New Mexico Mercury

(Art Sheinberg displays a viola de gamba during an interview in his living room. Sheinberg plays this and numerous other instruments from the medieval, Renaissance and Baroque eras as a member of Música Antigua de Albuquerque.)

Art Sheinberg is an Albuquerque music teacher so beloved that his retirement recently created a scene every bit as emotional as the ending of the popular film, “Mr. Holland’s Opus.” Standing ovations. Tears shed. Praise and thanksgiving from the deepest canyons of the heart.

There are good reasons for this and for his widespread acknowledgement as an outstanding teacher. Let’s examine them for lessons in how to teach and motivate young people to excel.

The film –spoiler alert! – is about a music teacher, played by Richard Dreyfuss, who is feted at the end of a career of sacrifice with a surprise concert put on by scores of former students and attended by a standing-room-only horde of appreciative parents and colleagues. The students play an orchestral piece Holland composed. I give the 1996 film five hankies.

On May 3, Sheinberg put on his last concert at Albuquerque Public Schools, at the Albuquerque High School Performing Arts Center, capping a 37-year career at APS, mostly at Albuquerque and Valley high schools and Washington Middle School. He estimates he has taught about 4,000 students during that time.

After the performance, to his admitted genuine surprise, the curtains rose on a “Top Secret Tribute Concert for Mr. Sheinberg.” An orchestra of about 50 musicians, formed by and from former and current students, fans and associates, from pre-adolescents to the grey-haired, played selections from a piece Sheinberg composed. There were slide shows, videos, talks, gifts. Lots of moist eyes. The testimonials during the program and the interviews I did were filled with words about the man such as “love” and “caring” and “beauty” and “heart.”

The concerts are evidence of what is remarkable about Sheinberg and his legacy.

The “Top Secret” orchestra played Sheinberg’s energetic and difficult pieces strikingly well, considering that the group only practiced twice and that, while many of the performers still are involved in music, some professionally, some also were relative newbies and some were a bit rusty.

The last number played in the regular concert preceding the “Top Secret” concert was “Il bianco e dolce cigno,” a Renaissance piece by Jacques Arcadelt, a choral composition that brought together the Albuquerque High School Chorus and the school’s Early Music Ensemble, which is Sheinberg’s bailiwick. The performance was gorgeous and, to me, flawless, which is amazing given its complexity. It is an example of “polyphony,” a composition that puts very different melodic lines together – tricky to keep one’s place.

These performances – and hundreds of others organized or assisted by Sheinberg over the years – repeatedly raise for me the question: “How does he DO that? How does he get young students to perform such difficult pieces so well and with such beauty – and end up with such a lifelong love of music?”

Love the subject

The answer, Sheinberg says, involves most of all loving the music himself, taking joy in the work and communicating all of this to his students.

“If they see you excited about the music, they’ll be excited, too,” he says, sitting in the living room of his cozy house, warmly lit, lots of wood, and with a piano in the background. Countless students have taken individual lessons from Sheinberg over the years in this house and, Sheinberg says, will continue to do so.

One question he says he gets asked a lot is: What is the most beautiful composition – the best piece of music – you’ve heard?

His response is practical, in terms of his teaching philosophy: “Whatever you’re playing at the moment is what is the most beautiful.” That covers everything he deals with in class. He pointedly will not use a composition for teaching that is not beautiful and moving to him and that is not rich with lessons for students.

Know your stuff

Sheinberg is regarded as a humble man, but he is an expert at his subject, and students know it.

This has wide-ranging benefits in teaching, he notes. He is regarded as authoritative. Students listen. In terms of outcomes, he is able to set students on the straight path to a solid foundation in music, which prepares them for further studies in college and beyond. His reputation as an expert earns him respect in classes and cuts down on cutting up.

Consider: He has a master’s in double bass from the University of New Mexico and plays numerous other instruments as well and can instruct most of his students directly in the details of performing. He teaches music education to college students at UNM.

He has composed and arranged many pieces for school orchestras that have been widely published and played – including the selections performed in “Top Secret” on May 3.

He was a member of the New Mexico Symphony Orchestra for 15 years and is a founding member of Musica Antigua de Albuquerque, a group of talented and dedicated musicians who have been playing medieval, Renaissance and Baroque compositions on original instruments since 1978. A room in his house is a virtual museum of instruments from bygone days.

He is highly decorated as a teacher, winning the Golden Apple Award for excellence in public school teaching in New Mexico, for example, NMSO Teacher of the Year, a place in the N.M. Educators Hall of Fame, an American String Teachers Lifetime Achievement Award and many, many other honors too numerous to list.

Adapt to the students you have

Sheinberg does not work from a top-10 list of what he considers the best pieces, imposing them on students willy nilly, year after year. His curriculum is broad and changes to adapt to the particular group of students he finds himself with at the beginning of the school year.

He says he is sensitive to the abilities of the students he has and chooses compositions – always lovely to him – that will challenge his students in exactly the right way.

Much of his work gets done before the academic year even starts, he says. He will spend time listening to eighth graders who are heading his way from middle school, and he knows his higher-level students from working with them in previous semesters. Some classes have students with more expertise than others and different mixes of instruments.

Based on his assessment of a class’s abilities, he will put together a slate of pieces he loves that are demanding but do-able by the class at hand – hard enough but not too hard. The pieces come from a repertoire he has developed based on years of trial and error, in terms of what works and what doesn’t to get students to learn and do well, he says.

Choose the best material

Give students no less than the greatest music available, Sheinberg says. Students can handle it, and they learn best from studying the best.

“Part of our job is to expose students to the quality stuff,” he says. “Kids know quality… They know what’s great music.” It’s music that students can love and know is beautiful and that they will be motivated to play.

He chooses pieces that exercise students in a range of technical and historical aspects of music, using his repertoire to drive the curriculum, he says. Based on the pieces he chooses, he will introduce students to music from the romantic, baroque, contemporary and other periods, expose them to compositions that are lyrical or based on dance or other criteria, have them practice compositions written in 12/8, 6/8 or 3/4 time and so on.

“I ask myself, ‘What will this piece of music teach them technically and musically?’” he says. And then he derives his lessons based on that.

Announce your final project at the start

Sheinberg says he remembers being impressed in the early 1990s by an article he read in Smithsonian Magazine about a geography teacher who had remarkable success by announcing up front what the final project of the year would be.

It was a tough assignment. The teacher’s goal was to get each student to draw from memory a map of the world. The fact that students knew from the beginning of the class what they would be expected to do helped them to prepare and succeed and end up drawing maps of great complexity and style – something they might not have been able to do so well had they just been given the assignment a couple of weeks before the semester’s end.

“I always thought that was a good strategy,” Sheinberg says.

Similarly, students who know the immensity of what is expected in a tough orchestral performance at the end of a class can prepare for and work on it all semester long.

Teach to the top

Sheinberg gives plenty of individual attention, including personal lessons to students whose skill levels are low. This helps raise the quality of the performances and encourages budding excellent musicians. But it also is important to him to challenge advanced students and give them a sense of ownership of the class.

He says he is not a fan of standardized testing, which aims at bringing the bottom of the class up to an acceptable level. He believes in directly challenging the top students in the class – even building performances around them and giving them more or less free rein to experiment with ideas that interest them. Ironically, he says, if he challenges the most advanced students, the rest of the class gets pulled along and accomplishes much more than if he set the bar lower.

For an example of this, read the accompanying interview with Elena Maietta, a student who one year proposed singing an aria from Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro” to orchestral accompaniment, and Sheinberg went along with it, with great success. Maietta now is working on a master’s in choral conducting. It was her idea to put the “Top Secret” concert together.

By respecting and attending to his more advanced students, he gets them to buy in to the class and take a certain amount of responsibility for it. He creates a classroom culture that aims at the best, and students follow the lead.

“They own the class,” he says. “They’re not going to put up with any slacking or bad behavior.”

Note the virtues of choice and stability

He says his job is made easier by certain structural elements.

For example, music is not required at APS. It is an elective, and the students who are taking it want to take it and are motivated in the first place, he says.

Carla Greene, assistant principal for Albuquerque High from 1999-2007, who recently returned to work at the school, said Sheinberg “never had a student in all of those years who wanted to drop.”

He says he also has the advantage of having taught in the same places, at Albuquerque High, Valley High and Washington Middle School, for his nearly four decades at APS, and has established a long tradition of his expectations and what his classes are able to accomplish. Coming in, students know about him and his classes already and know what they’re in for.

And by staying put for so long he also runs into many students whose parents he taught.

“How can you have discipline problems when you know the parents?” he says. If you have a relationship with the parents of a student, you can tell him or her: I know your mom.

In his 37 years at APS, Sheinberg says, he has very rarely had to write a referral for a student.

Teach selflessness

Sheinberg stresses putting other people first in his classes.

“When playing music, the real fun happens when most of your attention is on the other parts, rather than on your own,” he says. “And in your life, most of your joy will come when your attention is focused away from yourself, and onto your family, friends, and community.”

Love the job

Loving his job is something Sheinberg says he knows he communicates to his students along with everything else.

Typically, Sheinberg is humble about his job, saying he thinks he has it easier than many hard-working folks. Teaching definitely is hard work, but doing what he loves to do for so long makes him feel lucky, he says. He often thinks with gratitude about how different what he does is, compared to people with more traditional jobs, who work long hours and feel beaten down by employers and are bored with what they do but continue to do it because they have to make money.

“You can’t help but love your job when you’re dealing every day with making something beautiful, with students who want to be there,” he says.

Sheinberg says he is not completely disappearing.

His teaching ideas and expertise will not be lost. He says he will continue teaching music education part-time at the University of New Mexico, where he has taught for a couple of years. He will in this way continue to influence the teaching of music.

He says he also will continue playing and performing with his decades-long colleagues and friends in Música Antigua de Albuquerque and will consider other musical options. He will continue giving lessons. He is not going away.

What his students, colleagues say

Following are accounts of interviews with students and colleagues and their perspectives and confirmations about what makes Sheinberg a great teacher.

Cade Arnink is a 10th grader at Albuquerque High, a cellist, who has had Sheinberg for two years now.

Sheinberg “loves us,” he says, and Arnink is so sad that Sheinberg is leaving that “at the last concert I played, I cried for 40 minutes.”

Sheinberg takes an interest in each student individually and spent lots of time with him after school and during lunch hour instructing him, Arnink says. Sheinberg persuaded him to take private lessons and ended up shortly afterwards making it into the citywide Albuquerque Youth Orchestra, and he is working now to make it up to the Albuquerque Youth Symphony.

Sheinberg is enthusiastic and “makes it fun,” he says.

In one example, after students pack up at the end of class, Sheinberg sometimes plays the theme from “Jeopardy” and tries to hit the last note right at the bell. The bell and the last note of the “Jeopardy” theme are both B, Sheinberg confirms.

Sheinberg also always seems to have a smile on his face, he says. But despite the smiles and the fun, Arnink says Sheinberg somehow – he is not clear how this works –  is able to put pressure on him to do better.

“He keeps smiling, but you feel like you have to try harder,” he says. He sees this as a talent in Sheinberg, not a drawback.

Elena Maietta is the ringleader whose idea it was to put together the “Top Secret Tribute Concert for Mr. Sheinberg.”

She is a 2005 graduate of Albuquerque High who sings and plays cello and other instruments and who had Sheinberg for four years and has known him since she was 10. Her birth mom was a student of Sheinberg’s, she says. Maietta now is working on getting a master’s in choral conducting at Ohio State University.

One of Sheinberg’s more gifted students when she was in high school, Maietta appreciates that he would let students run with ideas they came up with for performances and would let them take over the implementation of these ideas.

For one example, she persuaded Sheinberg to let her sing an aria from Mozart’s “Marriage of Figaro,” with the backup of the entire school orchestra, for her last concert at the school. He went for it.

“It was a huge thing for the orchestra,” she says.

Maietta tracks with Arnink about Sheinberg’s uncanny ability to motivate. After a great performance, for example, he would ask a question, in a completely positive way, that would make her want to do even better next time.

Sheinberg allows that, despite all the talk of him smiling so much, his patience with students sometimes wears thin. But Catherine Eaves, department chair of fine arts at Albuquerque High, says she has “never seen him lose patience” or be anything but generous and humble in his approach to teaching.

One year, for example, during a regular event in which teachers of various disciplines would showcase their elective classes to entice students to sign up, Sheinberg had a group of music students who were performing.

As will happen with young people, the students were distracting themselves with high social energy when it came time to play. Rather than cajole or nag or yell, Sheinberg simply stood and waited till all students’ eyes were on him, and then they “all worked together with complete concentration,” marveled Eaves.

“They were happy,” Eaves said. “They created a beautiful piece of music.”

Asher Barreras, a 2005 Albuquerque High graduate and a bassist who studied with Sheinberg for four years, conducted the closing piece from Sheinberg’s symphony at the May 3 event. He now teaches and composes music in the Albuquerque area.

Sheinberg routinely would appoint the stronger students to be section leaders in the orchestra – a leadership role, Barreras says.

“He taught us to teach,” he says.

Barreras admits he had a wild streak during his high school years but found that Sheinberg “always gave us a second chance,” which students such as Barreras put to good use.

He allows that he was “kicked out” of Albuquerque Youth Symphony in his sophomore year and even out of orchestra at Albuquerque High, but found that when he came back for junior year Sheinberg “was still in my corner.” Barreras in response worked harder than ever to recover from this and ended up back in symphony and excelling in musicianship.

Elena Farmin, an Albuquerque High sophomore, is a bassist who studied with Sheinberg for two years, after taking private lessons with him at his house starting in 6th grade. She mirrors much of what others have said about him: He is “passionate about music and teaching,” “always has a smile,” “pushes us to do our best” and is “encouraging.”

Sheinberg exhorted her to try out for AYS, telling her, “I know you can do it,” Farmin says. When it didn’t work out this time around, he still said she made him proud, she says, and gave her further encouragements.

“He has a lot of faith in me,” she says. And other students feel the same. 

She recalls that he helped her, as he has helped other students, deal with upcoming auditions or music events outside of school by having them perform in front of his class to shake out the bugs and the nerves. At the time of her interview, she had an all-bass recital coming up at Robertson’s music store, at which she was to play, from memory, “Wish I Was a Rich Man,” from “Fiddler on the Roof.”

Farmin says Sheinberg had her play in front of her class to prepare for the event. It was one of the last things he did for her as her orchestra teacher. She says she still takes individual lessons from him, but she will miss him at Albuquerque High.