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| German folk songs that pleased my father. Then he found a fine flute teacher who agreed to take me as a pupil and who recommended a well-made flute. Second, the deficiencies in my music background frustrated my progress in flute playing, and so my teacher beat a sense of rhythm, timing, and phrasing into me while teaching me to play the flute. Third, I joined the New York Flute Club in order to participate in a social setting that included professional musicians, expert amateurs, and novices - a setting in which I could make friends and establish norms. Finally, opportunities developed for me to make music with other people and to play for people who enjoyed listening to music. During college, at the Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore, I continued taking flute lessons for a year; I also became a member of the Baltimore Bach Club. We listened to records once a week and pursued our mission to bring public chamber music concerts to the then rather barren musical scene in Baltimore. Each year, a group of us went to the Spring Bach Festival in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Thus my music education involved a lot of listening to music and contacts with people who took music seriously and who played and composed it. This personal involvement and training led to a lifelong thread of playing the flute alone, for my own pleasure, and of playing with a group, for other people's enjoyment. Such ideal conditions will rarely be available to students, but it seems to me that art education must provide, to the greatest extent possible, the supportive and reinforcing environment described in my personal experience. My learning about painting was also, except for one incident, completely nonschool. I do remember drawing a tree - probably in the second grade. The teacher explained to me that I had left a little cavity at the top of the trunk where the branches parted. She said that the cavity would fill with water and the tree | would rot and die. She was a very good teacher, because I then began looking at trees to discover how the branches do separate from the trunk in order to avoid this difficulty. Apart from this one drawing, I cannot remember any art activity or art learning in elementary school, high school, or college. But a lot of learning took place outside school. When I was about twelve or thirteen, I went to Greenwich Village once a week to do charcoal drawings of people and still life, but most of the drawings were of fire escapes and the "toits de New York." To this day, I remain highly sensitive to and moved by the views from the back windows of city houses. I remember feeling at home with charcoal and fixatives, and so on. Later, when I was about fifteen, my brother and I spent several weeks on Nantucket Island learning to reproduce with oils on canvas board the very special forms and colors of the island. At that time, we also learned about brushes and linseed oil and about colors - the way the colors mixed, and their names: burnt umber, cerulean blue, yellow ocher, and so forth. However, I have never become an even marginally competent sketcher or painter. The main thread of my art education came through a different pathway than through doing it. My mother was a serious painter before her marriage, but she painted only occasionally during my memory of her. Throughout my early childhood, our house had a static collection of her paintings and a few sentimental or allegorical prints. When I was about ten, my parents bought their first painting, a large dark Panini full of ruins. For the next eight years their collection grew, and I was able to watch and participate in the evolution of their taste, knowledge, and involvement with paintings. I remember sitting in private rooms of Tannhäuser, Wildenstein, and Durand Ruel listening to their comments and those of unctuous dealers about paintings. At the age of twelve, my parents took me to Zurich to see an extensive collection of van Gogh paintings, and a few years later, by special arrangement, we saw the Barnes collection in Philadelphia. I remember their participation in the beginnings | ||