The pioneering American composer John Cage once declared that an artist’s “proper business” is the cultivation of curiosity and awareness. We arts teachers at Webb embrace this charge.
In teaching students how to draw, we induce them to become more attentive and discerning observers.
In directing their dramatic efforts, we exhort them to descry the elusive emotional heart of diverse human predicaments.
In guiding their music-making, we invite them to listen acutely and to attend to the marvelous nuances of musical narratives.
In exposing students to the defining efforts of their pioneering predecessors—to the remarkable re-cast worlds of Michelangelo, Klimt, and Rothko, of Shakespeare, Strindberg, and Kushner, of Beethoven and Ellington and Radiohead—we introduce them to the extraordinary richness of the world’s artistic heritage, and awaken thereby their sensitivity to the range, scope, and intensity of human creative endeavor.
Describing the compositions of another American, Christian Wolff, Cage observed that “Wolff’s works invariably reveal to both performers and listeners energy resources in themselves of which they hadn’t been aware, and put those energies intelligently to work.” An important parallel to our abetting keen student engagement is our nurturing students’ awareness of their own abundant creative energies. We believe that anyone willing to try is capable of producing arresting work in art, theater, and music; and we are committed to creating the conditions in which students may feel emboldened to unleash their nascent talent.
Ultimately, our students become fervent transmuters. Deft, intrepid assayers of images, sounds, texts, and ideas, they imaginatively seize and transform the objects of their perception. They absorb, parse, and temper, weaving these seminal, metamorphic phenomena into their disarmingly vivid artwork and revealing therein new ramifications and possibilities.
Withal they confirm another Cageian adage: Art is self-alteration. Cultivating greater perceptual acuity, relishing the new discoveries that such acuity yields, and tapping their own teeming resources, our students develop dexterity and suppleness, a capacity for canny, nimble, eager response to anything they might encounter.
The goals of arts education, one quickly learns, jibe beautifully with those of liberal-arts education.
(Click here for more on Webb’s arts programs.)
