MUSIC CLASSES CALLED ESSENTIAL : PUSHING FOR AN EDUCATED AUDIENCE

With some 17 months left until the projected opening of the Orange County Performing Arts Center, most work and attention is focused on getting the Center built and booked.

But the big question in the local arts community is how Center officials will be able to fill those seats in the years to come.

As one local music educator put it, “It’s great that they’ve got millions of dollars to build this wonderful new music center, but they’d better plan to buy themselves an audience for it, too.”

Asked Thursday about the long-term importance of arts education to performing arts organiza-tions, the Center’s new executive director, Thomas Kendrick, who is currently director of operations at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., said: “It’s absolutely critical. . . . that we have educational programs to develop future audiences. We don’t want this Center just to be a museum piece.”

Although a fall 1984 marketing survey--financed by the Center, the Orange County Philharmonic Society and Opera Pacific--paints an optimistic picture of audience potential in Orange County, the study bypassed the relationship between music education in public schools and future audiences for performing arts activities.

“That was not examined specifically,” said Center General Manager Arline Chambers, “but the survey did deal with individuals who had a history of attendance (at cultural events). So that provides us with some sense of continuity.”

Orange County arts advocates and music educators interviewed recently agreed that the long-term success or failure of the Center--as well as the future of all performing arts groups in the county--rests on the cultivation of arts appreciation in the youth of Orange County.

Where the topic becomes controversial, however, is in the widely differing opinions on the present quality of music education in the county’s public schools and to what degree local arts organizations should be concerned about it.

On one side is Marie Clement, arts coordinator for the county Department of Education, who oversees music instruction provided to Orange County elementary, junior high and high school students.

“I think we can look toward an audience that will have an appreciation of the new music center,” Clement said. “We are very blessed in Orange County to have philanthropic organizations providing free programs to our students. We reached 8,000 students with live symphony concerts last year. In all, those programs reached well over 400,000 kids in this county.”

On the other side are some music educators who deal first-hand with students coming out of the public schools.

“We’re getting complete idiots up from the high schools. Most of them can’t name one composer,” said Ben Glover, director since 1965 of instrumental music at Santa Ana College (recently renamed Rancho Santiago College). “(The situation) has always been fairly poor in the 20 years I’ve been here. But since Proposition 13 hit and everybody panicked and they cut out elementary school programs, it has really gotten bad. It’s like growing a tree and cutting off the roots--now we’re really feeling it at our level. So I kind of get worked up to see all this money being poured into performing arts to bring in the big professional groups when no money is being spent on education.”

Added Alan Remington, who is a music instructor at Orange Coast College and a professional musician, “We should be able to give students at least as much music as English. The teachers in our English department complain that students who are supposed to have 12 or 13 years of (daily) English are functionally illiterate. They can neither read nor write. So just think of what we’re getting in the music department. Total (musical) illiterates. You can drop the word ‘functional.’ ”

According to Clement, Orange County elementary school students receive an average of 30 minutes of music instruction per week. This is provided by approximately 120 music teachers, employed by various districts, who travel among the county’s nearly 300 public elementary schools.

Each student also attends perhaps three or four special concerts each year that are provided by the Orange County Philharmonic Society, the Pacific Symphony, the Orange County Youth Symphony, Opera Pacific and other private groups.

Beyond the elementary school level, classes in vocal and instrumental music generally are more substantial, although most of those programs are electives. Yet most educators and arts advocates believe that a basic appreciation of music must begin before the junior high school level.

“We in performing arts organizations see a problem coming down the road,” said Michael Newton, president of the Performing Arts Council at the Los Angeles Music Center. Citing a 1984 nationwide study entitled “America and the Arts” conducted by the Louis Harris poll, Newton said, “The study shows an absolute correlation between the age a person is first exposed to the arts and what role the arts play in later life.”

But with the combination of the post-Proposition 13 budgetary blues and a pervasive “back to basics” attitude toward education from the public, arts instruction has been under siege.

Said Pacific Symphony Music Director Keith Clark, “Somewhere, people in the community who should know and care made the mistake of allowing music to be defined as a luxury item. But music is a luxury no more than Shakespeare or good literature is a luxury. It is a very important part of anyone’s upbringing--at least it should be.”

Although local arts officials and even some educators were quick to point to a statewide decrease in the quantity and quality of music instruction, state arts consultant Miguel Muto, one of two consultants in visual and performing arts for the State of California education department, said, “Each district sets its own internal priorities. The district decides whether they want to buy more math books, more chemistry books or more art books. That cannot be mandated by the state.”

The consensus of arts advocates locally is that even though private arts organizations cannot provide ongoing daily programs to remedy deficiencies in public education, they should be at the forefront of efforts to win public support for a long-term commitment to arts education.

Groups such as the Pacific Symphony and the Philharmonic Society have been trying to fill some gaps with numerous youth concerts in the schools. Said society Executive Director Erich Vollmer, “We see it as a way of providing future audiences for our own concerts.”

Added Keith Clark, “Without a real concerted effort on the part of the people with whom the responsibility rests--professional musicians, educators and parents--we are just one generation away from all of us going out of business.”

There are those, however, who see the problem as one that has always been an integral part of the arts.

Said OCC’s Alan Remington, “Throughout history, arts has been the domain of the rich. But the advent of the capitalistic system has been one of the few times in history that the public put some of their money back into the arts.”

Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra Executive Director Robert Elias took the issue one step further. “The question of educating our children to be appreciative audiences has been around for a couple of hundred years. It hasn’t just suddenly become important in the ‘70s and ‘80s,” Elias said.

“But it may be a case of the tail wagging the dog,” he added. “Maybe there are already as many people who are interested in music as there ever will be. Perhaps the percentage of people who want to enrich their lives with that kind of quality experience remains fairly constant. I’m not sure you can force people to love it nor am I sure that you can really increase the percentage of people who are open to the world of classical music. I don’t know whether public education can do much more than it has already done.”

Yet Rachel Worby, director of youth concerts for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, believes that the effect of reductions in public music education in recent years is already evident: “Recent studies are showing that among the people in my age group, which is 30s to 40s, there is a whole generation who are not attending concerts. They are not going to Avery Fisher Hall (in New York) or Dorothy Chandler Pavilion or Carnegie Hall,” Worby said.

Center General Manager Chambers, insisting that education should always be a top priority for all involved in the arts, asked, “Is there enough? There’s never enough. It will be our goal to do everything we can to participate in arts education programs in the county, in our own best interest.”