Music Education

NEW DELHI - When Gavin Martin and his family moved here from southern India in the early '70s, the country's capital city offered the gifted young pianist exactly one option for continuing his music education: the Delhi School of Music. It was the only place in town - perhaps in the whole of northern India - that taught Western classical music with any degree of competence. Even so, life wasn't easy for the serious student born in a country where the sitar is king. "Growing up in India playing the piano was kind of like [being]

NEW DELHI - When Gavin Martin and his family moved here from southern India in the early '70s, the country's capital city offered the gifted young pianist exactly one option for continuing his music education: the Delhi School of Music. It was the only place in town - perhaps in the whole of northern India - that taught Western classical music with any degree of competence. Even so, life wasn't easy for the serious student born in a country where the sitar is king. "Growing up in India playing the piano was kind of like [being]

Musically, Venezuela is like no other place on Earth. Along with baseball and beauty pageants, classical music is one of the country's greatest passions. In the capital, Caracas, superstar Venezuelan conductor Gustavo Dudamel is mobbed wherever he goes. Classical music teeny-boppers run up to him for autographs when he walks off the podium at concerts. The state-run music education program, which is known as El Sistema and from which Dudamel emerged, is the most extensive, admired and increasingly imitated in the world.

Before conducting the Colburn Orchestra at Walt Disney Concert Hall on Sunday night, across the street from the newly renamed Colburn Way (one block of 2nd Street), the renowned British conductor Neville Marriner was handed the Richard D. Colburn Award in a small ceremony on stage. Marriner was the first music director of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, which Richard D. Colburn, Los Angeles' legendary music benefactor, helped bankroll. The concert was presented by the Colburn School in honor of the centenary of its founder, who died at 92 in 2004.

Every Friday, the young women gather at the blind man's home in a fading district of a sleepy city once famous for its poets and wine. They unpack vessels of wood, string and stretched hides. They cradle them in their arms. And as the afternoon wears on, they fill the alleyways with song. My Bahar, my daughter, wake up! Put on a sweet smile and stir emotions. The song is an old one, a bittersweet melody of grief and hope about a girl, Bahar, whose name is synonymous in Persian with the season of spring.

"Get your lips loose," said Andrew Werderitsch to the 13 students. "Don't worry about the spit. Get your lips as big and juicy as they can be." No, this isn't a class on advanced smooching. It's a didgeridoo workshop, the first in a planned series open to players of the Australian instrument. This one was held at the Circle, a Marina del Rey area residence that doubles as a creative space.

We could not agree more with your Nov. 10 editorial "Keep Music in Mind." The American Assn. of University Women, Orange Branch, has for the past 22 years supported music education in Orange, Tustin and Santa Ana public schools by providing musical instruments at nominal rental cost to children who would otherwise be unable to participate in school music programs. The need is great, as are the rewards for providing an opportunity for eager young students. The decline in California school-based music and band programs has been a source of concern.

Roger Rabbit helps sell children on classical music in "Disney's Young People's Guide to Music: The Greatest Band in the Land" on the Disney cable channel at 7:30 tonight. It's the first of two specials aimed at music appreciation. The second, "A Tune for Toon," will air in the spring. The sprightly half-hour has a simple formula: On stage is the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, a slew of instruments and personable young conductor Rachel Worby of the Wheeling West Virginia Symphony Orchestra.

Music teachers Diane Simons and Jane Hardester have seen a generation of children who don't know how to sing. They don't even know songs like "Hot Cross Buns." And the veteran musicians are concerned that this is just the beginning.

It's appropriate that when Tricia Tunstall first entered the world of Gustavo Dudamel, her guide was the daughter of the musician Dudamel regards as one of his spiritual mentors: Leonard Bernstein. In winter 2008, Jamie Bernstein, a writer and broadcaster, went to hear Dudamel conduct the Israel Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall in a program that included her father's Concerto for Orchestra ("Jubilee Games"). She brought along her friend Tunstall, a New York musician, music educator and author of the just published book "Changing Lives: Gustavo Dudamel, El Sistema, and the Transformative Power of Music.

Musically, Venezuela is like no other place on Earth. Along with baseball and beauty pageants, classical music is one of the country's greatest passions. In the capital, Caracas, superstar Venezuelan conductor Gustavo Dudamel is mobbed wherever he goes. Classical music teeny-boppers run up to him for autographs when he walks off the podium at concerts. The state-run music education program, which is known as El Sistema and from which Dudamel emerged, is the most extensive, admired and increasingly imitated in the world.

It's appropriate that when Tricia Tunstall first entered the world of Gustavo Dudamel, her guide was the daughter of the musician Dudamel regards as one of his spiritual mentors: Leonard Bernstein. In winter 2008, Jamie Bernstein, a writer and broadcaster, went to hear Dudamel conduct the Israel Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall in a program that included her father's Concerto for Orchestra ("Jubilee Games"). She brought along her friend Tunstall, a New York musician, music educator and author of the just published book "Changing Lives: Gustavo Dudamel, El Sistema, and the Transformative Power of Music.

Book collectors with fat wallets, take note: A first edition of the rare John James Audubon book "The Birds of America" will be auctioned by Christie's in New York on Jan. 20. When another copy of "The Birds of America" sold for $11.5 million in 2010, it became the world's most expensive book. "The Birds of America" was published in the early 1800s as a serial, with subscribers getting a handful of plates at a time. It was printed on oversized pages, more than 3 feet tall and 2 feet wide; the original black-and-white engravings were hand-colored.

In recent years, both with its money and its reputation, the Los Angeles Philharmonic has endorsed the principles of Venezuela's El Sistema national music training program. The Phil set up a Los Angeles youth orchestra partially modeled on El Sistema, and hired the program's star graduate, Gustavo Dudamel, to be the orchestra's music director. Now the L.A. Phil is following El Sistema's lead again. On Tuesday, the orchestra announced that it is partnering with Bard College in upstate New York and the Longy School of Music in Cambridge, Mass., to launch a joint musical education initiative that will aim to combine first-rate musical instruction with the broader goal of serving underserved community.

In April 1975, Vu Tien Kinh arrived at UCLA from battle-torn Vietnam. The orphaned 3-month-old was dehydrated, malnourished and plagued by diarrhea, eye infections and a contagious skin rash. On Wednesday, Vu returned to thank the doctor who had restored his health. Barry Halpern was an intern resident 35 years ago when UCLA Medical Center admitted 20 of 219 orphans who were airlifted out of Vu's orphanage in Saigon just days before the city fell to the North Vietnamese army, ending the Vietnam War. Halpern oversaw the baby's treatment, administering antibiotics and other medicines.

Sir John Dankworth, the British jazz composer, saxophonist and bandleader and husband of jazz singer Dame Cleo Laine, has died. He was 82. Dankworth died Saturday at a London hospital after a long illness, the Associated Press reported. Laine announced Dankworth's death before the finale of an anniversary concert at the Stables, the theater they founded together. Monica Ferguson, the theater's chief executive, said Sunday that Laine had told the artists before the concert, " 'I'll go on and I'll have a lump in my throat, and I might crack.

The plight of music in the schools is not unlike the old saw about the weather--everyone talks about it, but no one does anything about it. Last January, however, a group of educators, parents and members of the local music community organized to lobby the San Diego Unified School District to increase its support of music education within the district.

They don't even know the alphabet yet. Their fingers are too small to play more than three notes consecutively, and six or seven years will pass before their feet can touch the piano pedals. But the 2- and 3-year-olds taking piano lessons at Patrick Music School in Fullerton are not working on technique.

Pop & Jazz Previews by August Brown (A.B.) and Reed Johnson (R.J.) Year Long Disaster With an album title like "Black Magic: All Mysteries Revealed" you'd expect this power trio to sound like Celtic Frost meets Procol Harum. But instead they deliver druggy, pummeling scuzz rock of the highest order (A.B.) Spaceland, 1717 Silver Lake Blvd., L.A. 8 p.m. Mon. Free. www.clubspaceland.com Nick Jonas & the Administration Enlisting a good swath of Prince's backing band might have been the best move the young Jonas could have made for his second -- and decidedly more adult -- solo venture.

Every Friday, the young women gather at the blind man's home in a fading district of a sleepy city once famous for its poets and wine. They unpack vessels of wood, string and stretched hides. They cradle them in their arms. And as the afternoon wears on, they fill the alleyways with song. My Bahar, my daughter, wake up! Put on a sweet smile and stir emotions. The song is an old one, a bittersweet melody of grief and hope about a girl, Bahar, whose name is synonymous in Persian with the season of spring.