Socrates and Nina

Socrates had just recently recovered from the measles, and was not available. But Nina was in fine shape. While silent Pianist Socrates Birsky Okuntsoff, 6. sat with the rest, sedately attentive, golden-haired Pianist Nina Lugovoy, 8, propped herself against the piano stool so she could reach the pedals, hunched herself over the keyboard and gravely played a Loesch-horn Etude. The audience in Manhattan's Town Hall gave her a big hand. Before the last clap had died out she had already launched a vigorous performance of a Moskowsky Pantomime. Subsequent applause was deafening. Pianist Nina walked to the platform exit, gave her little silk dress a hasty jerk and hurried out. Applause continued. Pianist Nina came back, walked a few inches further toward the centre of the platform, put her right foot back and gave another jerk to her dress, walked out with a sober air of finality. Next soloist was eight-year-old Anthony Di Bonaventura.

Nina, Anthony and Socrates were three of the 879 students of Manhattan's Music School Settlement, largest and second oldest-institution of its kind in the U. S. * The occasion: The Music School Settlement's annual uptown concert. But few of the children who performed at last week's concert are likely to become ambition-mad prodigies or struggling virtuosos. They are more likely to become mothers and fathers, sober citizens whose lives have been made more interesting through the study of music. For Manhattan's Music School Settlement, like Greater New York's 13 other community and settlement music schools (and over 50 other such schools scattered through U. S. cities), has always stressed the value of music as an avocation rather than a profession.

In the midst of a noisy tenement district in Manhattan's warren-like lower East Side, the school's neat, old-fashioned red brick building stands out with an air of simple respectability. In it, simple-mannered, genial, white-haired Director Melzar Chaffee considers the aptitudes, problems and ambitions of each of his hundreds of students, himself teaches some of them how to play the fiddle. Not all are children; mothers and fathers come for lessons too. The school's youngest pupil is three, its oldest 49. Fees for lessons range from 50-c- to $2. Children under ten pay $1 for a piano, violin or cello lesson, and a class in musical theory is thrown in for nothing. Adults pay $2. Actually these fees cover only one-third the cost of the lessons. Another third comes from the school's endowment fund; a final third is raised by public subscription. For specially talented pupils free scholarships are sometimes provided.

A few of the school's thousands of former students have become professional concert soloists, among them the young pianists Ray Lev, Tessa Bloom and Sylvia Smith. Nearly all of the great U. S. symphony orchestras have a member or two who once studied at the Music School Settlement. Of these successful alumni good-humored Director Chaffee and his staff are proud. Still prouder are they of the fact that in all of its 44 years not one of the Music School Settlement's thousands of pupils has ever been haled before a juvenile court.

* Founded in 1894. Only the music department of Chicago's famed Hull House is older (1892).

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