- One of the ways that musicians can connect
to audiences is by opening up the processes
around their instrument itself.
I mean, you have very deep and complex relationships
with the instrument.
You spend a lot of time and a lot of personal growth
in the developing of this amazing expertise
that you have.
And its a big challenge.
How do you open that up to audiences?
Well, one of the key things we know about engaging audiences
is they really wanna know what it's like inside there.
But you can't talk for five hours
about what it's like to play a piece.
So, you look for ways
where you can authentically open up a process.
There's playful ways you can do this.
For example, one is you can bring a designated person
out of an audience to conduct you
and begin a dialogue about what you can do
and what you can't do.
I can think of another example
of an oboe-player student of mine,
who went into a fifth-grade class
she'd been working with for a while
and she said it wasn't going very well with these kids.
Just they couldn't find a good vibe together
and she went in and she said
I got a problem. I got an oboe problem.
I got an important orchestral audition coming up
and there's these same excerpts I've played a million times
and I have come to hate them
and I know they're gonna pick up the fact
that I'm not excited
to play these pieces.
What can we do to help me creatively reinvest
in these excerpts I gotta play.
She said this like right at
She said help me figure out some stuff.
Fifth graders who don't know anything about oboe.
Well, they started to know some stuff about oboe.
And started to get curious about the oboe.
They started to say, well what is the difference
in the sound
between when you're engaged and when you're not engaged?
And she said well lets try to experiment with that.
What she did over the course of that 40 minutes
was draw them inside this incredibly subtle listening
and they started to produce really valuable ideas
about the way she could relate to her instrument
and the way she could adjust the way she thinks
about a piece.
All the while, they're having a deep exchange
about it.
What its like to play this instrument in great depth.
Another example of what we want to think about
is drawing people in through their natural competence.
I had a student who told me a wonderful story
in which she said she was traumatized
by her fourth grade recorder playing experience.
She said, What they did to me was
they put this interesting looking thing in front of me
said don't touch it
and then they like took a whole class to get me
how to hold this thing
and like three classes till I can make any sounds
come out of it.
All the while she's thinking this is like really hard
and this is just a dopey instruments.
Could you imagine how hard those real instruments are.
It's no accident she became a string player.
Well, when she had a chance to work with students,
and she went at it through tapping their competence.
She said to everybody,
put a recorder in front of each fourth grader
and said okay pick up that thing
and figure out how to make three sounds come out of it.
Ya know, and they did fourth grade things
like bang their heads and blow in the sides
and all this.
And she said great, now figure out how you did
those three sounds so you can make
the same three sounds again.
Great.
Now, write a little song using those three sounds
that captures something about how you feel today.
So, they all did that.
She said okay now, write down how the song goes
so you can play the same song again. Terrific.
Now, take your piece of paper and give it to your neighbor
and have them play your song.
She said Eric, within 25 minutes, every kid in the room
believed she could play the recorder,
had composed something of personal significance,
had created a notational system
to capture her creation
and had her first work performed publicly.
What a different way to draw people into the
the competence of their instrument,
the inter thinking I can do this. I have a voice.
I know how to do it.
And probably even thinking, oh you mean
real recorder players only blow in the end of this thing?
How limited.
You can bang it on your head and you can blow in the side.
So they come in with much more open sense of process
around an instrument.
That's the world we want to engage people in
that our commitment to this instrument
is more than just telling about it
and giving the history of it,
but opening up what it feels like to be in these inquiries.
That's when people connect to us.
That's what audiences wanna know.
What is it like to have that much expertise?
I remember a Rice graduate student
who worked with me at Julliard,
he did this amazing program with his cello
in which he gave it a name and a personality
and had a whole dialogue with it
about what it was like for the cello to work with him
and what he thought about the cello's personality
and how the two of them thought
about the piece they were gonna play.
It opened wide the sense of what it's like
to have a life with an instrument
in a most delightful way.
So I encourage you to think
about opening up processes, not just talking about them,
but sharing them, inviting us in in a kind of language
that is a universal, personal language.