Eric Booth is the Module Director of GLP’s current module, Teaching Artistry for Communities.
In 2015, Eric Booth was given the highest award in American arts education and was named one of the 50 most influential people in the arts in the United States. He began his career as a successful Broadway actor, and became a businessman and author of seven books and over 35 published articles—his books include the bestseller The Everyday Work of Art; The Music Teaching Artist’s Bible, which is used as a textbook around the world; and Playing for Their Lives, which is the only book about the global music for social change movement.
He has been on the faculty of Juilliard, Tanglewood, The Kennedy Center, and Lincoln Center Education. He serves as a consultant for many arts organizations including seven of the ten largest U.S. orchestras, and serves as Senior Advisor to the El Sistema movement in the U.S. and abroad. He is also the founder of the largest publication in the field —The Ensemble.
A frequent keynote speaker (including the closing keynote at UNESCO’s first World Arts Education Conference), he founded the International Teaching Artist Conferences, which have now become the year-round International Teaching Artist Collaborative, and was given the first honorary doctorate for a career as a teaching artist.
He generously shares his thoughts in the blog post below, where he explains teaching artistry and why it belongs in The Global Leaders Program:
Teaching artistry is the most important workforce pioneering the future of the arts—and you probably haven’t heard of it!
Music teaching artists are musicians who expand their range of artistic skills to engage directly with audiences and participants in communities, schools and institutions. These artists (you find them in all artistic disciplines) are known by other titles too — participatory artists, community artists, social practice artists, artists-in-residence, citizen artists, etc. — and you find them in every country.
The number one job of an artist is to make worlds and to invite others into those worlds to discover the valuable things they contain. Teaching artists don’t leave it at that. They do everything they can to support people’s success in entering those worlds — and they want to help everyone find the richness contained in musical works, not just the Art Club who is fortunate enough to have the background that prepares them to know how to enter musical worlds and make personally relevant connections.
The number one job of teaching artists is to activate the artistry of others. When that universal capacity is awakened, the birth right of all people not just the privileged, a force is released that can be guided in any number of directions: to take people deeper into an artwork, to make a community’s life more vital, to increase health, to help students learn, to foster social justice, even to address the climate crisis. This is the 21st century power of the arts — not just to create masterworks in concert halls for the small percentage of the pubic who loves that. Teaching artists expand the value, the relevance, and the power of the arts to make a difference in the world. Not by condescending or compromising artistic quality, but by opening up access to the power the arts contain.
This is why Module 5 on Teaching Artistry belongs in the Global Leaders Program. Teaching artists expand the sense of the possible, for the arts, for individuals, and for communities. That’s what leaders do. The cohort gets a sense of the field of teaching artistry—its history, its surprising size and global presence, its many purposes—and then studies its foundational tools and practices. The cohort culminates by working as teaching artists to design an ambitious interactive community concert specifically created for the organization they have been studying.
Global leaders in the arts need to know all the tools we have to make a difference in the lives of individuals, communities, and cultures.
The etymology of the word culture doesn’t have anything to do with art or concert halls. It originally meant the medium in which you grow, like agriculture or the growth medium in that petri dish during your biology class. Global Leaders are culture changers—they change the medium in which people grow into a better future, and teaching artistry enables everyone to tap into their innate artistry and create a better self, a better community, a better field of the arts, a better world, in ensemble.
