Tooting Those Trumpets

By MARGARET CARLSON

Many things in life will catch your eye, but only a few will catch your heart. As part of a celebration of Colin Powell's tenure as head of America's Promise, fifth- and sixth-graders at New York City's P.S. 58 serenaded him with America the Beautiful. The instruments they were tooting, plucking and tapping had been donated by an America's Promise partner, Save the Music. I'd never seen the general gulp so hard, and it wasn't because the kids played well--a more off-key version rendered with greater intensity would be hard to imagine. It's that they played at all. With public schools fighting for necessities like books for the library and balls for the playground, niceties like music had been left to wither away, and many schools, especially in the cities, ended up with no music at all.

Enter VH1 president John Sykes, who discovered the crisis when he went to P.S. 58 in April 1996 to participate in New York's Principal for a Day program. Luckily he was in the perfect position to find people who could help restore the music curriculum at P.S. 58 and hundreds of other schools. Who would be more enthusiastic about giving kids a trumpet to toot or a guitar to strum than those whose talent had been nurtured and who had got air time on Sykes' channel? Under Sykes' Save the Music campaign, Wynton Marsalis, Eric Clapton, Sheryl Crow and Gloria Estefan, among many others, eagerly raised money to purchase instruments--and that was before all the buzz about what music can do for the soul and the psyche. By the time school bells ring this September, kids in more than 500 schools in 40 communities will be playing $10 million worth of instruments.

There's a downside to such success. It fuels the conservative myth that private efforts can replace government, when the fact is you can barely fill the gaps created by budget cutbacks even when all the stars--literally--align themselves. With Save the Music, the limit on raising funds is the limit of performers' willingness to headline concerts, such as the Concert of the Century at the White House last October, featuring B.B. King, Lenny Kravitz and Melissa Etheridge, who were introduced by Gwyneth Paltrow and Kevin Spacey, and April's Divas 2000 concert, starring Diana Ross. And Hollywood helped with last year's movie Music of the Heart, starring Meryl Streep, which celebrated a class of Harlem kids who took their donated instruments all the way to Carnegie Hall.

The success stories are almost as numerous as the cellos and drums handed out--little miracles amplified into a life away from drugs and pregnancy and into higher grades. At Mother Hale Academy, a public school in the Bronx that sits amid empty lots and broken glass, a fifth-grade class is playing La Bamba from photocopied sheet music with drums that are too loud and a clarinet that is too squeaky. To the audience, it's better than the Met. Last week VH1 Save the Music got recognition high and low. It won the Peabody Award for public service and received $32,000 when the returning champion on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire earmarked half his winnings for Save the Music. School halls are alive with the sound of music.