They’ve Been Instrumental in Making Classical Music Sing

Hospital hallways resonated with the sounds of belching trombones, chattering castanets and scratchy violins the other day, as a squad of resolutely hospitable San Gabriel Valley women passed out musical instruments at County-USC Medical Center like hors d’oeuvres at a party.

Have a cello. Try the cymbals. The snare drum is delectable.

For children in the huge hospital’s AIDS, psychiatric and pediatrics medicine sections--some of them dragging 6-foot-tall “IV poles” that continuously fed fluids into veins of their arms, the reply was, “Don’t mind if I do.”

They sawed notes out of a cello, banged the snare, crashed cymbals, traced the brassy spiral of a French horn and--in one case--blew mightily into a trumpet--producing absolutely nothing.

This is how volunteers from the Pasadena Junior Philharmonic Committee educate children to the tangible realities of music.

“We want to give them a hands-on experience,” says Linda Seiter, president of the committee, which has been doing this sort of thing throughout the region for 22 years. “We try to give them an introduction to what a symphony type of orchestra is all about.”

On this rainy afternoon, the young patients felt the heft of the wind instruments and the silvery smoothness of their keys and valves. They listened to the hollowness of the cello’s wooden shell and felt the gritty horsehair of its bow. They touched the wiry snares of the drum and tapped out rhythms on its surface.

Uriel Ramirez, a 4-year-old pediatrics ward patient, had his eye on the trumpet from the moment the ladies arrived, their arms overflowing with violin cases, drums and plastic bags full of wind instruments.

When someone finally placed the gleaming instrument into Uriel’s hands, he pushed his vinyl intravenous tube aside and inserted the mouthpiece as if he were drinking from a soda bottle. He blew. Blew again. Then he blew harder. But not a peep came from the trumpet.

“Nothing’s coming out,” he said.”

Boy meets instrument and begins to understand the challenges of coaxing beautiful sounds out of a complex creation of brass tubing.

For most of the children at the hospital, glimpses of orchestras or bands on television are about as close as they ever get to instruments.

“Budget cuts are killing school music programs,” Seiter says. “This may be the only opportunity they ever have to hold an instrument.”

Mostly, the volunteers do their thing in San Gabriel Valley public schools. The committee, which has about 100 members, has conducted programs for 65,000 third-graders since 1971.

They introduce youngsters from Pasadena, South Pasadena, Sierra Madre, San Marino, San Gabriel and La Canada Flintridge to their van full of instruments, then put on a concert at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium. About 6,000 schoolchildren--those same third-graders who, by then, are fourth-graders--hear members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic play classical pieces and talk about their instruments.

The program has been a boon to the San Gabriel Valley schools, elementary school principals say.

“The youngsters are exposed to something other than rock or rap,” says Isaac Hammond, principal of Longfellow School in Pasadena. “In this day and age, they usually just see the guitar or the sax. It’s really exciting to see how engrossed they can be with classical music.”

After a visit from the volunteers’ Music Mobile, many of Longfellow’s third-graders line up eagerly for instrumental music studies.

“They want to learn the violin or the flute or the clarinet,” Hammond says.

The committee won an award from the American Symphony Orchestra League in 1989 as one of the six best educational programs in the country.

Distributing instruments to school children is just one of the committee’s activities. Volunteers also raise money for instrumental music scholarships and for community music programs.

They also sponsor the annual Pasadena Showcase House of Design, in which a house is refurbished and remodeled by interior and landscape designers. Most of the proceeds go to the Los Angeles Philharmonic Assn.

Oddly, the volunteers are, themselves, not musicians, but they have developed a breezy, informative presentation. They play tapes of instrumental solos and recount interesting things about the instruments. For example, some people call the clarinet a “licorice stick,” and the tambourine was invented 2,000 years ago.

The children learn that there are four “families” in the orchestra: strings, brass, woodwinds and percussion. The families work together to perform such compositions as the “William Tell Overture,” the theme for the “Lone Ranger.”

“Radio was the thing for my generation,” said volunteer Rosemary Choate, as the Rossini overture galloped out of a portable tape recorder. “People heard this music and imagined horseback riders.

“Is the cello here today?” asked one boy in the psychiatric section.

Choate held up a child-size violin, a regular-size violin, a viola and, yes, a cello. All wooden, all stringed, all with the distinctive tucked-at-the-waist shape--”like twins,” she said.

Volunteer Barbara Gianpaulo blew into a trombone, letting the slide out so the pitch deepened.

“The bigger the instrument, the deeper the tone,” Choate explained.

They passed around a French horn, with its big bell and tightly coiled tube. If you could uncoil it, Gianpaulo said, the instrument would be 16 feet long.

On cue, volunteer Karen Stracka pulled out a plastic tube, which stretched 16 feet across the room. Gianpaulo held one end with a funnel and Stracka blew hard on the other, producing a faint, strangled sound.

“Did you hear it?” Gianpaulo asked.

“Yeah, I heard it,” replied Bradford Lord, 15, a pediatrics patient. “She was turning red.”

For some, the women seemed almost overwhelming in their resourcefulness.

“What would be your favorite instrument?” Choate asked a teen-age girl, who had watched with disbelief the assortment of instruments circulating through the room.

“The piano,” she answered.

Choate headed back to the front of the room.

“No!” the girl shouted. “Please! Don’t pull one out.”

The least that can come out of all of this is a deeper understanding of music and its sources, the volunteers say. At best, some of the children will discover their destinies here, finding themselves so inspired by the feel of a trumpet or a violin that they will learn how to play it.

Of all the children who saw the committee’s musical presentation, none were as responsive as those in the psychiatric section. They tapped out rhythms on the snare drum, coaxed deep, groaning notes out of the cello and giggled appreciatively at the humor of Gianpaulo and Choate.

“Castanets,” said Gianpaulo, pulling some out of a bag and setting them in motion and making a face. “Sounds like teeth shaking on a cold day.”

Finally, the women passed out all of the stringed instruments and invited a 12-year-old named Richard to the front of the room. Choate handed him a baton and told him he would be the conductor.

Richard raised his baton, stood motionless for a moment, then lowered the stick decisively, and the other children began playing. He waved the stick in wide, sweeping strokes. The dissonant racket of the instruments was quickly drowned out by the children’s laughter.