Name:

Sarah Johnson

Subject:

Notes on June 1

Date:

09 Jun 2006

Time:

10:20:17 AM -0400

Blog

Thursday, June 1 This is not a TA-centric entry, but I hope that it will be relevant for TAs, artists, and people who generally care about the arts and arts organizations (orchestras in particular). As I said yesterday, I’m looking at this from a big-picture orchestra perspective … Thursday was a moving and inspiring day, and rather than try to capture the shape of the conversations and the experience of being a part of them, I’m going to make a list of phrases or ideas that emerged from the various panels, speeches, and dialogues. These are ideas or thoughts that struck me as being particularly interesting, unusual, or relevant. Many of the notes come from an incredibly inspiring and moving keynote speech given by Peter Sellers at the opening plenary session. I hope that by reading through them you will get some sense of the spirit of the day. I also think it’s interesting to imagine ways in which TAs might help the organizations with which they work with some of these issues. • A challenge to the artist – to be indispensable to my time. • Orchestras need to develop a better understanding of what our offering means to audience members, on a deeply emotional and psychological level. We need to become more articulate about this, and make this understanding a part of the fabric of our organizations, at every level. • Know the cultural zeitgeist of your time. Keep your eye on it, and given all of the changes that develop, decide what you should change, and what you should not change. Don’t lose the core mission and value of your organization. Preserve and nurture the deep essence and value of your offering. • Along the lines of the previous thought, we live in an image-dominated culture, but we shouldn’t just move in the direction of incorporating more images into what we do in an attempt to line up with today’s interests and appetites. We must not devalue the thing that we do best. • Live music - it’s got to be new every night, as it was for Mozart, Brahms, and Stravinsky. • Beethoven’s music is a statement of radical social inclusion. It is music of courage, and human rights, and you should not be performing it if you do not know that. • We need people involved with orchestras to be informed, thoughtful, and capable of imaging a new set of solutions to the challenges. (It’s interesting to think about how teaching artists might fit into this equation within orchestras or arts organizations.) • How serious can you be about your life? • America’s obsession with leisure is part of the crisis today. • To be associated with the best moment in someone’s life, moments that uplift, that affirm the best things about who we are. • Music to repair broken lives and broken communities. • We need more models of shared spaces in our culture. The i-Pod nurtures such separation – it’s an almost completely isolated experience. Where are the places that we meet, that we can come together? Orchestras, galleries, museums, readings all provide opportunities for people to have communal experiences. More tomorrow ….

Name:

Sarah Johnson

Subject:

A beginning

Date:

06 Jun 2006

Time:

06:02:32 PM -0400

Blog

May 31 - written after the fact ... First for a little context, I am writing this blog as a teaching artist and oboist who now oversees the education and community partnerships programs at the Philadelphia Orchestra. In Philadelphia we are coming to the end of our first year with a teaching artist faculty – the TAs work primarily in our School Partnership Program, which began in September. It’s very in-depth work, with TAs in schools weekly throughout the year, lots of PD for TAs and teachers, etc. I am increasingly looking for ways to include the TAs in more of the conversations and creative work that happens in our programs, and even in some of the orchestra’s other activities. Because of my role with the Philadelphia Orchestra and my participation in this conference, I do come to this blog from a big picture orchestra perspective, thinking about ways that orchestras could potentially use TAs and their particular skills beyond the highest quality classroom and community work. Most of the conversation and thinking about teaching artists on the first day of the conference was in the workshop on teaching artistry, which was part of the ASOL’s leadership academy program. There were about 22 participants in the class, mostly education staff from orchestras, but there were also a couple of executive directors of smaller orchestras there, a couple of conductors, and a number of teaching artists from the LA Phil. I co-taught the class with David Wallace, violist, teaching artist, and faculty, graduate studies, The Juilliard School. The workshop looked at the skills and attitudes necessary for working successfully in educational and community contexts, but also broadened into thinking about TAs working with Boards of directors, donors, advocating in various ways, etc. I have noticed, even over the last few years, a significant improvement (at orchestras) in the level of conversation, awareness, and understanding of teaching artists. The conversation does seem to be mostly focused on TAs working in schools, which makes sense, since that is the way in which most orchestras are currently working with TAs. There are a couple of things we are doing in Philadelphia to try to broaden the TA role, like bringing TAs into some of the planning conversations for a new series we have that is experimenting with different concert formats for adults. We are also working with musicians from the orchestra on effective interactive program design, and our TAs have begun to participate more actively in those conversations. As you can imagine, they have many great ideas and experiences to contribute to the dialogue, and they raise the level of conversation among musicians and other constituents. In Wednesday’s workshop I noticed people beginning to think about the TA as a creative resource for orchestras. People didn’t seem to have a lot of clarity yet about what that meant, and what exactly TAs could potentially do within the structure of the organizations, but they were interested in thinking about it. More to come, as the meetings progress …