"Our job is to put fannies in seats," said the longtime music instructor. He was responding to a circumstance that's impossible to miss when we attend most performances of the "classical" arts: audiences are graying and diminishing.

The explosive growth of commercial art and entertainment poses major challenges to art forms that demand concentration and reward contemplation. But meeting the challenge to create new, young, engaged audiences takes more than assigning concert or theater reports to freshmen forced to take music or theater classes. It demands helping young people gain intellectual and emotional access to the pleasures available in concert halls, museums, and the world of serious theater.

How can one lend appropriate help? While getting students to concerts is a goal of those of us who teach music appreciation, our concerns generally are more complex than those espoused by the instructor cited above. We use music as a locus for teaching critical thinking, and we situate music within the evolution of Western (or world) history and thought. Most students love music, but they rarely can articulate why they like what they like. Teaching critical listening helps students to attend more closely and to understand what aspects of music they respond to. We develop a vocabulary for these aspects, and students often find that knowing the terminology helps them pay closer attention—to the different effects produced by major and minor scales, for example, or to how structures that include repetitions, variations, and contrasts shape the emotional impact of music they love.

Getting students to go to concerts, of course, is hardly antithetical to getting them to think about what they are hearing. Indeed, for many of us, listening and thinking intently are intrinsic to the pleasure we experience in concert halls—and in theaters, museums, and while reading poetry and great novels. The effect is transformative: music no longer serves as aural wallpaper; it becomes a central focus of our attention—and the pleasures intensify commensurately.

What we do in the arts at Baruch involves both critical thinking and attendance at live performances. Since 1986 more than 15,000 Baruch undergraduates have experienced pulse-quickening exposure to the Alexander String Quartet in their classrooms. The ASQ's residency in the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences has brought this world-class ensemble to disciplines as disparate as math (to demonstrate music's many numerical bases and strategies), history (what music might Thomas Jefferson have known and how might it have exemplified Enlightenment thought?), and psychology (the interpersonal dynamics within a professional quartet are quite intense). And, in the process, students have forged intellectual connections that otherwise would remain elusive or obscure. Other residencies at the College (the Harman Writer-in-Residence and the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, for example), the annual series of readings coordinated with the required Great Works literature course, and the presence on campus of the Mishkin Gallery also serve to help students think outside the box of narrow disciplinarity and to provide opportunities to feel the shiver of excitement that only art experienced live can afford.

Many of our students gain this experience in college for the first time, and their opportunities to do so have been vastly increased by the opening of the Baruch Performing Arts Center. The aesthetic rewards afforded by BPAC's venues have been immediately evident: in concerts within the splendid acoustics of Engelman Hall the ASQ now sounds as wonderful as it does on recordings; emotionally and physically sprawling theatrical productions can blossom as never before in the varied configurations available in the Nagelberg Theatre. And first-class venues allow us to bring to the College the astounding panoply of performers you can learn about elsewhere in this magazine.

Helping students develop love for the arts presents pedagogical challenges not far removed from those encountered by our colleagues throughout the College. The goal is to lead students to a more critical appreciation of the complete experience of culture and, in the process, to make sure they experience the rewards gained by filling those seats themselves.

—Dennis Slavin is associate provost at Baruch College. He has been a member of the fine and performing arts faculty since 1986. He was chair of the music department from 1993 to 1996 and served as deputy chair of the Department of Fine and Performing Arts from 1996 to 2000.