History is in the lessons

ON A warm afternoon, not long after most students around town have been dismissed for the summer, a group of 20 third-graders sits attentively in a classroom on an otherwise empty campus in the Crenshaw district. Instead of books and desks, they have bows and violins -- a few of them, anyway. The rest improvise, their right hands carefully fingering the length of their left arms as they practice scales and arpeggios on imaginary string instruments.

To mimic the scales, they also sing -- do, re, mi -- with gusto. At points, the gusto gets a bit out of hand, and a few students collapse into giggles or fidget in their chairs. Teacher Anne Rardin grows stern. “You have to learn to sit up and keep your comments to yourself,” she tells the students. “You can’t do these things if you’re going to be in an orchestra.” The children fall silent and straighten up. It is their third day of instruction.

Charles Dickerson, watching from the front of the room over his glasses, nods approvingly. Dickerson is the primary music instructor at this school, View Park Preparatory Accelerated Elementary. This is his new gig: For the last four years, he has been music director and conductor of the Southeast Symphony, a historically black community orchestra marking its 60th anniversary this year.

Not that Dickerson, 55, has had much time for reflection. This class is part of a new Southeast venture with View Park Prep to cultivate the next generation of black symphonic musicians, and Dickerson wants to get off on the right foot. The moment is ripe. Late last year, the Los Angeles Philharmonic launched a new youth orchestra initiative -- called Youth Orchestra LA -- with a goal of targeting kids in underserved neighborhoods. With that in mind, Dickerson came to View Park in February at the request of fellow Southeast Symphony member Fernando Pullum, who heads the performing arts for high school grades at another View Park Prep campus and a dozen other charter schools throughout South L.A. run by the Inner City Education Foundation. The foundation has a youth orchestra and is funding the new music program. Teachers and instruments are being provided by the nonprofit Harmony Project.

“We wanted to get kids at a younger age, to intervene early,” says Dickerson. Pullum, a trumpet player who built a national reputation as music director at Washington Prep High School in South L.A., says the summer program is teaching 500 students a day, far more than Southeast can reach. “We want to empower people through music, though this is not about music per se,” he says. “It’s about discipline, practice and focus. We want to take over South-Central one household at a time.”

The Southeast Symphony’s official anniversary celebration will be a concert next Sunday at Walt Disney Concert Hall featuring a program of George Gershwin classics. The naturally upbeat Dickerson is clearly excited. A lawyer by training, he’s a vocalist and instrumentalist who says he could play piano before he learned to read. He got his conducting experience at churches and is musical director at Rolling Hills United Methodist.

Dickerson knew of Southeast long before he joined. The ensemble was founded in 1948 by pianist Mabel Massengill Gunn in what was then the largely black southeast part of town, at a time when blacks were shut out of most major orchestras. Southeast’s mandate of providing a place for black players to hone their skills and receive support from one another is simple, but it has not always been easy to carry out. When Dickerson took over, only four of the 56 players were African American. Now, 82 of the 95 scheduled to play in Disney Hall are black. Dickerson says he recruited hard to change the percentages because that’s part of his job. “I don’t apologize for wanting a black orchestra,” he says. “I’m trying to get us back to that.”

View Park is not Southeast’s first foray into community teaching. In 1996, it started a conservatory to help counter the de-funding of music and arts programs in public schools, which hit South L.A. and other poor neighborhoods especially hard. The Saturday conservatory, like the classes at View Park Prep, is open to students when they reach the third grade and runs through the school year. It serves about 120 students and also offers instruction in theory, composition and performance ensemble.

Unlike View Park, however, the conservatory costs -- $125 a semester. That’s low, but it’s a lot more than free, especially in the inner city. But in the last decade, the cost is exactly what has attracted families who don’t live in the inner city and who aren’t African American. Dickerson and Southeast Symphony Assn. board President Sandra Wheeler acknowledge that the conservatory is now predominantly Asian, mostly Korean. “It’s a well-known secret that we’re an inexpensive alternative to the Colburn School,” says Wheeler.

Dickerson agrees, though he’s quick to add that the conservatory is not equal to Colburn -- not yet, anyway. Nor is it at the level of the Southeast Symphony. The organization’s annual budget has grown significantly over the years, but it is still only about $300,000, about a quarter of what Dickerson says would be needed to kick things up a notch. It does have an office in Inglewood but no paid staff. Much of the secretarial and development work, such as writing donor appeals and mailing fliers and invitations, is done by Dickerson. “We’re still a fairly mom-and-pop operation,” he says. “This is more than a full-time job.”

Still, the conservatory has been a big step in the direction of growth, even if the new demographics present a somewhat awkward situation for an organization built around serving black musicians. Dickerson says the biggest problem is that the pipeline is drying up. In addition to the fact that music programs are shrinking, black parents aren’t pushing music lessons the way they used to, he says. Kids are distracted by the Internet and iPods. Black kids are more interested in hip-hop than in classical, and hip-hop, unlike jazz and R&B; before it, has no instrumental tradition. Money is tighter for everyone.

All of which makes the appearance of a countywide youth orchestra initiative targeting minorities especially timely for Southeast. YOLA began at the behest of incoming Philharmonic Music Director Gustavo Dudamel, the 27-year-old wunderkind who is a product of El Sistema, Venezuela’s extensive orchestral training program. Southeast’s conservatory and its reputation for grooming young black musicians are what caught the Philharmonic’s attention, but that attention made Dickerson and others realize that Southeast’s core black membership was lagging and needed shoring up. Dickerson says the students he’s teaching at View Park, though they are being steered to the foundation’s youth orchestra, “I definitely see as a feeder for the future for Southeast Symphony.”

Giving kids choices

Southeast’s history with the Philharmonic is a bit strained. Wheeler says the Philharmonic’s community outreach in the past has consisted mostly of trying to draw audiences to its performances or of dropping in to do occasional concerts in the ‘hood.

And yet there’s also been a genuine connection. Philharmonic percussionist Raynor Carroll used to play in Southeast. Other Southeast alums play in the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra and other established groups. Many get studio work in the entertainment industry.

Helping musicians move up is certainly part of Southeast’s mission, but the other part is maintaining the orchestra for its own sake. Dickerson believes YOLA will help accomplish this. The initiative, run by Philharmonic public affairs director Leni Boorstin, is already helping folks connect dots on both sides of the equation. “When we were first talking about YOLA, Leni said to me, ‘Do you know Fernando Pullum? Go to talk to him,’ ” Dickerson recalls with some amusement. “I said, ‘Please, Fernando plays in my symphony!’ ”

More amusing to Dickerson is that Pullum brought his boss into View Park to work for him. Other Southeast members working in the summer program include bassist Hakeem Holloway and cellist A.J. Fanning. Both say that nurturing young musicians is akin to the give-back energy of playing for Southeast.

“There’s nothing like Southeast Symphony where I’m from,” says Fanning, a 30-year-old Cleveland native. “This kind of program gives kids options besides sitting on a street corner playing ball.” Holloway, also 30, grew up in Koreatown and got his master’s in music from USC. “There’s no excuse for taking arts out of schools,” he says. “This is something I totally believe in.”

French horn player Emily Booth is a music teacher and Southeast veteran who has been with the symphony for more than 25 years. “It provides a real opportunity for young black musicians to play music they wouldn’t ordinarily get to play,” she says. “You also learn to be in an orchestra, to be in the real world where you might sit next to a white guy. Southeast accomplishes both things.”

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Southeast Symphony

Where: Walt Disney Concert Hall, 111 S. Grand Ave., L.A.

When: 3 p.m. next Sunday

Price: $25 to $60

Contact: (323) 293-7372, (310) 973-2488 or (213) 480-3232 (Ticketmaster)