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Where the Spirit Moves

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Kristin Hohenadel, based in Paris, writes on arts and culture

If St. Francis of Assisi were still among us, he might encourage his most musically gifted followers to lug a Steinway to San Quentin or dispatch a violinist to wander the AIDS ward of Paris’ L’Ho^pital St. Louis.

Following in his spirit is Father Eugene Merlet, a 73-year-old French Capuchin Franciscan friar. His unusual foundation, called Pro Musicis (“for musicians” in Latin), is a nondenominational, nonprofit organization that was founded 35 years ago to help nurture young artists and to bring world-class music to the sick, the poor, the disadvantaged and the dispirited.

“The whole idea has its source in St. Francis himself,” Merlet said on a recent morning in Paris, where he is headquartered at the Fraternite des Capucins on a quiet street in the 10th arrondissement. “He didn’t tell artists to give up everything to give themselves to God. He said: ‘You’ve got a gift from God. Develop it and use it.’ ”

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To that end, Pro Musicis sponsors an international music competition in seven disciplines--harpsichord, voice, piano, harp, strings, winds and guitar--with winners named in staggered groups over a three-year cycle. Applicants in various countries are asked to send videotapes of a live recital given within the last year, which are reviewed by a panel that includes composer-conductor-educator Gunther Schuller and pianist Byron Janis, and the finals are held in New York and Paris.

The winners of the Pro Musicis International Award are given an expense-paid public concert in a major world city, and in exchange they must agree to give two community service concerts, usually in the same city, in prisons, nursing homes, hospitals, schools, AIDS centers and drug rehab clinics. Over the years, the competition has offered more than 750 community service concerts and given a boost to such artists as Jeffrey Kahane, now conductor of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, and French soprano Natalie Dessay.

On Friday the group launches a new L.A. concert series at the Zipper Concert Hall of the Colburn School for Performing Arts. As in many of its series, the performers will include some current winners and some “friends” of Pro Musicis. The series begins with New York-based pianist J.Y. Song, a 1999 Pro Musicis winner. It continues on March 24 with the Beijing-based Bao Jian, a virtuoso on the Chinese wind instrument called the guanzi, a winner in 1998. It continues April 2 with a longtime Pro Musicis member, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra French horn player Richard Todd. And on June 16, another 1998 winner, German baritone Christian Gerhaher, makes his Los Angeles debut.

“Artistic inspiration is God’s purest gift ever offered to humanity,” the white-haired, bespectacled Merlet says, reciting his mission statement. “Enabling it to be expressed and shared with all the strata of society is the wonderful mission of Pro Musicis.”

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Merlet says he heard God calling at age 9, when he read the story of St. Francis and announced to his parents that he’d found his life’s work. A musical child from a musical family, his parents made him wait a few years before entering the seminary at 13. He joined the order at 20.

“I thought I had to make a decision between music and the order,” he says, “and St. Francis was stronger.” But upon entering the order, his superiors made him resident organist, and he talked to them about the possibility of following the path of a priest musician. When he was ordained in 1953, his mission was to go to the Paris Conservatory to complete his musical studies, to find out about the problems of young musicians and come up with a way to help them.

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“I could see that some of my fellow musicians who won international competitions had a few concerts but then nothing afterwards,” he says, “and their talent would break down.” With Pro Musicis, he reasoned, musicians would get career-boosting exposure and concert dates, while also becoming better musicians by learning to communicate the music to a more challenging and unpredictable audience. Prisons, it seems, are among the most dramatic settings for the group’s altruistic work.

“At the end they thank us,” he says, “because it makes them feel that we consider them human beings, even if they are imprisoned. For all the people on the outskirts of society, it’s the same. The music goes into their heart, and what’s good in them comes out, without them realizing it. They are enjoying a moment of happiness. And when music reaches that level, when it reaches a level of beauty, you reach God.”

Pro Musicis is one of a handful of organizations, including the New York-based Affiliate Artists, to add social conscience to the hothouse world of classical music competitions. Because of this, the charming, bearded friar has won the hearts of many influential supporters--including Janis, Pierre Boulez, Daniel Barenboim, Jean-Pierre Rampal, Mstislav Rostropovich, Schuller and the late Yehudi Menuhin. With a network of associations in New York, Japan, Hong Kong and Italy, Pro Musicis’ international chairwoman is Madame Georges Pompidou, wife of the late French president.

Despite its high-profile friends, the Pro Musicis Foundation has struggled to gain a financial foothold since its inception in 1965 in Paris. Merlet has received a French Legion d’Honneur for his work and says he has always been praised for the group’s mission, but that appreciation hasn’t always had francs attached. Discouraged by the French government’s lack of financial support in the beginning, he went to the U.S. and started talking to people about his idea. Encouraged by their openness and enthusiasm, Merlet moved the headquarters of Pro Musicis to New York in 1969. He thought he’d stay a few years. He stayed 20.

But he relocated the organization back to France, after a benefactor donated her 14th century Chateau Valesne in the Loire Valley as an international headquarters. So far, only one room of the chateau, the Grand Salon, is usable. And the structure suffered roof and other damage after the violent storms that hit France over Christmas.

As recently as 1997, financial problems caused Pro Musicis to take a hiatus from producing concerts. Merlet is hopeful that resurgent economies everywhere, but especially the robust U.S. economy, will provide private and corporate donations, and he continues to travel back and forth between Paris and the foundation’s U.S. headquarters in New York to raise the profile of the organization and help launch a renewed fund-raising campaign to renovate the chateau.

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“We aren’t well-known enough,” he admits. “We want our U.S. foundation to be stronger and stronger. We had concerts in Los Angeles for the last 20 years, but we want to be more present in California, and to spread all over the West of the United States.”

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Byron Janis has been a longtime friend and supporter of Pro Musicis, serving on the competition selection committee and donating his time for benefit concerts and community concerts.

“I think the community service aspect of Pro Musicis is very important to the development of the artist,” Janis said in a telephone interview, recounting a concert he gave at the Tombs correctional facility on Long Island. “I’ll never forget it,” he says. “I purposefully decided to play something that required a lot of attention--a Chopin nocturne, a quiet piece. They weren’t fidgeting at all, and their faces really showed how they were listening.”

Janis says he shared the story of his life, including his struggle with arthritis. “They asked me how I stayed straight,” he remembers, and they gathered around him at the end to tell some of their own stories. “Music is such a healer--it gets through. You can talk and talk your head off and it means nothing. I think I came away from it with probably even more than they did.”

For the Los Angeles series, J.Y. Song, 29, has community concerts scheduled at the multicultural youth center Heart of Los Angeles Youth, which provides fine-arts, education, athletic and job training for at-risk youth in the Rampart district. Her second charity concert will be at Upote Tamu (“sweet strings” in Swahili), a grass-roots program that trains children ages 5 to 13 to play the violin and piano (on donated instruments) in South-Central L.A. But she has also done quite a bit of community work on her own, in retirement homes, hospitals and at the Hedrick Martin Institute in New York City, a high school for teenagers with AIDS. She says that working with unconventional audiences allows her to talk more about her own life and reasons for making music, and to answer questions from the audience, an opportunity that isn’t within the protocol of a classical event.

She says Pro Musicis fits in with her idea of the role of music in society. “I liked that it has a social mission, that it thought of music as part of a larger picture,” she said in a telephone interview. “It’s not purely just a music competition--there are many of them out there--but it seemed to function with slightly higher ideals.”

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Many of the now several dozen Pro Musicis winners remain loyal to the organization, continuing to perform for years after their initial commitment has run out. Richard Todd, 43, won in 1982. “When it’s an organization like this, you want to stay involved,” he said. “It’s such a special entity to have these community concerts and to see tangible results in the faces of the listeners. It’s hard to put into words how important I think this is. It’s a feel-good kind of thing.”

Todd says some of his most rewarding work has been at schools, where he isn’t above name-dropping (Madonna, Puff Daddy) to prove his street cred as a studio musician to get kids to see the relationships between musical styles. “They think the only thing out there is rap. When I point out that rap basically uses new lyrics over old melodies or harmonies, it changes their idea. I tell them a Bach prelude was the pop music of its time. It’s cooler than you think it is.”

He also says that the informal atmosphere of the community concerts has changed his own performance style. “The concert in L.A. is only part classical music; the rest of it is jazz,” he says. “I’m going to talk about the composition and integrating stylistic ideas between classical and jazz. I’ve taken a much more interactive approach with my concerts.”

Those affiliated with Pro Musicis are enthusiastic and cooperative with their time, eager to tell you that they will do anything to help Merlet in his push to expand Pro Musicis.

And Merlet definitely has expansionist dreams--if the fund-raising goes well. He hopes to host a music festival for the handicapped at the chateau, to sponsor a symposium on the nature of artistic inspiration, and to develop artists residencies and begin to produce Pro Musicis recordings and broadcasts.

Has he ever thought of looking for an angel among the Internet millionaires? The friar’s eyes grow bigger, his tone confidential: “Do you know anyone?” he asks--and hopes the angels are listening.

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Pro Musicis / J.Y. Song, Friday, 7:30 p.m., Zipper Hall, Colburn School, 200 S. Grand Ave., $15. (323) 467-6537. Through June. Call for complete series schedule.

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