Musical Instruments

When the curtain parted, 32 youthful musicians appeared on the crowded stage, each clutching a small accordion to his or her chest. Never mind that when the band of fourth-graders began playing, some had forgotten to unclip the leather strap that releases the instrument's bellows. The simple tunes, learned during a 10-week program at four Los Angeles public schools, were music to their parents' ears.

Timpanist Joseph Pereira was in the kitchen, preparing to marinate short ribs in French wine, when he made an important discovery: That nice plastic cork at the top of the wine bottle had a terrific consistency. It wasn't long before Pereira, who has long customized his instruments, was experimenting with the plastic cork inside the end of his drum mallets. "I cut the top part off and wrapped it for a new stick, which I use every week," says the musician and composer. "It has a really warm tone to it. " His compositions also come from unlikely sources.

The Swing King was still a young man when he retired in 1954. On Thursday, legendary band leader Artie Shaw, now 93, retired two of his beloved clarinets, giving them to the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. During a ceremony in Westlake ViIlage near his home, the wheelchair-bound Shaw was presented with the James Smithson Bicentennial Medal for his contributions to music.

The public doesn't warm to every instrument it hears. Every winter audiences are enchanted by the celesta, a kind of keyboard glockenspiel, because Tchaikovsky made its sweet sound famous in "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy" from "Nutcracker. " The jury is out on the siren. Edgard Varèse shocked listeners in 1930 when they heard its high-pitched wailings in his all-percussion "Ionization. " The siren will get another hearing when percussionist Steven Schick joins 47 other percussionists in a performance of John Luther Adams' outdoor piece, "Inuksuit," at the Ojai Music Festival in June.

"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.

Whether it's a trumpet fanfare, a drum roll or even a rim shot, musical instruments have played an important role in ancient and modern cultures. The organ that today accompanies both weddings and baseball games is part of a long tradition of using music to enhance ceremonies and rituals, to inspire victories, communicate messages and even promote healing.

The Los Angeles Unified School District is seeking donations of used band and orchestra instruments that secondary school musicians can use for free. Whether the instrument is a moldy oldie or nearly new, repair technicians will restore it to playing condition for use by student musicians, said John Rosell, district supervisor for musical instrument repair.

Despite protests from street musicians, the Laguna Beach City Council on Tuesday night revised its noise ordinance to include the playing of musical instruments. The ordinance allows police officers to cite street musicians for disturbing "any reasonable person of normal sensitiveness" with loud music. Laguna Beach Police Chief Neil Purcell emphasized that police officers would carry recording devices and would warn musicians about complaints before issuing a citation.

When Adolphe Sax, perhaps the most prolific instrument maker who ever lived, created the saxophone and dozens of other inventions in France in the mid-19th Century, he was vilified by jealous competitors and conservative musicians with an extraordinary fury. Band members refused to play his unconventional instruments, he was maligned in the press, a suspicious fire damaged his factory, he was even physically attacked.

Can you tell when the scary parts of a movie are coming by listening to the music? It usually gets deep and menacing and warns you that something bad is about to happen. Music is so much more than notes on a page. It is a way for composers to tell a story. One way music can tell a story is through melody. Melody is made from musical notes that go up, down and skip around on a musical scale, forming a tune that can get stuck in your head long after you've heard it.

The score for Oscar Bettison's chamber concerto "Livre des Sauvages" ("The Book of Savages") should come with an IKEA-like warning: Some Assembly Required. The half-hour work, which will be given its premiere Tuesday at Walt Disney Concert Hall as part of the Los Angeles Philharmonic's Green Umbrella new music series, employs a toy piano, hotel desk bells, melodicas (with foot pumps), tuned cowbells, tuning forks, conch shells and a "wrenchophone. " The concert, to be conducted by Jeffrey Milarsky, also will feature works by Stockhausen and Cage.

Frank Javorsek Bluegrass player co-owned music store Frank Javorsek, 70, a bluegrass musician who co-owned the now-closed Blue Ridge Pickin' Parlor music shop in the San Fernando Valley and hosted a bluegrass radio show on KCSN-FM, died March 22 of a heart attack while giving a mandolin lesson in Encino, said his wife, Tammy. Javorsek, a Palmdale resident who played banjo, fiddle, mandolin and guitar, was a well-known bluegrass instructor in the Los Angeles area and had been teaching for some time at the California Traditional Music Society's Center for Folk Music in Encino.

It's a foggy morning in late September at the Internet radio collective known as Dublab, and Mark "Frosty" McNeill and Alejandro Cohen are diligently prepping for the Monday Music Meeting, a show featuring the staff's five favorite new songs. Located above the Little Temple bar in East Hollywood at the corner of Virgil Avenue and Santa Monica Boulevard, the Dublab office is a microcosm of the group's obsessions and its effect upon the experimental music life of L.A.; the scruffy vintage concert posters plastering the walls are a backdrop for the tangled cords, speakers and various musical instruments everywhere in the office space.

Bill Skiles, the wacky half of the Skiles and Henderson comedy duo, who entertained audiences for five decades with his sound effects, mimicry and improvised musical instruments, died Monday at his home in St. Cloud, Fla. He was 79. The cause was kidney cancer, said his wife, Arlene. Skiles and his partner, Pete Henderson, began their collaboration in Orange County, where they grew up. Starting as an act at Disneyland in the late 1950s, they worked their way up to Las Vegas showrooms, national television and touring as the opening act for the Carpenters and the New Christy Minstrels.

The musical instruments kids play in school bands and orchestras are traveling denizens of bacteria and fungi, say the authors of a new study. Music education is great for kids, they note, but please, please wash the instruments! Researchers at Oklahoma State University bravely examined 13 instruments that belonged to a high school band. Six of the instruments had been played the previous week and seven hadn't been played in a month. Swabs were taken of 117 different sites on the instruments, including the mouthpieces, internal chambers and even the carrying cases.

A federal judge has blocked portions of a Los Angeles ordinance designed to regulate performers and vendors along the Venice Beach boardwalk. U.S. District Judge Dean D. Pregerson issued the preliminary injunction last week, effectively stating that the city's permitting and lottery system for boardwalk performers and sellers violates the 1st Amendment. The ruling involved a 2008 ordinance that required performers and vendors to seek permits to sing, dance and sell items along the boardwalk through a lottery system held between Memorial Day and Nov. 1. In blocking the ordinance, Pregerson noted that the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals held that a similar permitting system in Seattle was unconstitutionally broad and only marginally regulated vendors, which the appeals court said could be achieved through "less intrusive means.

Frederick Selch, 72, an advertising executive and magazine publisher who collected hundreds of antique musical instruments, died Aug. 22 of cancer at his home in New York City. Selch began collecting almost 50 years ago and owned more than 300 instruments by 1977. That same year, he founded the Federal Music Society, an organization dedicated to performing music from the Colonial-Federal period. The group's 26 players used instruments in Selch's collection to perform in more than 70 concerts.

As symbolically devastating as the recent flooding in Nashville was to the home of the historic Grand Ole Opry House, the toll on another building little known outside the city's music community may well have a broader, more lasting impact. That building is Soundcheck Nashville, a "cartage" facility, where roughly 1,000 musicians, including country stars such as Taylor Swift, Brad Paisley, Keith Urban and Vince Gill, as well as hundreds of the world's most accomplished studio musicians, store their instruments and equipment.

Not long before Robert Ulrich stepped down from his long-held job as CEO of Target Stores upon reaching the company's mandatory retirement age of 65, he was on a trip through Europe indulging one of his extracurricular passions as a museum junkie. On the trip was his friend and fellow African art aficionado Marc Felix, who, over beer in the Grand Sablon square in Brussels, asked Ulrich what he had most enjoyed during their day of museum hopping. "I said this was fun, and that was fun, but that musical instrument museum -- I still think that was so cool!"