A “Parting Prescription” to the United States

In early January, Dr. Vivek Murthy, whose research I explored in a piece on the crisis of loneliness in the United States and how teaching artistry can help, released his “Parting Prescription” to the United States as he concluded his two terms as US Surgeon General. In it, he identifies the common cause underlying many of our public health challenges in the US from loneliness, to drug addiction, to youth mental health, to parental stress: a lack of community.

Throughout the prescription, which I would encourage you to read if you have the time, Murthy describes how community acts as a powerful source of fulfillment in people’s lives. In numerous accounts of interactions with people in both his personal and professional life, he details how even when people achieve what is typically held up as success in our society: money, fame, and power, they often continue to remain unfulfilled. Fulfillment is more than just a sense of meaning and happiness with the state of our lives, it is a major driver of our personal and collective health influencing health outcomes like premature death, heart disease, depression, and anxiety. 

The challenges posed by our crisis of community are far reaching and deeply impactful on every facet of our lives. Rather than try to describe the stakes myself, I’ll just repeat here how Murthy lays them out:

“The fracturing of community in America is driving a deeper spiritual crisis that threatens our fundamental well-being. It is fueling not only illness and despair on an individual level, but also pessimism and distrust across society which have all made it painfully difficult to rise together in response to common challenges.” 

It was striking to read through a well-researched, scientifically-informed document making medical recommendations about community. Nearly all of my work revolves around community. It’s in my job title at the New England Conservatory of Music. Yet I wouldn’t consider myself in the medical profession, not even close. However, over my years exploring teaching artistry, there continues to be more evidence that there is a very close relationship between medicine and the arts. In his prescription, Murthy focuses on many of the social and medical avenues through which we can address this crisis of community, such as reaching out to people we care about on a daily basis, creating technology free zones in our day to day life to focus on in-person human connection, engaging in volunteer work, and investing in social infrastructure (including programs, policy, and physical space). However, I didn’t read a lot about the role that the arts can have, so I’d like to offer this follow-up as a response.

To navigate my own thoughts about why teaching artistry is ideally positioned to create community, I’ll use Murthy’s framing of community’s three core elements: relationships, service, and purpose.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Relationships

When describing my job at NEC to people, one of the first things they comment on is the amount of time I spend driving students in a car to and from events in the Boston community. In a typical year, our student fellows do around 160 performances and someone on our staff, with rare exception, is at every single one of those. That work takes a lot of time and energy and is only a portion of what we do. But the time spent in the community is essential. On our team, we talk about relationships with partners being the currency of our work. Nothing is more important. 

The relationships and trust built across two decades are the bedrock that allows us to bring a student whose work we aren’t familiar with to a site and know that it’s a safe space for students to make mistakes and learn. Relationships and trust help us create new experiences for students because our partners can tell us what is important to them. Relationships and trust open the door for students to experience the power of music to have impact in the world. Just like every other program at the conservatory, artistic excellence is expected, but for our program that’s only part of the equation. 

Teaching artistry is fundamentally relational. It’s about activating that sense of innate human artistry in someone else through a creative experience you participate in together. Relationships and teaching artistry are part of a reciprocal loop. The relationships that we have were built through teaching artistry, and those relationships lead to new and deeper teaching artistry opportunities. It’s a self-sustaining ecosystem. Murthy writes that one of the most important factors in developing relationships is a commitment to being “vulnerable and real with each other…expanding our circle of concern to people who may differ in background and beliefs but who are still part of our community.” In our ideologically entrenched and polarized world, that kind of vulnerability and realness is hard. We’re used to having our armor up when interacting with those who believe differently from us. Art helps us get that armor down, stay open, and create relationships across difference, which is vital for reconstituting community.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Service

This one is a tricky one for me. I’m a child of the 90s and early 2000s when service work was a ubiquitous requirement for high school graduation and college acceptance. I can’t speak to if things have changed now, but growing up I volunteered often, especially through mission trips with the church I belonged to and leading a service project of my own design in order to earn the Eagle Scout rank in Boy Scouts.

Yet, throughout all of that service work, I kept being bothered by the uncomfortable question of “Who was really being served here?” The focus was on earning accolades for yourself, whether it be a rank in Boy Scouts or entrance to a prestigious college. It didn’t matter who you were serving or what service you were providing; the act of doing something for someone else was motivated by making yourself look better. That realization rubbed me the wrong way and actually led me to pull back from service work quite a bit in the later years of high school and early college.

My career and creative shift into teaching artistry after a decade focusing on music performance is in many ways shaped by a return to the core value of service that I lost during those late high school and early college years. Even if I didn’t realize it, I was craving the human connection that comes with doing things for the benefit of others. In my performing career, I was meeting people and sharing beautiful music, but didn’t feel an impact in the world around me or even in my own life. I was looking for a reason for making music and eventually found it in teaching artistry where human connection and social benefit are inextricably linked with creativity. 

I’ve also grown to better understand my discomfort with the “Who is really being served here” question. I have always received more than I gave when I performed service work. Murthy identifies a version of this positive return in his prescription saying “sustained service efforts can reduce the risk of hypertension, stroke, early death, and depression. They can also improve cognitive functioning and keep us more connected to others. Service can help build the skills, character, and dispositions to be effective in the workplace and in civic life.” Reciprocity is a foundational aspect of service.

To put in creative terms, I’ll refer to Lewis Hyde’s book The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World, which argues that there is another type of economy: the gift economy, which is noticeably different from the market economy. In the gift economy, we aren’t looking to balance the books by exchanging things of equal value, but instead we give away with the expectation of nothing in return, only to receive far more than we ever gave. This is especially relevant with intangible goods such as love, peace, security, beauty, etc. Art has a natural place on that list. Art naturally resists being a commodity, and to the extent that it is ours when we create it, when we pass it along and it comes alive in other people, the world starts to look a little bit more like the world we hope to live in. Eric Booth calls this phenomenon “the bounce”, where when we pour our energy into something creative we get a burst of energy when it succeeds. Artistry gives more than it requires.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Purpose

Like the other two core elements of community, Murthy expresses that purpose can have tangible benefits on our physical and mental health including lowered “risk of early death as well as stroke, lung disease, and dementia for some…lower levels of depression and anxiety and greater resilience in the face of stress.” He also cautions that many people don’t have a clear sense of purpose right now including this troubling statistic: in a “study from the Harvard Graduate School of Education 58% of 18- to 25-years-olds said they have low, or no sense of purpose or meaning in life.”

That statistic would be more troubling to me if I wasn’t seeing it every day. One of my favorite questions to ask conservatory students is “Why are you here, studying at conservatory?” Many give an answer to the effect of this being the best place to train for a career as a performing musician. If that’s the answer I get, I press a little more, “Why are you a musician and how can we help you fulfill that purpose?” When we get to that stage, most students outright reject the premise of the question; they don’t know what to do with it. 

Now to be fair, I don’t expect anyone when they’re 18 to 25 to know exactly why they’re going to do anything with their life. Part of growing up is learning our “why” and what we are going to do about it. But what is concerning is that for something as core to our soul as making art, we aren’t even asking young people to think about purpose. I certainly wasn’t when I was in school preparing for a life in music and it wasn’t until I began to ask those questions on my own that things really started to make sense for me. While I had teachers that pushed me on my reason for being a musician, I wish it had been more omnipresent in all of my training. 

We need a revolution of purpose in the arts. So often our “why” is expressed as a desire to make great art. That’s all well and good, but that’s a reflection of how we do what we do and not why we do it. If we have a clearer idea of our purpose grounded in what art can do amongst people, not as a commodity, but as a vehicle for community and change, we are going to make better art. Plus, as Murthy says, if we have a better sense of our purpose, we’re likely to live longer, healthier lives in a more connected, vibrant, and just society. 

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

I’ve had a version of this conversation with students after finishing a community engagement event countless times:

Me: “How do you think things went today with this performance?”

Student: “It was ok, I did this well but could have worked on X, Y, or Z. It’s given me a lot to think about for the future.”

Me: “That’s some great reflection and there’s always things we can work on. Beyond thinking about how we played, I’m curious about how you’re feeling? What did you notice about your emotional connection in this performance?”

Student: “I’m feeling really good. You know it’s funny, I’ve performed so many times in amazing concert halls for huge audiences and there was more meaning and joy than I’ve ever felt in today’s performance in a sitting room for 15 people. Is that weird?”

Me: “No it’s not weird. Not weird at all.”

That conversation is the “light bulb” moment when they wake up to the power of teaching artistry and experience a fundamental shift in their awareness of the impact and relevance their artmaking can have in the world. The joy and meaning that the student experienced in that small performance in a room with questionable acoustics is community. I had the same discovery in my own career and it is a tremendous honor to experience that journey with new students each and every day.  Like them, I realized that relationship, service, and purpose is at the center of what we do as teaching artists. It’s the reason we make art. What a gift then it is to have this parting prescription from a leading medical voice in our country reinforce that community is perhaps the most vitally important ingredient to our individual and collective health. Let’s make sure as teaching artists, we live up to the call to action!

Read this piece and others on Substack