Italics are mine

John Sargent at TEDxTimesSquare on "The Decision Point"

Such a remarkable, inspiring talk by the CEO of Macmillan Publishers - sometimes you have to decide to stand up and face the wave.

Music Education

Following up on my previous post on the August "education" issue of Opera News, here are some articles, in addition to the one about Gustavo Dudamel, that particularly caught my attention:

• The business of music: about the new career-management courses being taught at music schools and conservatories, 
• The classroom connection: about the Met: HD Live in Schools program
• Life after the assembly line: as usual, Pulitzer-Prize winner Philip Kennicott has written a thoughtful article about the career prospects of the many graduates churned out by music conservatories,
• Mannes enters the modern era: about music education at the Mannes College The New School for Music in New York City.

Gustavo Dudamel and El Sistema in Los Angeles

I don't say this very often, but I truly loved the August issue of Opera News, which was the magazine's "education issue". So today's post will be on its main feature - an article about Los Angeles Philharmonic conductor Gustavo Dudamel, whose contributions to the classical music education of underprivileged youth make him one of the truly inspiring figures of our times, for those of us who care about that sort of things - and my next post will be on other education-related articles in that same issue. 

For those of us who care about classical music and social good, Dudamel is nothing short of royalty for his work in El Sistema, a Venezuelan orchestra for underprivileged youth founded by Jose Abreu in 1975. Dudamel himself is a product of that system and thus offers hope and inspiration to the children and teenagers El Sistema now teaches - some of whom participate in the Orquesta Sinfonica Simon Bolivar, the very best of Venezuelan youth orchestras, which has played around the world under Dudamel's leadership to great acclaim. (I have their Mahler 5, Beethoven 3, and the Discoveries recording, on which I liked everything but truly loved the South American music. They deserve every bit of the applause they get.)

Dudamel is now trying to recreate the El Sistema experiment in Los Angeles as the Youth Orchestra Los Angeles (YOLA) program, which is "based on his unshakable conviction that a classical-music education should be an inalienable right for every child, regardless of demographics, background or race" - can you see why I like him? YOLA, which started with 80 students from underserved LA neighborhoods, now counts over 550 students receiving music training and academic support at two centers with hundreds of students on waiting lists; Dudamel makes a point of visiting YOLA students whenever he is in town. The article gives the example of a student who'd been running with a bad crowd and changed his ways thanks to YOLA, ultimately being accepted to a prestigious performing-arts high school. 

Many communities in the US are now implementing El Sistema-like initiatives - perhaps one of the most visible ones is OrchKids, launched by Baltimore Symphony Music Director Marin Alsop using her MacArthur genius grant money. The article goes on saying that such programs may change the face of classical music by (at some point in the future) bringing musicians from diverse, underprivileged backgrounds into American professional orchestras and creating a vast audience of educated listeners just as diverse as the musicians. 

But I think there is more to that. I think - and this reminds me of an article I read recently, about a former Olympic athlete who uses his charity to bring athletic equipment such as soccer balls to poor children in Africa, and had been asked pointedly by a journalist why he thought bringing soccer balls to starving children was going to have any impact whatsoever, only to hear the president of the country tell him shortly thereafter that his fellow citizens wanted joy and not just survival in their children's lives - those programs matter because kids get to see that the nice things (such as a music instrument) don't just go to the children in the wealthy neighborhoods, that famous people such as Gustavo Dudamel treat them as real people and hold them to high standards, that they can develop discipline and find fulfillment and be rewarded for their effort - that even if they got a bad hand of cards in the neighborhood they were born in, there are ways to escape if they apply themselves. They can do it, and we can help. 

More resources about the LBJ play

A short post to point out a few excellent resources for those of you who, like me, love theater:

• the Columbia University website of the Edward M. Kennedy Prize for Drama inspired by American History, which Robert Schenkkan's play All the Way (see previous post) co-won in 2013, has outstanding interviews with Schenkkan on:
  1. The complexities and paradoxes in LBJ's character,
  2. The impact his play has had on the people who have seen it performed,
  3. The influence of Shakespeare in his construction and treatment of themes,
  4. The lasting impact of LBJ's policy,
  5. The medium of drama,
  6. Epic theater,
  7. and much more!
• Harvard Magazine ran a thought-provoking feature in its January-February 2012 issue, about the future of theater. It discusses current trends such as digital media, ticket prices, the difficulty of getting new plays mounted and the siphoning of talented writers who could be playwrights to the world of television scripts. It also touches upon nonprofit and regional theater as well as Broadway as show business but not theater, to paraphrase someone quoted in the article. The author writes: "The theater of the future will be one that actively engages its audiences and probably breaks not only the “fourth wall” (the imaginary “window” of the proscenium) but the other three as well." I also enjoyed the part about theater in schools and, more than anything, the last paragraph, excerpted here: "The hunger for live storytelling, for the shared experience of actor and audience, may even increase, if and when people tire of the edited, buffed, packaged perfection of television and film products."

More theater-related articles from Harvard Magazine: Nixon in China Creators Re-Create, John Adams on Harvard "beyond highbrow amateurism", Diane Paulus at the American Repertory Theater and the October 2007 Harvard inauguration of the New College Theatre with a panel on the future of American playwriting and producing. Food for thought: "Maybe the next five or 10 years of exciting things to happen in theater will happen in universities."