A GUIDE TO YOUNG PERSONS’ ORCHESTRAS

Loud musical sounds emanated from one of the large rehearsal spaces in Schoenberg Hall at UCLA, which usually serves as a classroom for university orchestras. More than 110 young people--36 violinists, 14 cellos, a bank of 10 double bassists at the back of the room and a full complement of woodwinds and brass--jammed the room.

But these were not UCLA students. They were orchestral musicians, ages 15 to 25, members of American Youth Symphony who were rehearsing on a recent Saturday morning.

Right after 10 o’clock, and following a few weekly announcements given by a volunteer coordinator, the orchestra’s longtime music director and conductor, Mehli Mehta, stepped to the podium.

Then the young people really made a mighty noise.

At 78, Mehta has been a familiar figure in the Los Angeles music community since shortly after his son, Zubin, became music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1962. A lifetime educator, he retains the courtly manners and formal style of his years in Bombay, where he founded his own symphonic orchestra.

Mehta espouses a philosophy of music, and orchestral playing, different from that of more pragmatic teachers, apparently combining a high idealism with the worldly practicality of a journeyman musician. Some of those ideals are clearly inherited from his long tenure as concertmaster of the Halle Orchestra, under his mentor, Sir John Barbirolli. What music creates in the people who make it, Mehta says, is deeper and longer lasting than the skills they hone to perform together in a single concert.

“Too many young people see music as a matter of fact--they take it for granted,” he says. “They had better see it as a matter of art. It must be nourished, cultivated, promoted and cherished--and nurtured.”

The American Youth Symphony--and about a dozen other youth orchestras in Southern California--offer training for young people in a time of dwindling orchestras. Some say the future is “bleak,” with too many orchestral players competing for too few positions. But to Mehta, making music isn’t just a hobby or potential job.

“Young musicians must be encouraged, not only to look forward to a job, to a vocation, to a career, but to being part of the art of music,” he said. “It is a high calling, and it demands the best--sometimes even more than the best--they have to give.”

On this particular Saturday morning, American Youth Symphony was rehearsing a suite from Ravel’s “Daphnis et Chloe,” a work of striking instrumental difficulties, for a concert more than six weeks away. During the hour Mehta devoted to it, he cajoled, implored, coaxed and lectured the young people of his orchestra.

He worked on technical and musical details, described in words and demonstrated on a borrowed violin the difference between a “French” sound and a “German” one, and gave practical musical advice not always related to the score at hand.

Mehta’s American Youth Symphony is arguably the most accomplished of the Southern California training orchestras; it is certainly the most visible. It exists, in terms of quality, and musical standards, between the college, conservatory and university orchestras, which supply many of its players, and the professional orchestras to which its members aspire. On a local level, it is the counterpart of the nationally recruited Institute Orchestra of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Seven times a year, AYS performs in Royce Hall at UCLA. Each February, it gives a benefit concert in the Pavilion of the Music Center. Every Dec. 24, it appears on the Christmas Eve program put on by the County of Los Angeles, also in the Pavilion (its next performance is tonight at 8, in Royce Hall, UCLA.)

The work of AYS and all its sister organizations, Mehta says, is to prepare young instrumentalists to play in professional orchestras. That is accomplished through rehearsals and concerts. Mehta says there are 67 AYS alumni working in North and South American and European orchestras. In every case, he claims, their training has been exhaustive. “We cover the entire orchestral repertory, music from the Baroque period up until today.

“Where else can young people get these opportunities?” Mehta asks in his hyper-intensive way. “The chance to play Mahler’s Ninth, Beethoven’s Ninth, Bruckner’s Fifth, all the tone poems of Richard Strauss, and every one of the piano and violin concertos in the standard repertoire?”

Of equal value to the future professionals and the future music lovers in the ensemble, Mehta says, is the chance to hear all these works.

“It’s always the first time for these young people,” he says. “Can you imagine how it must be, to play ‘Daphnis,’ or the ‘Eroica,’ or ‘Till Eulenspiegel,’ for the first time?” He raises his arms and shakes them in mock excitement.

John Larry Granger, founder and music director of the professional South Coast Symphony in Orange County, has conducted the Los Angeles County-sponsored South East Youth Symphony Orchestra (SEYSO) for 14 years. SEYSO is one of five youth orchestras sponsored by Los Angeles County.

Granger describes the youth symphony as “a bridge between the ensembles one plays in at school and the community orchestra.”

“It is a place young players can develop their skills. Many of our members go no further with music--at least not as active participants in performing organizations. But their playing in our orchestra fills a gap for them.”

Originally, Granger says, youth orchestras sprang up in this country “to supplement the public-school music programs.” That supplement can, and does, offer junior high or high school students of a certain level of accomplishment “a much more comprehensive overview of orchestral literature than they can get in their school orchestras.”

Young musicians preparing to enter a conservatory or to major in music in college need this kind of preparation, Granger says.

“And they need to see styles and techniques in a musical context they may not be able to have in a school situation. For string players, for instance, it’s bowings, and the chance to be exposed to a string specialist who can coach them in such things. In most schools today, there are no string specialists, only band people.”

The 70 young people in Granger’s current SEYSO ensemble are between the ages of 12 and 22.

“Because of the success of the Suzuki method, we are getting younger and younger string players,” he says, adding that the shortage of string players predicted in the 1960s has not materialized--probably because of pedagogical methods like that of Shinichi Suzuki.

Today a free-lance violinist, Robert Korda was a member of the Los Angeles Philharmonic for 20 years. Before Korda joined the Philharmonic, he was a member for 10 years of Peter Meremblum’s California Junior Symphony, the forerunner (founded in 1936) of all Southern California training orchestras; when Korda left the ensemble, he was concertmaster. In addition, he served for two seasons, in the late 1950s, as concertmaster of Debut, the orchestra sponsored by the Young Musicians Foundation.

Looking back on those years of training, Korda says: “The benefits were tremendous. I learned so much music, from playing, from reading, just from being at rehearsals every Saturday morning. In my first season at the Philharmonic, there were only three pieces we played that I hadn’t already been exposed to--and they were choral pieces, an area Meremblum never got into.”

Diane Ebert, the concertmaster of Granger’s SEYSO ensemble, is 21. A business major at Cal State Long Beach, she enjoys playing the violin but does not intend to pursue music professionally. Still, she says she wants to continue playing in orchestras, perhaps even in Granger’s South Coast Symphony. In the past, she has been a member of the community orchestra at El Camino College.

“Being concertmaster of SEYSO has definitely been a good experience,” Ebert says. “Mr. Granger is very special in that he inspires people to want to practice and improve their skills. He certainly inspired me. At one time, I was ready to quit. But didn’t--thanks to him.”

George Pehlivanian, Mehta’s 23-year-old concertmaster at American Youth Symphony for the past season, says AYS is for him “the last step before becoming a professional violinist.” Pehlivanian was also concertmaster of the YMF Orchestra for three years before joining AYS. A graduate student at USC, he is concertmaster of the USC Symphony and first violinist of the graduate string quartet at the university.

It is in the nature of training orchestras, says Lalo Schifrin, music director of the 3-decade old YMF Orchestra, that “we train them and lose them. They are here to learn to play in professional orchestras. When they can do that, they enter the profession.”

But things are not always that easy, says conductor and violist Richard Rintoul, a former Philharmonic Institute conducting fellow and until recently conductor of the Pasadena Young Musicians Orchestra. The competition among college-age players and young professionals is “fiercer than ever.”

“It’s a very discouraging picture,” says Rintoul. “With fewer and fewer orchestras surviving, and with free-lance work here in Los Angeles more unsteady than ever, the field is overcrowded. It’s bleak.”

Does it make sense to prepare young people for orchestral service when the very institutions they want to enter are threatened? Why train to be in an orchestra when so many orchestras are going under?

Mehta answers quickly, but with a patience one feels has been long-cultivated:

“That is looking at the subject very pessimistically. I am not so pessimistic. The young must be encouraged not to take adversity lying down. One of the problems is that orchestras today spend more money on production than on the artistic side. We must lower our sights on the production end!

“I have spent my life promoting music, and we must all continue to do so. Wherever I go--to Canada, to the East Coast, and all around this country--I find our alumni, young people who were trained at AYS. They have found, each one, a niche. We must continue to nurture their love of music, and their faith in its power.”