‘If you don’t teach kids how to be an audience now, there won’t be any in 20 years.’

When is music like baseball?

When it’s Maurice Ravel’s “Bolero,” and it’s being used to introduce elementary school children to the instruments of the symphony orchestra.

“Ravel heard a Spanish dance tune that he liked a lot and thought he’d give all the instruments a chance to get up to bat, to be a soloist,” Frances Steiner said Friday morning from the stage of the Carson Community Center, looking out at a sea of fourth- and fifth-graders seated in the enormous room.

“Some of these soloists are like players in the dugout,” the conductor of the Carson-Dominguez Hills Symphony Orchestra went on to say. “They all play eventually, but some have to wait a long time.”

In the case of “Bolero,” the first batter is the snare drum, which sets the rhythmic piece in motion. One by one, the flutes, clarinets, bassoons, saxophones and other instruments take up the melody.

This is one way to get the attention of a young audience, and Steiner has been doing it for 14 years in an annual youth concert--actually, three programs in a single morning that draw up to 3,000 children from the Los Angeles Unified School District’s 14 elementary schools in Carson.

“They have so little exposure to fine arts and music and this is one small thing I can do about it,” said Steiner, who also is a music professor at Cal State Dominguez Hills. The university and the city of Carson jointly sponsor the concerts.

Steiner said she aims the hourlong programs at fourth- and fifth-graders because they are at the age when they have opportunities to begin learning to play instruments.

“For most of the kids, these concerts are a positive, happy experience,” she said. “For one or two, they might inspire an interest in music.”

She told of a student who plays string bass at the university who discovered the instrument at a Carson youth concert.

“This is an important part of the cultural program in our schools,” said Georgia Otto, music adviser to the school district’s Region A, which includes Carson. She said the youngsters prepare for the concert by learning in their classrooms about the music that will be played.

From Steiner’s perspective as a symphony conductor, the program has a practical as well as aesthetic purpose. “If you don’t teach kids to be an audience now,” she said, “there won’t be any in 20 years.”

She said she deliberately chooses music that will appeal to young people, show off the orchestra or provide opportunities for narrated stories--such as “Peter and the Wolf.”

“The kids are a pretty good audience, but there are a few noisy ones,” said Steiner.

Story tellers, mimes or dancers are apt to turn up in a concert to give children something other than the orchestra to watch.

Indeed, on Friday, it was the lively college Dance Ensemble performing a set of dances from Aaron Copland’s “Rodeo” that brought the most comments.

The men in cowboy hats and kerchiefs and the women in full, swirling skirts danced out into the audience, thrust their arms toward the children and all but stepped on the toes of the kids in the front row as they worked in a small space between the musicians and the audience.

Youngsters laughed, clapped and whistled at the rousing finale, as the men raised one of the women on their shoulders.

“I liked it when they picked up that girl,” said Candice Davenport, 9, who goes to Ambler Avenue School.

Thomas Redmon, 10, another Ambler student, said he liked the sound of the clarinet best of all the instruments. “The orchestra played very good music,” he said.

The same music, together with some other selections, will be played by the orchestra in a free concert today at 3 p.m. at the community center.

“If you liked this,” Steiner told the departing children, “come back Sunday and bring your family.”