Professional Development: Conferences & Seminars: Seminar and Workshop with Eric Booth

Click here to download a set of guidelines for teaching artists provided by Eric Booth.

PMP recently invited arts in education expert Eric Booth to conduct a seminar and workshop on how to create more engaging musical experiences and build audiences for music through education. The presentation, hosted by the Curtis Institute of Music on April 24th, focused on strategic use of language to connect to and engage audience members in both public and outreach programs. Nearly 70 Greater Philadelphia artists and arts educators attended.

The morning-long event began with a seminar called "Words and Music: Connecting With Audiences," in which Mr. Booth explored how artists can use language to frame their performances in ways that help audiences find personal relevance in the work being presented on stage. He emphasized the importance of not only offering substantive, meaningful musical work on stage, but also facilitating the audience’s capacity to connect to art. Fostering this ability to connect and grow from artistic experiences, Mr. Booth says, makes audiences feel that the arts have something to offer to them personally and makes them want to return, making this strategy one of the most effective cornerstones on which to build audiences for the arts in the long term.

To demonstrate the potential impact of a few carefully chosen words to enhance an artistic experience, Mr. Booth presented an exercise in which he performed a Shakespearean sonnet with no introduction, then asked the audience for suggestions on what kind of preparatory information might have improved the performance for them. He then performed the sonnet again, this time introducing it by posing a set of questions meant to evoke the emotions the sonnet described. This exercise showed audience members how even a brief introduction can provide a "way in" to a piece, which facilitates a personal connection and makes the experience more rewarding for an audience member. The sonnet exercise was then used to elicit a set of guidelines for enabling audiences to relate to a work of art. (See "Guidelines for Engaging Audiences," below.)

After a short break, Mr. Booth conducted a workshop called "Engaging Young Audiences in Outreach Programs." Five local musicians and ensembles performed excerpts of their educational programs and received suggestions on how to use language more effectively to enhance their presentations. Curtis students Melissa White and Bert Witzel presented a lesson in which they used the violin and the bass to demonstrate the relationship between instrument size and pitch. Doc Gibbs introduced audiences to an eclectic variety of percussion instruments from around the world. The Latin Fiesta ensemble performed "The ABCs of Latin Music," highlighting the different musical idioms found throughout the Hispanic world. Reverend Carolyn Bryant followed with a performance of several traditional gospel hymns. The workshop ended with clarinetist Igor Begelman and bassoonist Larisa Gelman presenting a demonstration of the woodwind family.

Mr. Booth offered personalized feedback for each group, asking for audience observations, commenting on the performers’ choices, and posing challenges that would improve their ability to engage audiences in the music itself.

Eric Booth is an award-winning actor, artist and teacher who has worked with the American Symphony Orchestra League, Chamber Music America and professional ensembles across the country to help them transform their interactions with audiences. As the founding director of the Teacher Center, he designed and led the training for a network of teaching artists from around the nation and launched 47 research projects with them, helped design a new assessment system for learning in the arts, and was hired by Lincoln Center to train teams from 18 aesthetic education institutes around the U.S. Mr. Booth founded and led the Arts-in-Education Program at Juilliard, which became a national model for training teaching artists and placing them in yearlong classroom partnerships in New York City public school classrooms. As a faculty member of Juilliard, Tanglewood, the Kennedy Center and Lincoln Center Institute, he has helped hundreds of young musicians more fully realize their potential as live presenters and as advocates for concert music. His 20-year career in the theater included Broadway plays such as Whose Life Is It Anyway? with Mary Tyler Moore. He also has written books and appeared in major media as a leading analyst of trends among Americans.

Guidelines for Engaging Audiences

Personal relevance. Finding a hook that will draw the audience into a work is the highest priority in presenting good programs for concert and outreach audiences alike. The best connection is work-of-art specific and is not always an emotional hook. In fact, the best method is for the artist to draw on what he or she thinks is the most compelling or interesting dimension in order to introduce a work to an audience.
Engagement before information. The typical arts education model offers the audience as much information as possible about form and context, but this approach can alienate the listener from the content of the work of art and doesn’t provide a meaningful hook to draw them into the work. Rather than providing information as an introduction, give information after a relationship had already been developed by way of a good introduction—studies have shown that audiences actually retain more information this way.
Use information in your introduction as a springboard for engagement only. Information can be a useful "way in" if you choose information that draws the audience member in rather than pushing him or her away.
Tap artistic competence. Asking the audience to do real artistic work, such as composing, performing, dancing or, in the case of the sonnet exercise described, doing what an actor does to prepare a monologue, positions the performer and the artist as equals and gives audience members confidence that there is something for them in the arts.
Ask good questions. Avoid questions with right or wrong answers, as these questions affirm audience members’ sense of artistic incompetence. Instead, ask questions that provoke engaged answers. In doing so, however, don’t neglect quality by simply praising every response. Instead, take all responses seriously—even the ones that seem silly or careless—and asking more questions to elicit more thoughtful responses. This will reaffirm audience members’ sense of their ability to have authentic artistic responses.
Explore alternative avenues of making connections. Most of education is invested in getting students to make logical connections, but humans are also capable of making emotional, intuitive, kinesthetic, and other kinds of connections, which the arts can tap into. In a similar vein…
Don’t underestimate the importance of fun. Musical fun, such as sound, dance or improvisation, can provide an engaging physical connection to a work of art.
Balance process and product. Instead of overemphasizing the product of music—what is already up on stage—engage people in the process of how music is made. Asking the audience to compose works on a small scale and taking seriously the works they create enables them to understand what’s important in the composition process on a large scale.
Target audience members’ intrinsic motivation. The arts offer a rare opportunity for people to invest intrinsically—that is, to do something because they personally believe it’s worth doing, rather than because someone has told them to do it. Research has shown that self-esteem goes up when you invest intrinsically, succeed, and are recognized for it, but goes down when you invest extrinsically and succeed. With so much of education focused on extrinsic motivation such as grades and right or wrong answers, arts educators need to focus on enabling students to explore and succeed and what they think is worthwhile.
Attend to the verbs of art. As Mr. Booth put it: "Inherent in the artistic experience is the amazing human capacity to expand one’s sense of what is or might be. The art isn’t in the thing you’re looking at. … The art is in the capacity to expand your sense of the way the world is or might be. It’s the verb that transforms a noun into an art experience. We don’t focus enough on that amazing human capacity—in ourselves or in our audiences—that is the crucial element. When people experience that, they get what the arts are about."
Engage yearning. Have faith that if your audience invests in your well-structured artistic experience, they will be rewarded for their courage. "In this role as an agent of artistic experience," says Mr. Booth, "we’re in the yearning business. Our job is to awaken yearning and guide that energy to rewarding experiences that will provide personally relevant connections that will make them try again."
Remember the law of 80%. Eighty percent of what you teach, Mr. Booth explains, is about the quality of the teacher. In learning about the arts, students pay attention to how a teacher acts and interacts with the curriculum they are teaching, the teacher’s level of enthusiasm, and the degree to which he or she appears eager and involved in what’s going on. In a good education program, artists should make it obvious that they love music and that they are richer for having experienced music in their lives.