevance.
The ASaP Symposium explores holistic, artistic
interventions for diverse populations.
This year's focus is on the power
of design and implementation of arts programming
in the medical field.
So Rebecca has more information on this specific program.
You can go and seek her out.
But a nice corollary to this day, especially the connection
to the medical field a week from tomorrow.
Maxine Greene was an important inspiration
for many of us, philosopher of education and aesthetics,
spent the majority of her career at Teachers College, Columbia
and also importantly, at the Lincoln Center Institute
for the Arts in Education and wrote several books,
including one that I quoted from,
Releasing the Imagination.
In the back of your program, you see a list
of three other conferences, symposiums
that Community MusicWorks has been involved in presenting
over the last 15 or 16 years.
Each of them really focused on Maxine's work
in a different way.
She was a speaker at two of them and was a real inspiration
for Community MusicWorks and many other initiatives.
Maxine passed away in 2014 at the age of 96.
And there's a group really working
to keep her work and legacy in the minds of people
in the-- practitioners in the field.
And Heidi Upton is the president of this Maxine Greene
Center for Aesthetic Education and Social Imagination.
So we are bringing this topic forward,
the legacy of Maxine Greene.
Though Karen and Paul aren't necessarily connected
to Maxine's work, it felt like the conversation
that we framed is very much one that Maxine would appreciate.
So very briefly again, bios are in the book.
But Heidi Upton is, as I said, the president of the Maxine
Greene Center and is an associate professor at St.
John's University in New York.
She'll describe more of this Discover New York class
that she teaches.
But important to the theme of the today,
Heidi is also an accomplished concert pianist
so is wearing two hats here today.
Karen Zone is the president of Longy School of Music,
which is now the Longy School of Music of Bard College and also
a concert pianist.
So there's a theme on that side of the panel here.
Karen was an associate provost at Berklee College of Music
and was at the MacPhail Center before that, really important
work that Karen is involved with and that she'll
talk about connected with the Sistema world
starting a MAT program to teach musicians
to be educators in this kind of new space
of Sistema-related work.
And we are honored that Paul Guyer
is with us from the Brown faculty, Johnathon Nelson
Professor in philosophy and humanities
who has recently, I think, published
the History of Aesthetics and will kind of provide
that frame for us at the end of this panel
into what sort of philosophical context
is some of this applied work.
So with that, let me welcome Heidi Upton.
[APPLAUSE]
I need a password.
[INAUDIBLE]
[LAUGHTER]
OK, so much better.
Hi, everyone.
I first want to say how honored I am to be here and how excited
and how inspired I am so far listening to people who are not
just talking the talk but walking the walk
and really doing something.
This presentation that I'm about to give is a report, in a way,
on the partnership between-- or partnerships,
I should say-- between students in my course called
Discover New York and people who are homeless in New York City.
And I came to this undertaking from a position
at Lincoln Center Institute, which
is now called Lincoln Center Education, where
I was a teaching artist, a full-time teaching
artist for several years and where
I got to know Maxine Greene and learned
about aesthetic education, which is an approach to education.
And it is a methodology, which I'm
going to discuss a little bit as we move forward.
So the question I think that I would like to pose to you
and for you to think about and for me to address, first
of all, is this word aesthetic and the notion
of aesthetic experience, what that means
and how I think about it in my work.
So we're going to start with this.
Because this is something that I ask my students
at the beginning of every semester
is to notice the room that we're in.
And it's generally a room that's about that shape.
It's not like this room, which has a different shape.
But it's usually a lot right angles.
And it usually-- and it remarkably, looks
like this room, my classroom.
And I really have them look for a very long time
at the ceiling, which is filled with geometry.
And we begin the semester by just describing things.
And this is when my students think that this is really
a nut's course.
And maybe they should drop this one and take it from another.
Because Discover New York is something that all freshman
have to take at St. John's.
But each professor who teaches it
does it through their own lens of expertise.
And my expertise is aesthetic education.
So they're stuck with that.
So we describe the room.
And as I've been sitting here listening to everybody speak,
I've been looking at this space and thinking about situating
myself in its aesthetic space.
I think it was a line in a Beatles song.
You might correct me.
Is it, "The love you take is equal to the love you make?"
Do you know that line from the Revolver album?
Do I have it right or backwards?
I'm not sure.
But it's that philosophy.
It's that deep thinking.
It's that to the extent that one enters, that one gives oneself
to anything, that is to the extent that one receives.
And I think that's the way.
And Maxine used to say it with personal relationships.
And it's also just situating oneself in aesthetic space.
So I'm noticing a lot parallel lines
in here all over the place.
And I might say that there is a conversation
between parallel lines and horizontal and vertical.
So there are lot of horizontals and a lot of verticals.
And in my discussions with my students
about the room in which we sit, it moves from description
to analysis.
And then, maybe like, who decided
that there should be right angles
or that it should be this color or whatever
questions arise as we proceed in our inquiry
into aesthetic space.
So it's the qualities of things that I am thinking about
and that I want my students to think
about when we are thinking about aesthetic experience.
First, noticing the qualities of things.
And here is, for example, a thing, which is a shape.
And it's red.
And we could start to describe it.
And we could say that it's not uniform in color
and that there's some texture involved and everything.
But if you have ever read Maxine Greene's writings
or if you ever knew her, you know
that she is always referring to the work of others,
whether it be the work of philosophers, such as Dewey
and Sartre or the work of other artists.
And I captured this quotation from one person
that she references very often who
is Merleau-Ponty who was an existential phenomenologist.
Don't think that I really know what that means.
But that's what he was.
And that's what Maxine was.
And he is talking here about how there are so
many contingencies when you look at something, when you're
there, when you're putting yourself
in relationship to anything.
And that's very much what I want my students
to begin to think about that in the room, each of us
has something to say.
Each of us brings our cloud of experience.
And each of us has a unique perspective
on what is happening.
So Maxine is always talking about--
and I think that Sebastian mentioned this in his talk--
the idea of givens versus contingencies,
that in education-- whatever that is-- we are given, given.
You know, this is a fact.
Learn this.
But that perhaps we should approach these givens
as contingencies.
And so we never really know what we're looking at.
When we're looking a patch of red,
it might the eye of a bird.
And that bird might be escaping from a box.
Anyway, so Maxine Greene, what she said so often is,
I am what I am not yet, that we are always becoming.
And her description of situating oneself in aesthetic space
is up there in red.
And she, herself, asks the reader
to notice wherever we are, we can shift our understanding.
We can shift our consciousness into a moment of awareness
of aesthetic space.
Notice the sheen on the apple on the fruit stand.
And so it is this that inspires me
to inspire my students to be more in the moment,
to be mindful, to notice, to wake up.
So I know about aesthetic education
from be a teaching artist at Lincoln Center Institute.
And aesthetic education creates pathways
into transactions with works of art
using particular concepts embedded in that work of art
and teaching artists craft workshops
based on their inspiration of what
they find in a particular work of art,
which is the text understudy.
So there are four cornerstones in aesthetic education
and developing workshops.
And that is asking questions, making stuff-- art-making,
making things that are having to do with whatever
is in that work of art that's going to be met-- bringing
in contextual information, the world
out of which the work of art emerges, and a reflection.
What is it that we have done here?
What are we thinking about here?
So I brought that into my job at St. John's University
when I began there in 2003.
And I got to do whatever I wanted in Discover New York.
And it took me a while.
I first taught it in another way.
You can evolve the course as you wish.
And it was one day when I got off the subway
at Fifth Avenue and 53rd Street actually
on my way to do an aesthetic education workshop at the Met
when I noticed on this cold January Saturday
morning that every bench and every little nook
and cranny along the way to the uptown bus on Madison Avenue
had a lump of person covered in clothing.
And it hit me like a thunderclap that what
I needed to do with my Discover New York course
was focus on homelessness in New York.
And I had to learn about it.
And then, I had to bring that to my students.
And so my little version of the course is DNYhome.
So much has been spoken about Dewey.
And there's Art as Experience again.
And he-- yes, it was inspiring to me
that he said that art has been kind of taken away from us.
That it isn't this, which is our birthright-- which
Eric Booth mentions in his book The Everyday Work of Art--
is taken into the palaces, which is what you mentioned,
Sebastian.
It's not part of our culture.
It's off there somewhere.
You have to go to it to experience a work of art.
And so many people say, I don't know anything about art.
So I can't have any-- I don't have an opinion about it.
This is a quotation of Dewey. "A wall is
built around these works of art that renders them opaque."
So when I was thinking about, well,
how am I going to teach this course, which
is an academic course-- which is not a skills-based arts
course or anything.
I want my students to have a deep aesthetic experience
of the situation that is called homelessness in New York City.
I, to my surprise, found that political scientists also
feel that there is some sort of a wall built
around this notion of citizenship
and civic participation.
Meta Mendel-Reyes says this, that we are not brought up,
we are not educated to become members
of a participatory democracy.
And it was very resonant to me.
It's connected to what Dewey were saying about the arts.
And here is someone else, Carol Pateman.
You know, the answer to creating people who are participants
is to have them participate.
So I decided to try to get my students to participate
as much as possible in activities having
to do with homelessness.
So I brought in, as much as I could,
the honored works of art that I knew so much about
into the course, weaving them in.
And I have just sort of woven together
the course that's DNYhome.
And so I'm going to kind of show you some projects that
have gone underway.
Now, the first activity that I want to share with you
it really comes out of Maxine's thinking
that in order to really get into anything,
you have to situate yourself in relationship to it
just as I situated myself in relationship to this room
and start thinking about parallel lines,
particularly here when you have to see yourself as somebody
who's having a relationship with--
and you are one of many having that experience
with that thing, in this case, homelessness
but with any kind of work of art.
So this is from Variations on a Blue Guitar,
which is one of her texts.
OK.
So an activity that I do to get my students thinking
about homelessness instead of just passing
by the person on the street is to-- I hand
out little sandwich bags like this.
And I ask them-- they don't know what I'm doing.
I ask them to please write down, what if they
had to leave home quickly?
They didn't know if they would come back.
What would they take with them?
Every little item had to be on a separate piece of paper,
toothbrush, comb, everything separate.
And then, they would have to put each one of those little items
in the bag and then on the outside of the bag
draw the conveyance that they would need in order
to bring all that stuff with them
wherever they needed to go.
And this is a very AE, Aesthetic Education,
methodology kind of thing to do to bring
the personal relevance into the regard of the work of art.
And I happened to use a work of art
in this activity, which is by Thomas Hoepker.
And it's a photograph entitled Bag Lady in Chelsea.
But I don't tell my students that.
But after that activity, they are
more ready to look at those bags and to think
about this person and the choices
that the photographer made.
They can think about the textures, the colors, and all
of the aesthetic qualities.
And then, what other things?
What are the questions they have?
And inevitably, the question comes up, well,
where is her face?
And then, we begin to think about the anonymity
of homelessness in New York.
OK.
Now, I don't have time to go through every little thing
that I do in this course.
But I do have a couple of frames here
that kind of give you an overview of the things
that I think are important.
Beginning with personal relevance
and then having students use books, contextual information
books that give them information.
One of them is a narrative by Elliot Liebow-- I never
know how to pronounce his name-- called Tell Them Who
I Am and another one by Ralph Nunez, Shelter Is Not a Home,
Or Is It?
And so a combination of this contextual material
in preparation for them going out to fulfill what
is a required component in the course, which is called
academic service learning.
I have created relationships with three service centers
in New York.
And in my experience, so important to develop
a relationship with whoever is there
coordinating volunteer activities.
St. John's has a tremendous Academic Service Learning
Department, much support.
So that is connecting to the social sphere,
to see it, to be part of it.
It's scaring me because the timekeeper
is entering the space.
[LAUGHTER]
OK.
No, plenty of time.
OK.
And so there are a lot of activities
that connect to the personal relevance piece,
activities that connect to the contextual relevance,
and then the social relevance.
And one of them is the paper bag activity,
which you see up there.
But then, there are many others.
Symbol and metaphor activity, which
is students having two offer images and phrases
that-- the idea, it's important for them
to understand that metaphor is a tool in art-making.
And that image can mean something more than what it is.
And so they-- we have a thing on that.
And there are big art-making activities,
photo essays where they photograph things themselves,
metaphorically, symbolically and create a photo essay that
speaks to their experience of homelessness in New York.
What I'm reporting to you on now is our interaction
with homelessness itself.
And then, we'll have some-- I'll just
have a few little examples of student reflections.
So this is Mainchance Drop-In Center.
It was one of the early projects that I
did with-- I partnered with a photography professor, Intro
to Photo course.
And these were our goals of the semester.
I'm kind of going quickly, so read fast.
Mainchance Drop-In Center is adults.
And it's in Manhattan.
And anybody can come off the street
and sit in the room of chairs is what I call it.
It's a very intimidating space.
Anyway, our students, both my DNY students and her students,
photographed just thinking about patterns in the world.
And they did their own photographs of patterns.
And we discussed that in sort of like a warm up activity.
And then, her students-- Belenna Lauto
was her name-- her students went into Mainchance.
And we had a grant, a little mini grant
from St. John's, and bought digital cameras.
And the students and what they call clients
photographed patterns in the space of the drop-in center.
And this is an example of those photographs.
My students then came in.
And we were going to take the photographs that were developed
and prepared and find six-word stories-- a la Ernest
Hemingway's little six-word stories
idea-- to distill meaning from the photographs.
And so this was a model.
So we all did this together.
These were not necessarily the photographs of the-- these
were not necessarily the homeless clients who
took the photographs.
Some of them were.
Some of them weren't.
It's a very transient population.
But this was our brainstorming of that.
And these were the initial six-word stories
that we found as a part of looking
at that boat, upturned boat on the pebbles.
And so then, my students, partnering--
there's no hierarchy.
It's not like I'm the one who knows.
You're the one who doesn't know.
But equal to the task were given the photographs.
And they could choose which one they wanted to.
And they develop six word stories
about-- so the photograph was taken by the Intro
to Photo and homeless clients.
And then, we, my students and other homeless clients
devised six-word stories based on that.
And so there's a whole bunch of these.
And actually, I have a blurb book
here if you ever want to look at it of all of the photographs.
And these photographs and their six-word stories
were framed and put on the walls of the meeting
room in the space.
You can see them on the walls there.
We had a culminating activity.
I played a little concert at the beginning
of this culminating work with my friend, Flutist Wendy Stern.
And those gesturing people are the homeless clients describing
their creative process.
I guess my goal in all of these projects
is to have my students understand something
about homelessness by just being with people
and understanding the complexity like it is.
I have to-- I have five minutes.
So I'm now racing through.
Go ahead.
Wild Hair @ Mainchance, the same site.
But this was the theater project where
a colleague of mine at Lincoln Center Institute
is also an actor.
And she has this piece called Wild Hair.
And it reimagines Ophelia who escapes from Elsinore
and actualized her life elsewhere in the world.
And it's a funny piece, but it's also very profound.
We entered the space.
We had clients who were telling us about Hamlet.
You know, they were very, very knowledgeable people.
This is a very difficult bunch of slides.
But my students and these clients created scripts.
They imagined where Ophelia might go.
They created props.
They played out the skits for each other
before attending Gene Taylor's Wild Hair piece.
This is [? Mora Cook ?] who was a wonderful volunteer
coordinator.
And my students-- and I'm rushing
through-- these are my students and homeless people as part
of the audience experiencing the work of art together.
We did the same thing at Briarwood Family Residence,
which is children, homeless families.
But we worked with children there.
And these are photographs of the children
who imagined the young girl and the prince and the evil castle
and how the young girl got out of the evil castle.
This is the Blue Moon Tribe, my students
partnering with the children at Briarwood to imagine.
We got instruments from Gary Kvistad
from Woodstock Percussion.
And there are the instruments.
They devised this story of the Blue Moon Tribe.
They led it.
They created a storyboard with how the instruments would--
the sounds of the instruments would
tell the story of the Blue Moon Tribe.
They made a storyboard here.
And they performed it for their parents and significant others.
Now, here we are.
This is my students' reflection.
I want my students to reflect on the semester by creative means.
Word clouds, I'm a great fan.
So examples of word clouds-- I'm sorry I'm
having to go so quickly.
But they are beautiful.
Aren't they?
They're so inspirational to me.
And a student described why she chose the form of word cloud
because her feelings were all a jumble.
And it was the best way for her to express herself
and what she learned from the semester.
Now, I have some student outcomes.
And I'm just going to finish with that.
This is one.
I have two students.
So one student, she learned to look closer.
She thought that's what Discover New York taught her.
She goes on to connect.
And this is so important to me that they
make connections between the written information,
the facts that they get from the text,
and the embodiment of those facts in homeless people.
And so I felt like my job was done.
I was very proud that she had that.
And the notion that this carries beyond the realm of the course,
that she's taking that into the rest of her life
is very much what I want to happen.
I want transferable skills.
And the idea of looking deeply and asking questions
is something-- and symbolism and metaphors, that's something
that you can do wherever you are,
whatever you're involved with.
I'm moving on to the second student.
So she had a shift in paradigm.
She understands that situating herself in aesthetic space
gives her a deeper experience of life.
And she's envisioning new possibilities for herself
that she didn't realize.
And she's understanding that opening
her eyes to homelessness is a powerful thing.
And there's more to the world than she previously thought.
That to me is a big deal, especially in a freshmen
transition course.
And I think that I'm a fan of aesthetic education
methodology because I think it creates these pathways.
And it gives agency to students.
So this is what I want for my students,
that they imagine themselves as doing more than they perhaps
had thought they would.
And they believe in possibilities
they hadn't yet thought of.
And this really connects to what-- now this here is,
I didn't realize it at the time, but there she
is holding Art as Experience.
And this is Maxine in her apartment,
Fifth Avenue-- what she says about social imagination.
And then, if you want to know anything
about the Maxine Greene Center, there is our URL.
Please come to the website.
Please engage in conversations.
It's online conversations.
It's using Disqus.
And we really love to hear your voices on our site.
So thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]
So as we segue to Karen, I think there's
a piece as we were kind of warming up for this panel.
The skill to notice that Heidi has talked so much
about, the skill to notice that you might start in the arts.
How do you notice the room?
How do you notice what you see?
How do you notice what you see in this work of art?
But then, how does that translate
to how do you notice what's around you in the world?
How do you notice these important civic issues
and problems and begin then to take that leap
toward social imagination?
Thinking about how these freshman at St. John's are
starting to see New York differently
through this experience, I feel like a really interesting
parallel to how MAT students are starting
to interact with communities in LA
through this new MAT program.
And how do you teach people to begin to be good teachers?
Sort of fundamental questions that Karen and her colleagues
ask.
So over to you.
Great.
Thank you, Sebastian.
And it's great to see everyone.
I feel very honored and privileged to be here.
And I have to say, you know, I'm the president of a music
conservatory, so I spend a lot of time raising money.
And that equates to defending music education.
So I am not going to defend music education in this room.
I don't think I need to do it.
Is that a fair assumption?
[LAUGHTER]
Anyway, Sebastian had asked me to speak a little bit
about this program that we've started, the work that we're
doing in California.
Longy, of course as you may or may not know,
is actually located in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
But by way of a little context, I
was just looking at your Coursera offering.
Sebastian and I saw this question
that you were asking, which is, do musicians
have an obligation and an opportunity
to serve the needs of the world with their musicianship?
And that's the sort of question of why
that Michael Gaffey was talking about, getting underneath that.
And why would that be?
And so I just wanted to give you a little bit of context
about Longy, which I hope will help
explain why we decided to get involved with El Sistema.
About 2006, something was percolating
at this little school in Cambridge
with 250 students, a very small but elite school where
you would come to get a classical training
as a musician.
And they were struggling.
They were struggling financially,
but they were also struggling philosophically, I think.
Why should we be here anymore?
We're the smallest conservatory.
That's not a reason to be.
How can we think about this differently?
And they ended up actually changing
the mission of the school.
And the mission of the Longy School
is preparing musicians to make a difference in the world.
And that is actually what drew me to the position at Longy.
Because I had kind of given up on this elite,
this sort of elite pursuit of classical education
in a conservatory.
I just though it was too narrow.
And it wasn't that interesting to me anymore personally.
But with this change in the mission,
I thought, wow, you know, musicians as agents of change.
What can musicians do for the world?
What do musicians need to do for the world?
And I see it both as the right thing to do.
The world needs it.
It's also extremely practical.
It's extremely practical for musicians
not just to think about those needs that have already
been defined in the world that a classically trained musician
gets to fill but rather to turn it around and say,
where is their need?
And how could I actually be helpful?
Or where would I like to be?
And how might I help make change in that community?
So for me, the change in that mission was very exciting.
And in fact, Longy was saying yes
already to this idea that there is so much opportunity and also
obligation in the world for a musician.
This is what, of course, led us to look at El Sistema.
And shortly after I started there
in 2007-- today is my ninth anniversary, I realized.
I looked at my calendar.
I started nine years ago today.
So we start looking at El Sistema.
And I just did a lot of research.
I didn't really know, was there a role
for Longy in this burgeoning nascent movement that
was coming from Venezuela and was really starting
to move through this country and other countries in the world?
And I don't know.
Is everyone somewhat familiar with El Sistema?
Should I give just a brief--
No.
This is a music program.
It is really a social program using music, really,
as the community.
It was started in Venezuela in the early '70s
with 11 children in a garage.
And at this moment, there are over 600,000 children
who are participating in programs
that are orchestral, choral-based, jazz
programs, pop, every kind of music, folk music.
And it's really focused on children who come from the most
challenged situations.
So most of the students in El Sistema come from poverty.
They would never have a chance to participate
in a music program if they would have to pay for it.
So El Sistema programs are normally
either free or nearly free.
Most of the teaching is done in groups.
This is in part economical, but also there's
the sense of learning from each other.
And another aspect to the learning
is that the children are taught to be teachers.
So mentoring is baked into the pedagogy, if you will,
of a Sistema program.
So if you go into a Sistema room where a rehearsal is going on,
it might look very traditional to you.
You would think, well, there's a conductor.
And there's an orchestra.
But actually, there are all of these teachers
within the ensemble.
Once you've learned something as an El Sistema student,
you're expected to teach it to someone
who has not yet learned that.
And of course, you know what happens when you teach
something to someone else.
It helps also to deepen your own understanding of that skill.
So we started looking at this idea of El Sistema inspired
programs.
Did we have a role?
What I did was I interviewed about 40 people
who were either running El Sistema sites in the United
States or teaching in El Sistema sites.
And I did a very non-scientific needs assessment,
which was just to say, what do you need?
And of course, the first thing that they needed was money.
But of course, I could not help them with that.
And the second thing that they needed
was, they said, we actually need musicians who are--
and here's where we'll flip between these two words.
Michael, thanks for bringing them up.
They said, trained to be able to teach in these circumstances.
And what they were finding was a very high burnout rate.
You know, Sistema has gotten a lot
of attention from Gustavo Dudamel
has come to this country.
He's the music director of the LA Phil.
It looks like signing up for the Peace Corps.
You know, so at a certain point in your life
you think, wow, I'm a musician.
I graduated from conservatory.
What am I going to do next?
Why don't I go teach in a El Sistema site?
And it turns out that, of course,
it's maybe not as sexy as it seems.
Once you get into the work, the work is really hard.
And the need for understanding of the circumstances
of the children as well as skills
to be able to actually teach effectively
in that circumstance is great.
And so a lot of the musicians who were drawn to El Sistema
didn't last very long and walked away
deciding that they were not very good teachers.
And I thought, OK.
That, maybe that's what we should do.
And we had been thinking about whether-- I
think all music conservatories think about what's
happening with music education in the public schools,
what's working, what's not working.
What can we actually do to help that?
And we were at the time merging with Bard College.
So I was talking with Leon Botstein, the president
of Bard, about this idea that I had that maybe we
could shape a new kind of music education degree that
would train musicians to teach in a kind of El Sistema
style of teaching.
And so one of the things he said to me, he said,
that's a great idea, Karen.
Go to California.
Go get Dudamel.
And I thought, how do I do that?
Do I need Dudamel?
How do I get to Dudamel?
But before we did that, we had this opportunity through Bard.
Bard had started a charter school
in the Central Valley of California.
This is not Hollywood.
This is Delano, California.
This was a school of about 500 students, grades 6 through 12.
Most of the children were children of field workers
because this is really the breadbasket of America
where there are these huge conglomerate farms.
Or they were actually the children
of the inmates from the local prison
because the other big business in town was the prison.
And so it was a very high need area.
So we went to the school to see if they would indeed
be interested in a music program, which they did not
have.
And I won't tell you the whole story.
But it took about a year to build an El Sistema inspired
program there.
I learned a lot.
And what I learned is that building a program like that
is really working very deeply with the community.
And it was an incredibly meaningful and impactful
experience for me as I was thinking about this El Sistema
degree program.
Just to tell you briefly, what we ended up doing was
we started a mariachi program.
Because this really was the music of the community.
And this was the music not just of the parents,
but actually the children were also extremely
interested in their culture.
We eventually also built a bridge from mariachi
to symphonic and choral music.
And so that doesn't mean that was better or worse.
But it was fabulous to be able to open that door actually
to those children who might not otherwise
have had the opportunity, the entry
point into symphonic music.
And so it was really incredible.
And I learned a lot from that.
So going back to Dudamel.
There we were already in California.
And I thought, well, it actually makes sense.
The optics of that make sense.
But what I was even more interested in than Dudamel,
even though he's an incredible person,
was this El Sistema inspired program
that he had started in Los Angeles, which
is called the Youth Orchestra Los Angeles, otherwise known
by its acronym, which is YOLA.
And I was really interested in YOLA
because this could be actually our learning
laboratory for a teacher education
and training program in Los Angeles.
So we went to the LA Phil.
We pitched the crazy idea that a conservatory on the East Coast
partner with a symphony orchestra on the West Coast
in a degree program.
And they went for it.
So this is an innovative orchestra.
I think it is the only degree program that
is attached to a symphony orchestra in the world
as far as I know.
So let me tell you a little bit about how
the program has taken shape and the how as Sebastian put it.
You know, how are we going to do this?
How are we going to prepare these musicians,
wonderful musicians, to be able to go into communities
and be successful and make change and good things
happen for children?
Here's what we really came up with.
We thought that education programs were often
pretty isolated.
The schools of education often have an approach
where the teacher education, there's
a lot of theory happening for a long period of time.
And then, right at the end comes the practice.
Maybe even in your last semester in the program,
you finally actually go into the classroom.
And you start teaching.
So that really seemed backwards to us.
So we've shaped this program more like a hospital residency,
which is in some ways where the word training I think
comes in and is actually an apt word.
So our master's degree program is at the Youth Orchestra LA.
We don't have a separate site.
We are right there in the same building on the same floor
where youth orchestra rehearses.
And what we're trying to do with this program
is really bring together theory and practice
and bring it together much more closely.
So the way an average day looks for a student in the MAT
program is they come to their graduate level course.
I'll talk a little bit about a few of those courses later.
But they're learning about learning theory,
about identity, about pedagogy.
And then, they walk across the hall.
And they try out what they've been learning.
I have five minutes.
Yeah.
OK.
[LAUGHTER]
So they try out what they've been learning.
And then, they come back to their cohort
of graduate students, and they say, how'd you think that went?
How did it go?
Did it go as you expected?
What went well?
What didn't go so well?
What might you change next time?
And so you get the idea of the behavior
of this degree program, which is you're learning about research.
You're learning about how children learn.
And then, you're being asked to shape lessons and go
across the hall and actually try them out.
It's a very intensive program.
Another piece of the program that I think is quite unique
is actually our students from Longy
in this program live in the neighborhood,
the same neighborhood, of the children that they're teaching.
So it's an immersion program.
They're dealing with the same challenging issues.
This is the Rampart neighborhood of LA near MacArthur Park.
I think 97% of the children in the program come
from below the poverty line.
There are a number of gangs, very well-known gangs
in that neighborhood.
So the Longy students are dealing
with the issues of crime, drugs, lack of healthy food,
just lack of security.
This is a part of a way that we are helping them understand
what that child that they're trying to teach
has gone through that day from their own experience.
The students take courses in the clinical practice
of teaching, which I spoke a little bit about.
They take an identity course where
they're learning about research in the power issues that
take place in school and in the classroom, whether it's
race or gender.
They're learning about the stereotype
threats that take place when children are being tested.
And our hope is that through the course of this year,
they're really becoming those agents of change that
can be thinking about these issues of inequity
as they're teaching and hopefully making strides
in the right direction in the ways that they're teaching
and their own theories that they're developing.
I guess, just in closing, I would
say that we are in our fifth year of the program.
So it's still a relatively young program.
We're very proud to say that every one
of the graduates of the program is 100% full-time employed
in the field.
Woo!
So this is pretty unusual.
So we're even considering whether we might actually
open a second site for this degree program
on the East Coast.
And we know that we're small.
We hope we can serve as an example.
We certainly have looked at the examples around us,
many of which are in this room here.
And we've learned a lot.
And I would just also add because I heard Dennie
speak earlier, Dennie Wolf.
We're also partnering with WolfBrown research.
And thanks to the funding from the Buck Family Foundation
and the Mellon Foundation, we're finishing a first year,
really second year of research on El Sistema in this country.
And how is it working?
What's working?
What needs to be improved?
What's happening for the children who are participating?
So we think it's important not just to get on the bandwagon
but to make sure actually the bandwagon is
headed in the right direction.
One thing I would say is that it's very easy
to get focused on the social side, which
is extremely important, and to potentially
neglect the musical side.
And the way that this really lifts students up
is that the music instruction is incredibly wonderful and good
and that the kids get better.
Because as they see themselves getting better as musicians,
this is what sort of undergirds their feeling
about self-esteem, their ability to actually be successful,
whether it's in life or academically.
And so we really want to make sure
that we're looking at the quality of the music teaching
and also the quality of the community that it's building.
Thank you.
That's good.
[APPLAUSE]
[INAUDIBLE]
Good luck.
So several issues come up.
Identity is an important one.
Right?
How do students in this MAT program
begin to think about their own identity, the identity
of their students, the challenge that their students are facing
but also the place?
Right?
And we're going to come back this afternoon to talking
about the significance of place in some of these initiatives.
Does the place influence the practice?
Does the opposite happen?
Does the practice end up influencing the place?
So that'll be the topic of our third panel today.
There's also this distinction, which
I think may be clear by now.
But I just want to take a moment to draw this out, which
is aesthetic education versus skill-based arts education.
Aesthetics noticing, Heidi was talking about,
and the kind of skill-building that
goes into awareness, being able to notice,
being able to apprehend, I think Dewey says, a work of art
versus the skills of learning to play the violin
or the trumpet, which is that kind
of artistic progressive skill-building toward making.
Is that painting?
Is that music?
Is that sculpture?
Is it filmmaking?
Is it photography?
And those are really different practices, totally related.
But we were talking a little bit earlier.
In some ways, the highest ambitions
we have for young people training
to become young artists start in this very skill-based training
kind of format, especially in music
where the technical hurdles are so high that you don't really
have the opportunity, except as a sort of clever educator,
to think really about expression when it's really
a athletic thing you're trying to do.
You know, this is how you use these muscles
to do the instrument.
And to make a good sound might take a whole year and then
from there to have some comprehension of the art form.
It takes a long time before you think, you are an artist.
And this is an act of expression.
Yeah.
And so in some ways, in order to keep a young person engaged
and feeling like they're participating in art
and not just sport or physical activity,
you need to pair them.
You need that aesthetic appreciation, the ability
to say, well, this is the mountain
you're climbing while you're taking step one and step two.
That's how I'm going to segue here.
Paul whispered to me, good luck making a segue.
[LAUGHTER]
But this whole practice of aesthetic education
fits into a larger frame.
You know, how do you notice?
How do you, like Dewey says, restore these continuities
between the everyday world, the crime, the gangs,
the very difficult circumstances and then this rarefied activity
of art-making?
How do you restore that continuity?
What is that experience of understanding, appreciating,
looking at the artist experience?
I'll let you know as soon as I find out.
[LAUGHTER]
I feel a little bit like an ugly duckling
who has mistakenly found his way among a flock of swans.
I'm not involved in either aesthetic education
or skill-based arts education.
If I'm going to display any art here,
any art form, it's going to have to be improv.
I'm definitely not a musician.
Although I listen to a lot of music,
I was the kind of person-- well, I
was the person to whom the chorus teacher in fourth grade
said, mouth the words.
You're ruining the whole thing.
[LAUGHTER]
I mean, I can never carry a tune.
What I am is a historian of philosophy.
And aesthetics is one of the subjects
in the history of philosophy I've
written a fair amount about.
And I teach mostly pretty privileged college students
and PhD students in philosophy.
And I have to add, for better or worse,
that there are these kind of membranes and often relatively
impermeable membranes between academic disciplines.
And the name of Maxine Greene is not
one that has crossed the membrane
between the world of education and the world
of academic philosophy.
So we obviously have, from what I've learned about her,
some text in common, some background
in common, in particular, John Dewey.
But I'm not prepared to speak directly about her.
Michael Steinberg asked me if I would
talk something about Dewey to add some background to this.
But actually, it sounds to me like you have all already
heard a fair amount about Dewey today.
And what I would like to do is say
a couple of words about some ideas and some figures
in the history of aesthetics prior to Dewey
and then talk a little bit about benefits
of aesthetic experience as described
by an American philosopher, mid 20th century whom I regard
as the most important successor to Dewey
in at least American academic philosophy.
So first, Heidi began by asking about what is aesthetic?
What does the term mean?
And what is meant by aesthetic experience?
And then, she gave us an example of how she begins her course
with having students focus their perceptual attention on aspects
of the very room in which they are situated in,
taking off from there.
And she ended her remarks talking
about the focus of the course on homelessness
and what sorts of lessons students take away about,
maybe to some extent, about what the life of homelessness
looks like, what you might see when you focus
your perception on it but also, and perhaps much more
importantly, what they take away by way of concepts,
the concept of homelessness and the significance
and what that kind of life means and so on and so forth.
And it seems to me that that reflects a-- I don't
want to say a twofoldness.
I'm trying to use a relatively value-neutral term.
I don't want to say a contradiction.
I don't want to say a bifurcation.
Just two aspects of what has been meant by the term
aesthetic over its history.
Maybe a word or two about the history of the term
might be of a little bit of assistance.
You might think that this is a sort of eternal term
that's been around sort of as long
as there has been language or something like that.
That's not true at all.
The word was coined in the 18th century.
Philosophers had been talking about and arguing
about the cognitive value of various kinds of art,
the emotional impact of art.
They'd been talking about that since the time of Plato
and Aristotle.
So philosophers always talked about certain issues
about the arts.
But the term itself was not introduced
until the 18th century.
It was introduced actually in 1735
in a master's thesis written in Latin by a 21-year-old German
called Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten in [? Hallah. ?]
And he coined it.
I mean, he coined the Latin term out of the Greek term [GREEK]
meaning having to do with the senses.
And in particular what he proposed
was going to be a general theory of the contribution
of the senses to human cognition, which you might
if you were coming from the British tradition
from the kind of empiricism that is basically
bred into the bones of most of us
was a sort of kind of obvious thing
that knowledge begins with the senses.
But coming from the rationalist tradition
that he was coming from, he needed
to actually make a case that the senses had
a fundamental contribution to make towards knowledge.
In any case, in its initial meaning,
the term really has to do with the senses and all the kind
of things that Heidi was talking about right at the beginning
of her presentation of learning how to really attend
to what is coming to you through your senses
would naturally go along with that kind of meaning.
Over the course of the century, however-- and actually
in Baumgarten's own practice rather than his definitions--
the meaning of the term got broadened.
I should mention last time I checked,
I think the Oxford English Dictionary
said the term was first found in English in 1819.
So it didn't make it into English until the 19th century.
But other Germans picked it up over the course
of the second half of the 18th century.
And the idea of aesthetic experience
and aesthetic judgment, aesthetic ideas, aesthetic--
begins to be a number of things that
can be modified by this adjective--
begins to be more widespread.
And actually, I mean, the book that really canonized the term
aesthetic judgment, the book that really canonized
aesthetics as a field of philosophy
was called the-- was a book by Immanuel Kant,
his third critique, the Critique of the Power of Judgment
published in 1790, which is divided
into two parts, the Critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment
and then something else we don't have to worry about.
And over the course of that book itself,
you can see the conception of what aesthetic experience might
be not so much shifting but expanding.
And so he starts off with kind of sense-based conception
of aesthetic experience, very much like what Baumgarten had
initially described where the object of aesthetic attention
is going to be pattern and form and that kind of stuff,
the kind of stuff that might seem central,
let's say, in abstract painting, in musical composition,
in music, as he puts it, "music without words"
or what other people [INAUDIBLE],
instrumental music, absolute music rather than music
with a text and so on.
And many people think that Kant restricted aesthetic experience
altogether to purely-- the pattern
and form in sensory experience.
But as the book develops, he says, well,
in the case of most arts actually,
there's always going to be content as well as form.
Art deals with ideas, actually deals typically with big ideas.
And so his example of typical kinds of ideas
that art deals with will be things like-- sorry,
give me one second-- ideas of invisible beings, the kingdom
of the blessed, the kingdom of hell, eternity, creation, et
cetera, death, envy, all sorts of vices, as well as love,
fame, and so on, big important ideas.
And ultimately, the model of aesthetic experience
that we get by that stage of the book
is that it concerns a sort-- the presentation of ideas that
are very important to us through sensory means and an interplay
between aspects of perception and aspects
of conception or cognition.
And that is really ultimately what
becomes crucial to much of the experience of the arts.
Now, the reason I mention this distinction between these two
aspects of aesthetic experience is
because it seems to me that what you might expect
from aesthetic education, what kind of benefits to individuals
in societies that you might expect from aesthetic education
are going to vary across this spectrum or this dimension.
When you're dealing with arts that form more
on the formal side and don't have
content in an obvious way, when you're dealing with lots
of instrumental music I should think but other things as well,
you know, the benefits are not necessarily--
are not going to be directly benefits about how you conceive
of society or reconceive of society
or conceive of your place in society
or anything of the sort.
Because that's not directly present
in the art-- in the work of art or in the art form.
There may be all kinds of indirect benefits
that will arise for individuals and societies via education
in these kinds of arts, strengthening of sense of self,
learning how to cooperate with other people
because music, for example, will often be produced
in ensemble, and so on.
But it's not necessarily going to be
at the level of conceiving of your place in the world,
reconceiving your place in the world, and so on.
On the other hand, when the arts are
involved in the content in a more straightforward sense
in the way that music with words rather than music without words
often does or that literature does
or that some kinds of paintings-- although now people
might think mostly old-fashioned kinds of painting do-- and so
then you have a different story.
So it seems to me it might be helpful to think about there
being in a way two kinds of aesthetic experience,
two kinds of art, and two kinds of educational benefits
that might go along with-- How much time do I have left would
you say?
You have about seven minutes.
OK.
Good.
So then, I'll go directly then to the second thing
I wanted to talk about.
As I hinted before at an American philosopher who
I regard as-- I mean, at least from within
professional philosophy-- as the most important successor
to Dewey in the 20th century.
That's a name that I imagine will not be known
to many people in the room.
This was a man called Monroe Beardsley
who lived from 1915 to 1985.
He taught for many years at Swarthmore College
and then in later part of his career at Temple, a switch
that he made because of his social conscience in good part.
And he published a very big book in 1958 called Aesthetics---
Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism,
which was reissued in 1981 with an addendum in which he
responded to everything that had happened in the field
in the intervening years.
And way at the end of this book in a chapter that
is entitled something-- this chapter
is The Arts in the Life of Man.
Of course this was pre-linguistic political
changes.
Presumably now, he would've written
The Arts in the Life of Humans or The Arts
in the Life of People or something.
Means men in the sense of humans.
And at one point in this chapter,
he gives a list, which he calls of the effects
of aesthetic objects or which we might
say of the possible benefits of aesthetic experience.
Presumably, that can be the experience both of reception
and of production, of audiences and of artists at every level.
And the list is the following.
And I'll just sort of read it, the kind
of topic sentences of the list.
"We might say," he says, "that aesthetic experience
relieves tensions and quites destructive impulses," which
he characterizes as an Aristotelian claim,
a claim that Aristotle had made in response to Plato.
Because Plato thought that the typical experience of the arts
aroused tension and destructive influences.
And Aristotle said, no, no.
On this, as in most other issues,
Aristotle was wiser than Plato.
Secondly, Beardsley says "We might
find that aesthetic experience resolves lesser conflicts
within the self and helps to create an integration
or harmony within the self."
Thirdly, he says "Aesthetic experience refines perception
and discrimination."
That's what Heidi began by talking about.
Fourth, he says that "Aesthetic experience develops
the imagination and along with it the ability
to put oneself in the place of others."
That's a central skill necessary for social well-being,
progress, et cetera of any kind that a number
of other philosophers over the course of history
have said interesting things about.
Fifthly, he says, "Aesthetic experience
is, to put it in medical terms, an aid to mental health,
although perhaps more as a preventive
measure than as a care.
He said-- this one's kind of interesting--
"A world in which people in a normal course of events
found their streets and buildings
and working places filled with harmonious shapes and colors
good for the eye and the spirit who
spent part of each day listening to or performing
musical compositions of aesthetic value
who love the subtlety of good language,
et cetera would be a society one might
hope in which many common neuroses and psychoses, some
of which begin with mild symptoms, would not arise.
He says, "It hasn't been tried.
And we cannot say for sure, but the astonishing success
of classical music concerts in England during World War II
maybe indirect evidence."
Sixthly, he says that "Aesthetic experience
that it fosters mutual sympathy and understanding
across national boundaries and other such things."
And finally, he says "Aesthetic experience
offers an ideal for human life."
And you have a picture of the way things might be,
which is the kind of thing that Heidi
was talking about at the very end of her presentation.
So there's an array.
And quite an array he offers here.
And it's an array of benefits that would sort of be benefits
directly to the individual, for resolving conflicts
within the self, giving an individual a sense of what
he or she might be, but also benefits
for society as a whole, making people
empathetic with each other and, therefore,
laying the foundation for resolving social conflicts
rather than individual conflicts.
OK.
So that's his list.
One thing, of course, to note about this list is clearly
as his remark about, well, it hasn't quite been tried,
but the concerts during World War II
give some indirect evidence, these are empirical claims.
These are factual claims.
These are not conceptual claims.
You don't get this from an analysis of the concept of art
or an analysis of the concept of aesthetic experience.
And that's the kind of thing actually
that philosophers are supposedly qualified
to do, conceptual analysis.
These are empirical claims.
These are factual claims.
These are claims that ultimately would have to be tested.
Whether they have to be tested by the formal methods
of professional psychologists or whether they're
tested by the informal experience that we all have,
that's a separate question.
But these are empirical, testable claims.
And so I guess what I have to say in by way of a bottom line
is that I think that much of what
has been very interestingly described to us by way
of various programs in aesthetic education
rests on empirical assumptions about what
the benefits of exposure to the arts or aesthetic education,
and so on are going to be.
It's all [INAUDIBLE] empirical assumptions
as nicely laid out by Monroe Beardsley.
So in some ways, it's not for a philosopher
to say what the foundations of this
and what the potential for the success
of these kinds of programs is.
It's as much at least a matter for psychologists
and sociologists and just plain people with good common sense
and with their eyes wide open to see.
So bottom line, we won't-- we, philosophers will not tell you,
practitioners what the foundations of your work are.
You'll tell us whether these various claims are
plausible or successful or not.
[APPLAUSE]
We'll open it up in a minute.
And just a logistical reminder.
If you're willing to move to the aisles
if you have a thought or question,
that will help get the microphones over to you.
Paul, just picking up on a couple of strands.
The first observation I want to make
is that for those of you who have heard Maxine Greene speak,
you know the incredible way in which she
was able to combine theory and philosophy at the most
abstract level with the very real world things that
were happening in the news and on her block and out her window
and at any time.
And any one of her talks married the theoretical and the real
so beautifully and poetically.
I always thought Maxine was like a award-- she would have
won awards had she entered the competitions as a spoken word
artist.
[LAUGHTER]
Like she had such a rhythm in her speaking.
But part of it was one moment she was quoting
Aristotle and Dewey and Kant.
And the next, she was talking about American Idol and Lady
Gaga.
Right?
So it has taken four of us to even
come close to conjuring the spirit of the theoretical
and the real.
So just this couple other things I
would just draw out of your remarks, Paul.
You know, in a moment you said, the art
doesn't necessarily bring people closer to that real world
thing, at least the art that's abstract
or music without words.
And I think for Community MusicWorks,
that's been one of these important issues I
think we've wrestled with.
How do we sort of carry Paulo Freire's vision
into work with music when he says
it's got to be based on dialogue and mutuality
and mutual learning when really were like imparting
this set of skills.
So I think that's a tension and a struggle that we've had.
Like we're really interested in these social outcomes
for these young people.
And the medium we're working in is
anything but taking on those real world issues.
And there's a few ways we've pushed that.
But I guess maybe just as a prompt-- maybe people
were already burning with things to say.
But as a prompt for our discussion,
I think this last point is really useful
that some of these claims need to be tested.
And is it really true that these aesthetic experiences
develop our capacity for imagination and empathy?
Do they-- another one that you brought out--
do they really enable some kind of mutual sympathy
or mutual understanding?
The line which is sort of bland and problematic,
people often say, oh, music is the universal language.
Is it not?
Well, if you're not in that kind of music, does it speak to you?
So there is a problem with that idea.
However, music without words, art without words
can transcend language barriers.
And can we in fact find some mutual sympathy out
of aesthetic experiences?
Parenthetically, I don't know if anyone caught the Charlie Rose
interview with Alan Gilbert last week,
the conductors in your Philharmonic.
Really interesting, I recommend checking it out.
But he was, in his way through his practice as a conductor
of a major American orchestra, talking
about this perspective of mutual understanding
that can come out of the concert.
And I guess last, an ideal for human life.
There's something so sort of vivid
and romantic about this idea.
I think she's left now.
But Evie Lincoln and I were talking at the beginning.
At some level, being involved in arts education
or aesthetic education gives you that sense of like,
here's what perfect looks like.
If I could really achieve that, and I know
I'm on the path to this.
But it's not easy to talk about a vision of perfection
because there's something problematic about that.
But at the same time, those of us
who've been involved in the practice
know that's actually part of it.
You're in this practice of looking at the ideal
all the time and thinking, how do you get closer to it?
And it's not simply about, how do I
play all the notes correctly?
It is something more deeply connected
with our human identity.
Right?
It's like, I in fact will be better if I can do that.
So this ideal for human life thing
is another interesting sort of claim that we might test.
We have a bit of time for discussion,
for disagreement, for vehement opposition
to any of the ideas you've heard or questions.
So let's start there.
Thank you very much.
This has been a wonderful morning.
I would like to-- I'm thinking the word privilege
has been brought into the discussion
a number of times kind of as an empirical term.
And I kind of want to problematize that.
Privilege of what?
We have a common understanding perhaps
of what privilege means.
But I want to go to populations that some
of the organizations we've talked about have been serving.
And I want to think about the privilege that they hold.
And I want to go back to a kind of notion of-- wait a minute.
And I wrote this down so I would remember it.
Now, where did I put it?
I wrote it down here.
But I can't seem to locate it because I have so many notes.
Disappearing ink.
Hate it--
Oh, I know.
OK.
I think I understand.
So one of the things, just as a little
aside, that I'd like to offer is that those institutions that
have been mentioned as kind of the bulwarks or the-- that
have ramparts around them like museums and concert halls,
it's important to remember that when they were founded,
they were founded in part to open up access to the arts,
you know, Napoleon opening the Louvre
and having people come into something
that royalty could only see.
And then, the other piece I think
was the importance of people always
knowing how to connect their creative making
with their social situation that it's not something necessarily
that we're teaching a population.
But perhaps we can learn from certain populations
how to do it better ourselves.
I can respond just very briefly to that last point.
Well, first about privilege, I mean,
the only thing I wanted to say about privilege
is that I've spent most of my career teaching
in privileged institutions.
So I have no firsthand knowledge of going out into community
and so on.
That's all I was saying about privilege.
But on the very last point, now, sorry, I've
just lost your terminology already.
But the main point that I wanted to suggest
is that the connection between benefits
that an individual might derive from aesthetic education
in sense of strengthened sense of own potential,
strengthened sense of own identity,
and so on don't automatically carry over
into larger social benefits.
That may or may not be.
And it may depend in various ways on which particular art
form you're talking about.
So that was all I wanted to say to just suggest
a caution about making generalizations in this area
and treating these connections as if they were somehow
necessary conceptual connections when, in fact, they
are that empirical connections.
And that means highly variable, among other things.
And they're going to vary from art form to art form
but also from individual to individual
how much benefit an individual is going to get out of it.
Because of course, every individual
is coming from a slightly different point of view,
and so and so forth.
That's all I wanted to suggest.
And we have this issue of mutual learning
or not a one-way street of instruction.
I don't know if either of you wants to respond.
Oh.
Actually, I wanted to direct my comments
to the museum sacralized places and simply
to say that we all know what it's
like to go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, for example,
and be overwhelmed by all that is there or any museum.
And the dutiful class trip, you know,
with taking notes and passing by,
and there is some sort of statistics about how long
each person stands in front of each painting.
And I'm taken back to Maxine Greene's comment
that works of art must be achieved
and that there is a process by which you engage
in the transaction with a work of art
that many people are not aware of.
Or they don't feel like they can because they
don't have a pathway in.
And in my experience, aesthetic education
is a methodology that introduces pathways to people so that they
recognize their birthright to engage in transactions
with one work of art and not pass by a million of them
in these places that are so important to us.
I agree.
And I would just add one word to that,
which has helped me understand that idea,
Maxine Greene's idea and Dewey's idea.
And for me, that word is identify with.
Can I look at that and realize it actually
may relate to something I have experienced?
Right?
And sometimes that experience of alien.
I am alien to this because I haven't been trained
in 19th century painting.
So I can't really know what this is supposed to be.
I'll just look at it and go, now I've seen it.
It's famous.
Check.
Right?
It goes back to your Shostakovich experience
that you related how it wasn't until you understand
the context and the world out of which that emerged that you
were able to relate to.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Or even if you don't know the facts to be able to say,
I have license to see this is part
of my-- reflective of my life.
Right?
And for me, that was an aha to understand
what Maxine was talking about.
But you were going to jump in.
Well, I wanted to speak a little bit about privilege as well.
I just think because of the mechanics
of classical education that if a student-- a person
makes it to a conservatory to do a degree in music,
they're likely to have come from some privilege.
Just the cost of lessons, expensive instruments,
or there's an angel involved.
And so I think that is something that we think about,
which is how then do we help our students who are learning
to teach understand that that is a part of the power that
is in the classroom that they may bring with them, including
the taste for classical music at all,
making the assumption that this is
a music that these students would actually want to engage
with.
There's a certain kind of a privilege there.
One of the things we've done is to really help
the students understand how to use the creative act to begin
to teach, not the recreate act of teaching so that they're
on sort of a level playing field.
I'm not the expert.
And you don't know anything, but actually, we're
going to create music together.
And so all of the students do a whole semester
of becoming composers and improvisers.
And then, a second semester of learning how
to use that in their teaching.
And it's one of the ways also that you can get around
that kids don't sound that great at the beginning
is what Sebastian was talking about.
And but actually, by creating music,
we can actually create things that
do sound fabulous or beautiful or funny immediately
in a classroom.
But it takes a certain kind of understanding and a skill.
Like I said, I would just add one other piece.
And I think Paulo Freire has been
really important for in thinking about this.
But it's not to walk into the situation assuming or carrying
this idea that I have privilege, and you have nothing.
Right?
Thank you.
But it's instead to say, we're walking into this.
We have different backgrounds and experiences.
And I'm going to try as much as possible to not regard
my set of stuff as more privileged
than your set of stuff because immediately it
becomes problematic.
Right?
And Freire talks about generosity versus charity.
And it's very simple to say, oh, I'm being charitable.
I am helping them.
And then, as soon as you say, it's us and them,
you've reproblematized the whole thing.
You've separated yourself as an actor from those
who you were serving.
And so he talks about that hardens the whole situation
once you say, it's us and them.
I would like to add that the big surprise is that--
particularly for my students-- is that they end up feeling
privileged to be in the presence of--
You're learning, yeah.
There's no hierarchy at all.
If I could add one thing on this topic.
This is from an English writer, Edward Bullough,
who gave the first course on aesthetics at Cambridge
University in 1907.
And his lecture notes survived.
And he says, pretty much wrapping the course up,
"Aesthetically speaking, we must I
think see the function of art, its place
in the economy of the universe as the enlargement
and enrichment of our complete personality,
the enhancement and quickening of our total conscious
experience."
The language is a little flowery.
"The contemplative imminence of aesthetic consciousness
is par excellence the medium for extending
the limited range of our personal experience
and enforcing those experiences which do fall within it
into the highest relief of which they are susceptible.
Our range of personal, actually realized experiences
is deplorably small."
So we have to-- one thing that art does for us is take us
beyond our own limited selves, whoever we are,
whether we came from a privileged background
or a disadvantaged background, and helps us--
Large.
--enlarge our own identities by more fully
identifying with the rest of human experience.
My question has to do with exactly what you just
brought up.
But has to do with the anger and impatience of young people
now that's brought such kind of radical action and need
for radical action, including in a lot of cases wanting to throw
out elitist forms of art.
And so the fact that you're even teaching classical music
in other forms, which might include
ballet or all kinds of art forms that
have come from white European that might be considered
white European art forms from eras of-- ballet
from aristocratic environments and from the court, the court
art.
So you've been discussing that about how that can still
survive in the environment with so much hostility towards forms
of elitism and that art as being seen as representing elitism.
Where do you find the commonality, the humanity,
the universality in it, the part that
speaks of real art that speaks from a real person
to another person, the part that transcends its foundations?
Well, it makes me think of a project
that some Longy students did, which
was they were going to go into a junior high.
And they had decided ahead of time
that they were going to interest this eighth grade
class in art song.
And you might think, well, that's interesting.
That's somewhat esoteric.
This may or may not be an experience
that these eighth graders have had.
And what the Longy students figured out to do
was to interview all the kids in the class
and say, what do you listen to?
What music do you listen to?
And they wrote down the names of pop artists and rap artists.
And what ended up working in the end
was that they found art song composers and actually
text lyrics where there were matching texts-- you know,
this sort of universality of a theme-- from a rap artist
or from a [? Suman ?] leader and taught them
how to analyze text.
And by the end of the semester, the students in the course
sang a full evening of art songs in duos and trios.
And it wasn't to lead them away from the music they were
already listening to but just in fact to show them actually
how universal this is.
I want to add one other thought to that.
And one of the things I think is worth considering
is, you mentioned the courts of the aristocracy that
might have brought some of this music and art into being.
And the question is, does it have to stay there?
Does it have to stay in that origin story?
Or can we as learners and players and appreciators
sort of claim it and say actually, this speaks to me.
This spoke to me as a performer, as a student.
And I can transmit my interest in it and passion.
And we can create a new context.
So I'm sort of saying it doesn't have
to live in the concert hall.
It doesn't have to live in the museum.
It could.
It could be-- Rebecca said that it could be that we say no.
The point is, let's open the door to the concert hall
and make sure it can still happen in there.
Right?
Or it can say, it doesn't have to be trapped there.
It can be about let's share this passion for [? the Suman. ?]
Because if we set it up the right way
with the right entry points, as Eric Booth likes to say,
it's open.
It's accessible.
Kelly is doing a vigilant job of watching the clock.
And so at the risk of cutting this off
while somebody's burning with a thought, I'm going to.
Because we need to be fed and nourished so that
we can come back to witness more and participate.
Let me just say a couple logistical things.
First of all, come back on time.
You're not going to want to miss the beginning
of the next session.
Robbie McCauley is performing a work.
So this is not just the talk about.
This is the witnessing and apprehending of a work of art.
So it's a one woman play called Jazz and Class.
And then, with Brian Meeks we'll have an opportunity
to discuss the issues and the work itself.
So come back on time at 1:30.
We're having lunch.
You get a little fresh air and a walk.
Just follow the sidewalk.
Walk out the second floor main entrance.
Follow the walkway to the right to Alumni Hall.
There'll be signs and maps and people to assist you.
There's plenty of lunch.
If you did not register, we think
there's still enough lunch.
So don't think you have to go seeking it out.
But I think they might just check registrations
to make sure that those who registered definitely get in.
Or is there no problem?
I think we'll be OK.
No problem.
So just go have lunch.
And any other announcements?
And if you don't know how to get there
and you'd like a little map, there's
a map on the registration table.
There's a map on the registration table
if you need it to lunch.
Thank you, everybody.
[APPLAUSE]