Tune Time : Music Schools for Kids Surge in Popularity

These are the rules in Sharon Shaheed’s music class: No breast-feeding or diaper changing allowed.

There was no need to enforce them on a recent Thursday. The students were having so much fun singing and clapping and dancing and playing with musical instruments, they were too preoccupied to care about anything else.

These days, Shaheed, who runs music schools in Sherman Oaks and Pasadena for kids 19 months old and up, is feeling pretty good about her own timing. Hers is one of hundreds of early-childhood music education programs in Southern California and across the country growing dramatically in the wake of research showing that musical training enhances children’s brain development and academic skills.

“This is now a heavy-duty market,” said Marienne Uszler, editor of Piano & Keyboard magazine and co-author of a book advising parents how to guide their children’s musical education. “There is definitely a lot of action in that area--and a lot of competition.”

The entry level for music courses has been dropping “because parents have become--I don’t want to use the word pushy--but everyone thinks they’ve got a young Mozart in the family and it’s too late if they only discover it at age 6 or 7,” said Azim Mayadas, managing director of the National Guild of Community Schools of the Arts, a nonprofit group based in New Jersey that accredits private music schools.

Nobody keeps track of how many of these programs exist, but evidence abounds that music education for tots has come of age.

Take Shaheed’s Piano Play Music School. A year ago, the school had 175 students. The number more than doubled to 450 after a second location opened in Pasadena. The 2-to-5 age group, once a sliver of her business, now accounts for nearly two-thirds of the students.

Lynn Kleiner’s Music Rhapsody program in Manhattan Beach teaches 800 children a week at her three South Bay locations and at preschools and elementary schools.

“We’ve seen tremendous growth in the last three years in our babies through age 5,” said Kleiner, whose school teaches infants to eighth-graders with a European method developed by composer Carl Orff. “We used to have one baby class and one toddler class. Now we have 16 classes from baby to age 2.”

Greensboro, N.C.-based Kindermusik International recently teamed up with Gymboree to offer music classes at the popular kids’ play program’s locations. Kindermusik, which has 90 teachers in Southern California who focus on children 18 months through age 7, saw revenues increase 42% last year to $5 million.

Interest in the Suzuki method, best known for teaching violin to kids as young as 2, “has mushroomed in the last few years,” said Cheryl Scheidemantle, president of the 350-member Suzuki Music Assn. of California and its Los Angeles board. “Any time a teacher gets trained to teach, their studio fills up really fast.”

Much of the increased interest is coming from parents, like Martin Rock, who are willing to pay $12 to $20 or more per class in hopes that their children will reap extra benefits from music training.

Rock, a 46-year-old paralegal, signed 3-year-old Matthew up for Shaheed’s “Little Fingers” class after reading reports in Time, Newsweek and parenting magazines about research findings on the benefits of early-childhood music training. UC Irvine, for example, found that 3- and 4-year-olds who received piano lessons scored 34% higher in spatial reasoning--critical for math and engineering--than did children who took computer or singing lessons.

“What I’ve gotten from all of it is [the idea] that it’s good for your kid to be introduced to music as young as possible,” said Rock. “I’m just trying to expose him to something good.”

Some parents don’t even wait till their children are born to begin their music education, stimulating them in utero with Brahms and Beethoven. Sister Lorna Zemke was ahead of the curve, teaching prenatal music classes in Manitowoc, Wis., for 12 years.

“I used to have to go out and lasso the women,” said Zemke, who is in demand as a speaker at conferences for medical providers, psychologists and music educators. “Now we have a waiting list all the time.”

Varying in approach and quality, early-childhood music programs are offered by for-profit music schools, such as Shaheed’s and Kleiner’s, by independent teachers who visit preschools and schools, through nonprofit community arts schools such as the Colburn School of Performing Arts near USC, and through some college music departments.

As parent interest in music training for the very young surges, competition between the independent programs and chains is stiffening. A Kindermusik program, for example, recently opened at the Gymboree across the street from Shaheed’s school in Sherman Oaks.

Independent schools such as Piano Play can have a tough time competing with the better-known programs. That’s because college and university music departments don’t teach business.

“I was clueless,” admits Shaheed, who has a master’s degree in music performance and pedagogy from Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond, La.

“I didn’t have a plan,” she said. “I just went from month to month. I didn’t have a budget. I was trying to do everything myself--run a school, teach and run a business. And I was going crazy.”

This year she hired a part-time marketing director, who’s shopping the program around to schools. The business brought in more than $100,000 last year--a lot better than the $3,000 she grossed in 1986, when she took over a defunct Yamaha school.

“We’re not where we want to be yet,” Shaheed said, “but we’re on the right track.”