With Her Life on Screen, Teacher Stays Focused on Mission

Roberta Guaspari, a public school violin teacher very much in the spotlight these days, flew to Los Angeles recently to promote music education and buy some shoes. Both activities are central to her life these days.

She needed shoes for the New York City premiere of the new film that tells her life story, “Music of the Heart.” Directed by Wes Craven and starring Meryl Streep, the Miramax film, which opens today, captures a dynamic and passionate instructor clearly getting through to her East Harlem violin students. It also caught some drama, too, as Guaspari fought to restore funding to her music program by staging one of Carnegie Hall’s most unusual performances, a fund-raiser that paired her elementary school students with some of the world’s top violinists.

“The only reason that I’ve fought so hard through the years is that I love teaching, and I don’t want to stop,” Guaspari says. “The only thing that’s changed in my life now is that I’ve got 10 more things to do all the time.”

“Music of the Heart” follows Guaspari as she rebounds from a painful divorce and moves to New York with her two sons to start what’s become the hugely popular East Harlem Violin Program. More important for Guaspari, the new film beams a positive message about music education to audiences nationwide. She wants more money spent on programs and teachers--a return, she says, to the way things were 40 years ago, when she first learned to play the violin in a public school in upstate New York.

“I wouldn’t have the ability to play the violin. I never would have even thought about it without the gift of that program,” she says during a recent interview in Los Angeles. “But now it’s been stripped from our curriculum.”

She had just flown into Los Angeles after a day of teaching in the same Harlem classroom where she’s been since 1981 to attend a screening of “Music of the Heart” in Century City, where she stood and waved to the industry audience after being introduced. The next day, she was due to fly back to New York so she could get back to teaching.

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Her interviews and premiere appearances, including a recent White House screening and schmoozing with President Clinton, are what make the film’s positive message resonate with the public, she says. Still, she hesitated when Miramax Co-Chairman Harvey Weinstein asked to do a feature based on her life, and then told her that a man known for horror films would direct the project.

“I was really frightened, to be quite honest. It was like selling myself to have to put my life up on the screen. All of my friends and family said, ‘No, don’t let them do it,’ ” Guaspari says. But she is satisfied that Weinstein and Craven kept their promise to take care of her story, though it is one that presents a slightly warmer classroom atmosphere than the more disciplined learning environment favored by the real-life instructor.

“It’s easier just to have fun in class, but then no one learns anything,” Guaspari says. “The children need to know their limits, so you set boundaries and make them accountable.” She grabs an imaginary violin, leans forward in the sunny hotel lobby and lapses easily into teacher mode. “Watch me! You’ve got to put your fingers on the bow. Your pitch is not right. Fix it!” she says, and then pauses with a slight laugh.

“I know, I know. I’m a little bit threatening. That’s probably why I’m still single. I’m hard to live with. But my students and kids have come to learn to accept me for the way I am.”

In an autobiography that accompanies the movie’s release--also called “Music of the Heart”-- Guaspari offers her two sons a chance to comment. Neither spares his mother when it comes to how tough she was on them about music lessons. Both boys were started by their mother on the violin, but soon switched to other instruments, knowing what a perfectionist she is about the violin. “It was so hard to study music with her. She expected so much from her students, and twice as much from us,” son Alexi writes.

Pamela Gray, meanwhile, who spent weeks visiting with Guaspari before writing the movie’s script, saw right away how Guaspari motivates her young students to try to master a difficult instrument. “She’s crazy about these kids. If anything--and this is not meant to be cruel--she shames them into respecting themselves because she has so much faith in them,” Gray says.

Guaspari’s music program got caught up in the nationwide trend to slash arts education in public schools in the early ‘90s. The Carnegie Hall fund-raiser helped create the nonprofit organization that’s supported it ever since. Now the foundation has a $300,000 budget that pays for the salaries of three New York City teachers and a foundation director, as well as the maintenance of the program’s 400 violins.

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Guaspari wants to expand the elementary school program to include kindergarten, which means the purchase of new and tinier violins. And even though the city restored funding to her program last year, she has no plans to shut down her foundation. Her cause now goes beyond East Harlem. In January, she’s starting a program in which other instructors can observe her teaching so that they might take some of her techniques and passion back to their own classrooms.

Guaspari is also focused on her 8-year-old adopted daughter, Sophia, who, she says, has just as strong a will as her mother. “She’s spirited and wonderful and really has her own mind. Oh boy, there’s conflict,” Guaspari says. “I’ve got my work cut out for me.”