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  • The Music Teaching Artist’s Bible: Becoming a Virtuoso Educator
  • David Allen
The Music Teaching Artist’s Bible: Becoming a Virtuoso Educator, by Eric Booth. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. 285 pp. $24.95, paperback.

Eric Booth has completed the curriculum for today’s classical music performers in The Music Teaching Artist’s Bible: Becoming a Virtuoso Educator (2009). This book could handily serve as the text for a class designed to help music performance majors learn about the items that are usually ignored within today’s skill-based music performance degrees offered in most American universities and conservatories. Booth makes the case that many classically trained performing musicians unknowingly do more harm than good for their audiences and careers. He repeatedly states that a better understanding of the issues addressed in his book will equal more gigs and employment for musicians while providing better experiences for music audiences. Booth feels that only through the teaching artist/virtuoso educator will we as a society allow classical music to be relevant to modern audiences and the public at large.

teaching artist—1. A teaching artist is the model of the twenty-first-century artist and, simultaneously, a model for high-engagement learning in education. 2. A teaching artist is the future of art in America.

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His no-nonsense approach includes exploring and understanding integral parts of arts interactions in many different settings. It is impressive that so much common sense regarding complex issues within education, administration, human interaction, and musical artistry can be crammed into 267 pages. It would behoove undergraduate and graduate music performance students to read this book. American universities, colleges, and conservatories are simply not offering enough resources within their degree programs to help their music performance majors attain a career in music. Booth’s Music Teaching Artist’s Bible lays the groundwork for solving this problem.

Booth’s experience is extensive, and he is hailed by many as a leading expert in developing and helping teaching artists. He has taught at Julliard, the Leonard Bernstein Center, Tanglewood, and the Lincoln Center Institute. While serving as a teacher at the Kennedy Center, he currently continues his work as the founding artistic director of Julliard’s Mentoring Program. He is also in the process of establishing a new teaching artist training program at the Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University.

The book includes eight parts divided into either four or five subsections each. Booth uses Leonard Bernstein’s description to define art as having three attributes: “It holds a complex and profound truth, it cannot be expressed in any other way, and [End Page 118] the world would be worse without it” (3). The teaching artist is the conduit for sharing this view of art. Booth’s 80 percent rule is mentioned for the first time in the opening section. This law will come up several times, and it basically dictates that 80 percent of what you teach comes from who you are.

According to Booth, the arts ecosystem consists of six strands of arts learning, including arts appreciation, skill building within an art form, aesthetic development, arts integration, community arts, and extensions. For each strand, care must be given as audiences and students interact with the arts. He states that “the era of art for art’s sake is now officially over. It was a fifty-year experiment, in a time of affluence, and it didn’t work to expand the impact of the arts. We had existed for the previous ten or twenty thousand years, and it doesn’t mean the art produced is of lower quality” (24). Citing Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences, Booth urges teaching artists to give students the opportunity to explore the roles of creator, performer, audience, and critic. Furthermore, music education in the United States is not organized in such a way to utilize these potential roles. Few would argue that American music programs are not skewed in favor of performance skills.

While presenting the ways in which a teaching artist learns to interact with audiences or students, Booth introduces the liminal zone as that uncomfortable moment when the performer or teacher does not know...

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