Celebrating Years of ‘Musical Encounter’ : Music: Sylvia Kunin has produced the series for 21 years. Now, for her 80th birthday, she’ll be honored on the show Sunday on KCET.

Calling Sylvia Kunin an advocate for music is like calling a new grand piano a handsome piece of furniture: It doesn’t begin to describe the resonance and the possibilities.

In 40 years as a mentor to young musicians, competition founder, education activist and television producer, Kunin, 80, still constantly updates her priorities. “I’ll never retire--I keep finding more things that have to be done,” she says.

Greeting a visitor to the Westwood apartment she shares with her husband of six decades, Al Eben, Kunin shows written-out blueprints for projects bringing young people to music--and vice versa. Beginning next month, for example, she will embark on a “low-cost and simple” program of playing classical music recordings in elementary schools as a first step in exposing young people to the joys of listening.

This newest project follows Kunin’s preoccupation of the last 21 years, the educational television series “Musical Encounter,” a program with a concept: Put young and accomplished musical talents in the same room with people their own age, and let them interact.

Or, as she describes it, “Play a little music, but don’t make a big deal out of it.”

As of Jan. 1, Kunin says, “We will have 40 ‘Musical Encounter’ shows in release” for distribution to schools, all but four of which already have been broadcast.

These are not high-tech, glamorous concerts in which performers pose and play and audiences watch and squirm. Whether in “The Cello Show,” “The American Indian Show,” “The Violin Show” or “The Country Music Show,” informality reigns, young people ask questions, young musicians talk about their instruments and their lives, and the reality of music is a strong presence.

“Music vibrates,” Kunin says, “which makes it immediately more attractive to kids than looking at pictures. Looking comes later.”

The energetic activist, a native of Detroit who came to Los Angeles at age 3, did not start out to be a media producer. For years, she was a pianist.

Her budding career took her from Los Angeles to Minneapolis, to New York, and finally to Switzerland, where she spent three years, 1936-38, as a protegee of Artur Schnabel. The strains and stresses of maintaining the career did not suit her, and she abandoned public performance.

In the early 1950s, back in Los Angeles, she began to combine impresarioship with education, first as a producer of talent shows backed by chamber orchestras, later with the two organizations she founded, Young Musicians Foundation and the Debut Orchestra. In those years, and on many different local television stations, she hosted classical-music competitions, which brought her in touch with two generations of American music makers: Misha Dichter, Laurence Lesser, Horacio Gutierrez, Lawrence Foster and Michael Tilson Thomas, among others.

In 1966, she and her husband retired to Hawaii.

She produced her first “Musical Encounter” in Honolulu in 1972, with an old friend, conductor Robert La Marchina, and continued to add to that series until 1975, when the couple returned to Los Angeles.

One subject Kunin adamantly did not want to make a show about was her 80th birthday, which happened July 14.

“My buddy, Michael Tenzer”--an arts patron who first worked with Kunin in the glory days of Young Musicians Foundation, 20 and more years ago--”wanted to stage a ‘tribute’ to me. I completely refused. No parties! I said.”

But Patricia Marshall, station manager at KLCS-TV (the television outlet for the Los Angeles Unified School District), which has made a number of “Musical Encounters” during the years, prevailed upon her to make a show noting the birthday, and the resulting 40-minute show (taped in May), hosted by Huell Howser and featuring many old friends of Kunin’s, plus two young musicians--10-year-old pianist Jun Asai, and 13-year-old violinist Tamaki Kawakubo--will be shown Sunday at 6:50 p.m. on KCET-TV Channel 28.