Sounds of Another Language

I have a friend named Nicole who is 12 years old and loves music. She calls it “another language.”

Nicole plays clarinet in the band of the middle school she attends and takes private lessons on the guitar down the street where she lives.

Every once in a while I watch her practice and see how the music she creates carries her onto a plane where magic things dwell. She absorbs the melody and it absorbs her.

“When I play,” she said to me the other day, “it’s like part of me is something special.”

I’ve never heard a better reason for kids to learn music in school. Something special in us is what we all seek.

Although possessed with the soul of a poet, Nicole wasn’t born playing Italian operas. It was in school where she developed a love of music, and it’s in school where the love grows. Her mind was opened to music by a teacher, and her heart let the sounds soar in.

Which brings me to a current situation in the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District, where a budget crisis is threatening “nonessential” programs.

The sounds of that other language Nicole was talking about might be in jeopardy in those cities by the sea. Elementary school children are in danger of never hearing the mysteries the sweet language whispers.

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A colleague, Erica Zeitlin, who also despairs at the possibility of fading music, filled me in. She made me aware of the budget crunch that has put music on a hit list of programs to be possibly sacrificed.

The state doesn’t mandate the teaching of music and that makes it expendable. Next Thursday, when the local school board meets, we’ll all see just how expendable it is.

The situation abounds with irony. Not only is this district one that has traditionally celebrated music, but next week there is proof of just how effective its teachings have been.

Santa Monica High’s symphony orchestra will perform at Chicago’s prestigious Midwest Clinic music convention, the first time a California public school has been invited in 50 years. Given the expendability of music programs, even the orchestra’s continued existence is in question.

Fortunately, neither Santa Monica nor Malibu is a sleepy little village that accepts as gospel any tune that drifts down from high places. Activists have banded together to fight cuts in the music program, among them Zina Josephs, a musician and former L.A. music teacher who warns, “We’ve been polite and nice so far, but . . . “

As chairwoman of the district’s advisory committee on fine arts, Josephs promises a fight ahead to prevent a domino effect beginning on the elementary school level that could wipe out music through high school. She finds that unacceptable.

“If you learn football,” she says, “you’re not going to play football all your life. But if you learn music, it’s something you can play and/or enjoy until the end.”

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“Music is perceived as frivolous,” says Donna Stanton, who created a Web site to save the district’s elementary music program. “The feeling is that your kid won’t be a blithering idiot if he doesn’t play an instrument but he will be if he can’t read.”

However, she and others point out, studies have revealed that music goes hand in hand with literacy. Kids with music in their lives learn things faster than those who lack it.

“Some children can be reached through the arts and no other way,” says Patricia Henderson, the district’s coordinator for fine arts. “Art is essential to education.”

Even so, has there ever been a time when art wasn’t on the chopping block in California’s schools? Whenever there’s a budget crisis, it’s the first to go.

“Why,” asks activist Peter Davison, “is it always classes and teachers that are sacrificed? Why not administrators and clerks? They probably make more money than teachers anyhow.”

District Supt. Neil Schmidt, acknowledging the need to trim $2.5 million off next year’s budget, regards as a tragedy the possibility that several programs might be headed for the trash heap. One of the reasons he accepted the post here, he says, is because of the district’s music program. He helped strengthen it and takes personal pride in it.

That said, one activist worries about Schmidt’s motives because she heard him say once that he couldn’t carry a tune.

I can’t either, but this I know: Music has brought peace and awareness to the heart of a girl named Nicole, and it came from a program in school. I wouldn’t want others to be deprived of that same opportunity. The language of words might touch the brain, but the language of music touches the soul. It makes us all feel special.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Sundays and Wednesdays. He can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com.