Daniel Rubin: Leading city kids to classical awareness

At Penn Wynne Elementary, everybody got to pick out an instrument in fourth grade. Ben Raper chose the trumpet.

Lower Merion paid for the rentals back then, so the boy's horn came free, as did the lessons, once a week, held in his school.

"To a little kid, it was fun," says Raper, now 21 and studying engineering at Cornell. "They got to us so young that we didn't have any preconceptions about whether the music was cool or not."

When he went off to college, his mother, Susannah Chang, thought about what had made a difference for her son. She concluded it was the orchestra.

"For kids who aren't into sports, sometimes it's hard to find an identity," she says. "Orchestra provided that."

Although Lower Merion no longer provides free monthly rentals of instruments, it spends more annually on each student - $20,253 - than any other school district in the state. Starting in fourth grade there's an hour a week of musical-instrument instruction for all who ask. One in three students takes lessons through high school.

Compare that with what happens across City Avenue. Philadelphia schools have less than half that money to spend, $9,986, the latest figures show. With cash tight, many principals must decide between funding music or art. One-third of the schools have no music.

That's a silence that Chang and a group of Lower Merion volunteers are working to fill.

For three years they've been going into Philadelphia elementary schools, turning students on to classical music with the help of a giant, friendly beast.

He's called Maestro the Lion, and he was created by the head of Lower Merion's high school orchestra program, Tom Elliott, nearly 20 years ago to engage young people and build future musicians and audiences.

Maestro's volunteer helpers have started preparing students from 11 Philadelphia elementary schools for concerts next month by the Lower Merion High School Orchestra. They've raised $6,000 to transport the 1,600 students and pay for children's books about Maestro, written by two former students at the high school.

Watching the program in action this week, I marveled at the students' engagement.

Tom Koger, the principal of Stephen Girard School, at 18th and Snyder in South Philly, used to teach music in the district. When I poked my head into the darkened library Monday morning, his fourth graders were surprising themselves by how much they knew.

Geraldine Henwood, a retired Lower Merion literacy specialist, cued up "In the Hall of the Mountain King" from the Peer Gynt Suites, the Edvard Grieg piece that the students will hear in concert next month.

Then came a jazzier version, with synth and screams, as Mickey Mouse's familiar mug appeared on the screen. The students squealed in recognition.

"So you've already heard this music," Henwood told them.

For 40 or so minutes, she used cartoons, video of Lower Merion band members, and some basic physics ("the bigger the instrument, the lower the sound") to prepare the students for concertgoing.

"What instruments do you hear?" she asked.

Violin! several answered at once.

Koger listened approvingly. He told how since partnering with Lower Merion he has found the means to hire a music teacher. "I believe it is important that we educate the whole child."

When Henwood wood described the plucking bass as "pizza-Cato" Koger shared another key to the program's success.

"She's originally from South Philadelphia." It's tribal.

The instructor talked about how people can form pictures in their head as they hear music. As she played a piece called "Morning Mood," she asked the children to raise their hands when they thought the sun had risen.

And as the strings began to swell, the hands started shooting up one after another, and in that moment one couldn't help but notice that a roomful of tiny lamps were aglow.