In 1939 Samuel Goldwyn released They Shall Have Music, a film starring Jascha Heifetz, Walter Brennan, Gene Reynolds, Andrea Leeds, and Joel McCrea and dedicated “to the many music schools throughout the world—devoted to the development and encouragement of great talent among the children of the poor.”Footnote ¹ The film opens with a view of the Lower East Side of Manhattan and the Brooklyn Bridge seen from the tenements in Brooklyn. Its protagonist, Frankie, is a young boy fleeing a troubled home in a run-down apartment who becomes involved with a gang of boys engaged in criminal mischief. Chance leads him to the Lawson School of Music, located on Third Street, that serves the children of impoverished families. There sympathetic people take an interest in him, introduce him to new friends, and channel his energies into classical music. When creditors threaten to force the school's closure by repossessing its instruments, Frankie and other young music students travel uptown and appeal to violinist Jascha Heifetz to protect their school. In the climactic final scene, Heifetz appears at the school and performs the finale of Mendelssohn's violin concerto with the children's orchestra. The creditors are satisfied, and the school is saved.

Designed as a vehicle for virtuoso performances by Heifetz, the film's story, situations, and characters (other than Heifetz) are fictional, but the Lawson School of Music, its location on Third Street, and the opening views of lower Manhattan are unmistakable references to the Third Street Music School Settlement, a real institution on New York's Lower East Side. Founded over one hundred years ago to provide music instruction to the immigrant poor and still in existence today, Third Street (as its frequenters refer to it) was a part of the settlement movement that originated in England and spread to the United States in the latter 1800s.

The fictional Lawson School of Music also brings to life aspects of settlement philosophy and history embodied in actual settlement music schools. Most notable of these aspects is a belief in the power of the arts to raise up the poor, promote strong communities, better the lives of individuals, mitigate delinquent behavior, and counteract ethnic, social, economic, or religious divisions. The dominant role of women in the U.S. settlement movement is exemplified by the various female characters in the film, especially the school's managing director (played by Andrea Leeds). Heifetz's iconic presence and power to protect and validate the Lawson School recalls the contributions of prominent musicians who promoted and supported settlement music. The theme of poverty reflects the plight of immigrants at the beginning of the twentieth century and the struggles of people who lived through the economic hardship of the 1930s when the film was made. The financial burdens afflicting the Lawson School represent an ever-present reality that settlement and community music schools have faced from their inception to the present day.

The oldest continuously operated settlement music school in the United States,Footnote ² the Third Street Music School Settlement was dedicated to music from its beginning. Unlike other settlements, in which music programs were subdivisions of larger houses dedicated to social service and action, Third Street was primarily a music school with a social service component. Before the major conservatories of New York City were founded uptown, Third Street established conservatory-style music education among the immigrant poor downtown. Though committed to excellence and pursuing music for its own sake, Third Street also embodied a vision of music as a tool in shaping both individuals and a larger community.

At stake in the history and survival of the School, therefore, are two contrasting notions: one, of music primarily as art, reflected in the emphasis on training skill in musical performance through a conservatory-style system of education; the other, of music primarily as social action and expression, reflected in the use of music to address extramusical social concerns. These contrasting notions were a source of conflict about music's place in the settlements during the 1930s. They figured in Third Street's representations of its musical activities in the print media as primarily social action and service. Moreover, they were underlying elements in Third Street's decline from the mid-1950s through the 1970s, as well as its subsequent revival.

This study treats the history of the Third Street Music School Settlement as a case study in the interaction of these contrasting views, building on earlier writings on the settlements and on the history of Third Street. Of particular value in this regard is the dissertation by Mary Jo Pagano, documenting the history of Third Street from its beginning to the 1980s.Footnote ³ The present article places her work in a wider social context and explores in greater detail the forces that led to Third Street's decline and revitalization.

The Beginnings of Settlement Music

The Settlement movement was a response to poverty and other social problems related to nineteenth-century urbanization and industrialization. The prototype was Toynbee Hall founded in 1884 in Whitechapel, England, by the pastor of St. Jude's parish, Samuel Barnett, and his wife, Henrietta (Rowland) Barnett. Toynbee Hall was a residence that “settled” university men in an impoverished urban slum where they would learn as well as teach, and where they would pay for their education both in money and “in kind.” Living in a poor neighborhood gave many well-to-do young men bound for careers in public life the practical experience and insight necessary to make them effective agents of social reform. By enlisting middle-class men and women to supply practical material needs, along with music, visual arts, and literature, to the poor neighborhood residents, Barnett transformed charity work from mere almsgiving into social service and research with a cultural dimension that was compelling and rewarding to both givers and receivers.

Toynbee Hall helped produce data for demographic studies of London and to bring about changes such as increased patrolling of streets and more adequate water supply. It fostered development of the Hampstead Garden Suburb, a model of local neighborhood planning. Other programs and services started by the Barnetts included a mixture of social services and the arts: children's worship service; mixed choir; schools for boys and girls; adult classes in languages, arithmetic, composition and drawing; mothers’ meetings; girls’ night school; maternity society; penny bank; lending library; a pension scheme; flower shows; concerts and entertainments; oratories in the church; lady visitors; and a system of poor relief.

Along with social service, Toynbee Hall established several enduring arts institutions including the Whitechapel Art Gallery, which grew from picture exhibitions first presented at St. Jude's parish, and a series of Sunday afternoon concerts inaugurated by J. M. Dent in 1897 that ran for thirty years.Footnote ⁴ Dent, the founder of a London publishing house, became involved with Toynbee Hall in about 1887. He was active in the Shakespeare Society (a reading and discussion group), the Travelers’ Club (a program that allowed working people to travel comfortably in Europe at very low cost), and the series of concerts and lectures that he organized. Dent concluded the published account of his activities at Toynbee Hall with these words, “I intended to give help to others, but I got a far greater benefit out of this work myself, and I owe to the Toynbee Settlement more than I can ever repay.”Footnote ⁵

Settlements in the United States

The settlement idea spread quickly to the United States, appearing first on New York's Lower East Side. The Neighborhood Guild was founded in 1886 on Forsyth Street by Stanton Coit.Footnote ⁶ Two years later the College Settlement began on Forsyth Street under the leadership of Dr. Jane E. Robbins and Jean Fine, and in the following year moved to nearby 95 Rivington Street.Footnote ⁷ Jane Addams and Ellen Starr founded Hull House in Chicago in 1889. These initial settlements were followed by Denison House (Boston, 1892), Union Settlement (Manhattan, 1895), Locust Point Settlement (Baltimore, 1896), East Side House (founded by Everett Wheeler, Manhattan, 1898), Northwestern University Settlement (founded by Charles Zeublin, Chicago, 1891), Andover House (became South End House in 1895, founded by Robert A. Woods, Boston, 1891), Henry Street Settlement (founded by Lillian Wald, New York, 1893), College Settlement (Los Angeles, 1894), and Greenwich House (founded by Felix Adler, Eugene A. Philbin, Jacob A. Riis, Mary K. Simkhovitch, et al., Greenwich Village in New York City, 1902). The beginnings of the Third Street Settlement took shape in 1894.

Settlements gained impetus from the large urban enclaves of immigrants, most of whom were poor. The Irish and Germans who arrived from 1840 to 1860 were followed from 1880 to 1925 by a much larger group of over two million southern Italians and Jews from Germany and Eastern Europe.Footnote ⁸ New York City was a point of entry for many so that, by 1900, out of a total New York City population of 4,766,900, immigrants numbered 1,944,400. By 1920, the total population had risen to more than 5.6 million people, of whom over 2 million were immigrants and 2.6 million were children of immigrants.Footnote ⁹ The large presence of foreign-born people fueled anti-immigrant sentiment that extended even to the most influential and educated in U.S. society. In 1902 Woodrow Wilson complained, “The immigrant newcomers of recent years are men of the lowest class from the South of Italy, and men of the meaner sort out of Hungary and Poland, men out of the ranks where there was neither skill nor energy, nor any initiative of quick intelligence.”Footnote ¹⁰

Settlement workers fought against ethnic prejudice, emulating the model established by Toynbee Hall that blended social services with the arts. Programs and activities were designed to help immigrants adjust to life in a new country and to advocate for them in obtaining housing, employment, health care, and other services. Settlement workers organized immigrant protective associations and sponsored festivals and pageants aimed at preserving each group's heritage and awakening in U.S. society an appreciation of ethnic cultures. They established theaters and pioneered in the kindergarten movement. To promote education and assimilation, Settlements offered courses in English, civics, U.S. history, arts and crafts, industrial education, and music.Footnote ¹¹

By 1905 there were more than two hundred Settlements in cities and rural areas across the United States.Footnote ¹² The National Federation of Settlements (NFS), founded in 1911, provided a vehicle for communication and support among them and gave them a forum for speaking out on a variety of social issues.

The Lower East Side at the End of the Nineteenth Century

The year 1894 marked the beginnings, on New York's Lower East Side, of what would become the Third Street Music School Settlement. The Lower East Side is a four-square-mile area of lower Manhattan bounded on the west by the Bowery; on the north by Fourteenth Street; and on the east and south by the East River (see Fig. 1). (Nowadays “Lower East Side” refers to the area south of Houston Street; Avenue A divides the area north of Houston Street into the “East Village” to the west and “Loisaida” to the east.) Just south of Canal Street at the intersection of Worth and Baxter were the notorious Five Points, Paradise Park, and the Mulberry Street Bend. During its first years, the Music School Settlement was housed a few blocks north on Rivington Street between Ludlow and Orchard Streets, but it later moved north to 55 East Third Street. Currently, it is located at 235 East Eleventh Street.

Figure 1. The Lower East Side, bounded by Bowery running north from a and Fourteenth Street running west from e. Houston Street running west from f divides the East Village and Loisaida (north) from the Lower East Side (south); Avenue A running south from h forms a boundary between the East Village and Loisaida. Locations of the Emily Wagner music school: Chatham Square (a) and 31 Rivington Street (b). The Music School Settlement, 55 East Third Street (c). The Third Street Music School Settlement, 235 East Eleventh Street (d). Joseph R. Bien and C. C. Vermeule, City and County of New York (New York: Julius Bien, 1891). Courtesy David Rumsey Map Collection, www.davidrumsey.com.

By the 1890s the Lower East Side enjoyed a reputation as both colorful and sordid. It was home to a thriving bohemian café culture that included artists, writers, and intellectuals, as well as young people seeking alternatives to the middle-class expectations of their families.Footnote ¹³ Coffee shops were venues where artistic and literary aspirations came into contact with socialism, anarchism, and organized labor. The Ferrer Center, located on St. Mark's Place in 1911 and 1912,Footnote ¹⁴ was a gathering place for radical thinkers and writers such as Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, Will Durant, and Margaret Sanger. Jewish students and intellectuals who fled from Russian pogroms settled on the Lower East Side and organized labor groups such as the Yidisher Arbeter Fareyn (Jewish Workers’ Association, founded in 1885).Footnote ¹⁵

The Bowery, the most famous avenue on the Lower East Side, was depicted in popular literature and the press as a conglomeration of saloons, brothels, and flop houses rife with alcohol and drug abuse, prostitution, suicide, and crime. Indeed, vice of every description was common, both along the Bowery and in the Five Points.Footnote ¹⁶ Even music hall and theater entertainments there were considered vile and indecent.Footnote ¹⁷ Slumming became a popular pursuit of voyeurs who visited the Lower East Side to observe degradation, tragedy, and hardship.Footnote ¹⁸

The surrounding neighborhoods of the Lower East Side were the destination for most newly arrived European immigrants between 1840 and 1925, and by 1910 this congested area housed 500,000 residents.Footnote ¹⁹ Employed mostly as low-paid, unskilled laborers,Footnote ²⁰ they crowded into cheaply constructed, dark, windowless tenements, without running water, heat, or ventilation—conditions that promoted the spread of cholera and tuberculosis.Footnote ²¹ Laws to compel installation of water, lighting, heat, airshafts, and windows were not enforced until the 1890s; as late as the 1930s, 50 percent of residential buildings lacked central heat and toilets; one in six lacked hot water. With monthly income of about $35 and rent of at least $16, some families had as little as $8 each month for necessities.Footnote ²² Families took in boarders who slept on cots; in closets, hallways, and stairways, and even on rooftops, resulting in multifamily and mixed-sex living.

Squalid, indecent living conditions, in addition to foreign languages and customs, stigmatized immigrants as dangerous and deviant “others” and had a devastating impact upon children. Journalist Jacob Riis estimated that 170 children and fifty-three families lived in a single Bayard Street tenement.Footnote ²³ Authorities could scarcely keep track of the many children, much less compel them to attend school. Children worked at sewing, making artificial flowers, rolling cigars, cooking, and scrubbing to help support their families. Overcrowding forced boys onto the streets to fend for themselves as bootblacks or newspaper boys. If they survived, they were at risk of becoming illiterate, unfit for honest employment, educated only in the ways of the streets. Sickness and malnutrition were rampant.

The Beginning of a Music School Settlement

In this environment, Emilie Wagner (1879–1945) chose to begin teaching music lessons. The daughter of a New England minister, Wagner had learned of the Settlement movement while a student at Goucher College in Baltimore. Moving to New York after her graduation in 1894, she began teaching music lessons for ten cents at the Mariner's Temple in Chatham Square,Footnote ²⁴ and by 1896, she attracted the attention of workers at the College Settlement, who offered her teaching space. The University Settlement followed suit in 1898. Wagner's music program quickly outgrew these spaces, however, and in 1900 the music programs at both settlements moved to 31 Rivington Street.

By 1902, with the work and expenses continuing to increase, Wagner severed ties between her music program and the Settlements and assembled a separate music school management board. The music school incorporated in 1903 as the Society of the Music School Settlement. The new board raised money to purchase two four-story tenements at 53 and 55 East Third Street in 1904,Footnote ²⁵ and Mrs. A. A. Anderson donated the adjoining building at 51 East Third Street with funds to renovate it in 1909 (see Fig. 2).Footnote ²⁶

Figure 2. Third Street Music School Settlement, 55 East Third Street, ca. 1950. Courtesy The Third Street Music School Settlement.

Since Wagner's Music School Settlement was founded to benefit the poor, only children whose families could not afford lessons were accepted as pupils. Social workers verified each family's economic status by inspecting the home condition of every child before admittance. Thereafter, they made regular visits to families, helping them find jobs, housing, and medical care, and distributing donated items such as clothing, shoes, blankets, food, musical instruments, and concert tickets.

Until the well into the 1930s, the top story of the Third Street building housed at least one resident social worker. The second floor of the building contained teaching studios. The first floor housed a library of books, initially contributed by Mrs. Howard Standish in 1906, and musical scores, many contributed by Rudolph and Gustave Schirmer and Charles H. Ditson between 1905 and 1910. This library grew to include 2,300 books and 7,500 musical scores.Footnote ²⁷ The ground floor waiting area was equipped with bathtub and shower facilities, amenities that the tenements lacked. The combined parlors of two houses formed a concert hall.Footnote ²⁸

By 1912 the Music School Settlement had expanded its offerings into a conservatory-style curriculum. Lessons were available in piano, violin, cello, viola, double bass, and voice. Supporting ensembles included three student orchestras, a community orchestra, chamber music, and chorus. Classes were offered in music history and theory.Footnote ²⁹ A Concert Bureau assisted students and teachers in securing engagements to play at concerts, parties, and dances. In 1917, 399 students were hired to furnish music for East Side weddings and uptown concerts.Footnote ³⁰

Newspaper and magazine reports about the School praised its musical excellence and achievements but stressed its development of amateur music making and down-played professional elements in its training. The New York Times reported in 1911, “The making of professional musicians is distinctly discouraged in all but cases of exceptional talent. The intention is to contribute a stimulating and ennobling interest to lives otherwise hard. To furnish an avocation for those whose vocations give little opportunity for artistic enjoyment.”Footnote ³¹ A later story published in 1921 stated, “The Settlement aims to train not professionals but amateurs; to develop an intelligent appreciation of music by competent participation in it rather than to swell the crowded ranks of those who make music their living.”Footnote ³²

From 1904 through the 1930s, music instruction ran side by side with social clubs devoted to history, literature, drama, athletics, health, and homemaking.Footnote ³³ Playgrounds, both in the backyard and on the rooftop, encouraged outdoor exercise. Summer vacations were arranged for students at a house purchased in Newfoundland, New Jersey, starting in 1906.Footnote ³⁴ To get children out of the labor force and into the classroom, the Music School offered child labor “scholarships,” equal to a child's weekly earnings, provided through the New York Child Labor Committee. By 1911 children were accepted only if they attended school.Footnote ³⁵

Music as Social Service

How did classical music, whose history associated it with privilege and elitism, come to be viewed as an instrument of service to the poor? The conception of music as social service was inspired by the precedent of Toynbee Hall and by John Ruskin's belief in the moral value of art, inspiring “first . . . joy, then . . . love of the object, then . . . the perception of kindness in a superior intelligence.”Footnote ³⁶ Settlement founders entertained a vision of a diverse society enriched by contributions from different cultures and of art as an agent for assimilation, democracy, and upward mobility, a “merging of Old World past and American present.”Footnote ³⁷

Music seemed likely to succeed in the social aims set for it on the grounds of its diverse appeal. Speaking about the early history of the settlement movement, NFS Secretary Albert J. Kennedy characterized the United States in the 1890s as a “Tower of Babel badly in need of a secondary cultural language.”Footnote ³⁸ According to Kennedy, music possessed a unique capacity for healing social divisions because of its common attraction for people of different social strata, and he later invoked George Santayana's description of it as the most “transporting of the arts and the one most sincerely appreciated, even by the general public.”Footnote ³⁹

Indeed, the community response that led to the early success of the Music School Settlement supported this theory. Classical music appealed equally to well-to-do uptown New Yorkers and to the mainly Jewish and Eastern European immigrants of the Lower East Side who came to the school in large numbers. News stories told of the joy that music brought to the poor and the devotion and effort that it inspired among them. In 1917, for example, an article about the Music School Settlement in The New York Times reported, “One boy, a butcher's son, was found repeating his day's instruction every night to his father and mother, who painfully struggled to play after him the classics of Mozart and Haydn.”Footnote ⁴⁰ One young student related to his teacher how he had taken on the task of teaching his father the same lessons he received on the violin:

Even in its most elemental form, music symbolized a wholesome gentility. A story in The New York Times told of a boy who practiced scales each evening after the family supper while his mother listened in rapt attention, saying “It is beautiful to have music in the home.”Footnote ⁴²Harper's Monthly Magazine noted that economic hardship made children responsive to the beauty of music and conditioned them for hard work, and it referred obliquely to the upward mobility that music represented: “They all love sad music. Their lives are domestic operas in minor chords—family rhapsodies of suffering and striving. . . . They grow up poor, helpful, self-sacrificing, expecting to toil, these East Side children, and a musical promise to them is a promise of paradise, to be eagerly, unceasingly sought, though the way be ever so long and hard.”Footnote ⁴³

Between 1901 and 1913, enrollment increased at the Music School from 140 to full capacity at over a thousand. Nearly as many had to be turned away because of space and budget limitations. To maximize the number served, older students were employed as teachers for younger students.Footnote ⁴⁴ This prospect of employment either in the School or elsewhere—a “promise of paradise, to be eagerly, unceasingly sought”—must have attracted many. Student teachers in 1901 earned between $2 and $9 per week, compared with between $2.40 and $4 they might receive for a week of “home shop” labor.Footnote ⁴⁵Harper's Monthly speculated: “It is primarily because these children wish to aid or support their parents that they study and apply themselves so assiduously.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Pedagogy classes in piano and music theory empowered new instructors to begin teaching on their own and enabled the Music School Settlement to broaden its reach by offering evening lessons in public schools.Footnote ⁴⁷

Stories from the early years of the Music School reflect how much these children were willing to sacrifice for music lessons. Director David Mannes told of turning away a young boy because the school's yearly scholarship money had run out; the boy gave up his bed to a boarder for one dollar per night and slept on the floor to pay for his lessons.Footnote ⁴⁸Harper's told of children suffering from hunger and cold who nevertheless sacrificed the pennies they saved over long months to purchase flowers, sweets, and other small gifts for their teachers.

As the school grew, so did opportunities to observe its effects among the people it served and to draw conclusions about the positive social benefits of music instruction. The Annual Report of 1922 noted that music served as a means to strengthen communities by combating prejudice:

Individual benefits of music instruction were thus represented as adding up to a collective benefit to society. Through teacher-student relationships, children gained mentors who helped them develop musical and communication skills, which in turn bolstered self-respect. Relationships between teachers and children established trust between the school and the neighborhood, making the people receptive to a range of other activities. Rehearsals and performances of chamber and orchestral music combined the joy and satisfaction of musical achievement with friendship, cooperation, responsibility, and mutual respect—all antidotes to prejudice and social division.

Insofar as Settlement educational programs succeeded in building up “those elements which go toward making up a home,” they also fostered a recognition that where immigrant families failed to establish a wholesome stable home life, that failure was not due to some innate character defect but to poverty and lack of education. By the same token, Settlement music offered the prospect of counteracting the ill effects of both by creating a musically educated populace—a project that appealed to musically inclined, progressive, well-to-do citizens as well as to professional musicians, and one that produced relatively quick and tangible results.

Gaining Support

From its earliest beginnings, the Music School Settlement attracted the attention and enthusiastic support of prominent musicians who served as teachers, administrators, and advisory board members. Serving as directors of the School were violinist David Mannes (1910–15), composers Arthur Farwell (1915–19), Robert Ward (1952–55), and Allen Davis (1956–57), and conductor Julius Rudel (1945–52). The advisory board at various times included Marcella Sembrich, George Barrére, John Barbirolli, Rosina Lhevinne, Alexander Siloti, Olga Samaroff Stokowski, Licia Albanese, Marian MacDowell, and Aaron Copland. Appendix 1 lists well-known musicians who served as teachers.

Association with the musical elite burnished the public image of the Music School Settlement and attracted the support of wealthy, professional, and socially prominent people. As Albert J. Kennedy and Robert A. Woods noted, the inclusion of the arts “made work among the poor interesting, which before seemed dull and wearisome,”Footnote ⁴⁹ but the occasional opportunity to brush elbows with the musical elite was a further enticement to prospective supporters. The school's 1902 Annual Report lists the names Scribner, Schirmer, Pulitzer, Ditson, Macy, and Pierpont Morgan among executive committee members.Footnote ⁵⁰ Though probably motivated by an interest in music and a spirit of service to their community, these astute business people cannot have missed the social and economic benefit of educating immigrants to assume roles as able musicians, respectable family members, productive workers and wage earners, consumers, and patriotic citizens.

David Mannes, conductor of the School's orchestra from 1899 to 1915 and director of the School from 1910 until 1915, recalled that Sunday rehearsals of the orchestra were attended by friends of board members and visitors who had read about the school's accomplishments in newspapers and magazine accounts.Footnote ⁵¹ Through stories stressing the social aims of the school and illustrated with considerable human interest, the popular press cooperated in a public relations effort that enabled the musical work of immigrant children to engage directly the empathy of affluent prospective supporters and secure financial support for the school and its work.

Not only were uptown supporters enticed to come downtown; Lower East Side children were brought uptown to display their accomplishments. A 1911 report on one of the Symphony Concerts for Young People, in which Music School Settlement children were invited to perform, noted that the concert exhibited “to their [uptown] young people what some other young people from further downtown are doing in the way of music. . . [and] was evidently one of great interest to the audience young and old.”Footnote ⁵² The Music School Settlement annually displayed its students in uptown venues, including Carnegie Hall and Town Hall. These events brought children of the Lower East Side before the public in two of New York's most important cultural venues, broadening their horizons, and creating for them a niche in the mainstream of the city's musical life.

Music as Social Service

Statements issued by the Music School Settlement, as well as stories about it in the print media, repeatedly stressed the social and moral benefits of music. These benefits included character building, prevention of juvenile delinquency, and building an “Americanized” citizenry. A Charities magazine article contained Emilie Wagner's story of a child whose musical achievements revived her father's faltering self-respect and ambition, enabling him to become a prosperous wage earner.Footnote ⁵³ David Mannes told of a stone thrown through a window barely missing his head. When investigation revealed a gang of street boys as the perpetrators, Mannes offered free violin lessons to the leader, who “became an enthusiastic pupil, and brought many of his companions to the school.”Footnote ⁵⁴ The Music School Settlement also emphasized character building in Annual Reports addressed to friends of the school. Edgar Stowell (d. 1936), head of the string department, asserted music's appeal to “depth of character” and his department's aim “to make men rather than fiddlers.”Footnote ⁵⁵ The Music School Settlement Annual Report of 1926 praised Emilie Wagner, whose teaching of music gave to children “a new basis of companionship,” and it quoted Melzar Chaffee: “Ensemble playing is the finest character development possible for youth, maturity, and old age.”Footnote ⁵⁶

The power of music as a civilizing influence among the young and in curbing delinquent behavior formed a recurring theme. The boys in Mannes's story (like Frankie, the protagonist in the film, They Shall Have Music) may have included a type whom Jacob Riis referred to as “ragamuffins” and “street Arabs,” boys who were compelled by overcrowding to leave family and tenement and strike out on their own. Although these boys were often of rough character, Riis deemed it a mistake to view them as “hardened scoundrels beyond the reach of missionary effort”;Footnote ⁵⁷ to illustrate, he cited musical evidence: “No one,” wrote Riis, “has any just conception of what congregational singing is until he has witnessed a roomful of these boys [sheltered by the Children's Aid Society] roll up their sleeves and start in on ‘I am a lily of the valley.’”Footnote ⁵⁸

Later reports of the Music School Settlement's accomplishments echoed Riis in touting the wholesome influence of music. Time reported on the school's annual concert in Town Hall in 1938: “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.”Footnote ⁵⁹ The Annual Report of 1950 stated, “No child with a wholesome interest in good music can be a delinquent.” In the report of 1964–65, Director Harris Danziger quoted author Sylvia Ashton-Warner: “I see the mind of a five-year-old as a volcano with two vents; destructiveness and creativeness. And I see that to the extent that we widen the creative channel, we atrophy the destructive one.”Footnote ⁶⁰

The Music School Settlement also publicized music instruction as a means of cultural assimilation, adopting a particularly nationalist tone during the years of World War I and the subsequent “Red Scare” of 1919–21. This tactic addressed timely issues as it counterbalanced the Lower East Side's well-established left-wing political reputation.Footnote ⁶¹The New York Times in 1917 described the instruction at the Music School Settlement as “an inspiration toward spiritual ideals, among those boys and girls who will be the American citizens of the coming years.”Footnote ⁶² Board president Christine Rowell agreed: “We hope our friends . . . consider our effort to make [our children] better American citizens through their love for music.”Footnote ⁶³ Music instruction, which relied mainly on European classical repertory, was thus promoted as a means to transform European immigrants into acculturated U.S. citizens.

The stress placed on music's social benefits—promoting wholesome family life, forming identity and character, enhancing discipline and self-esteem, preventing delinquency and crime, providing a means of self-improvement, uniting a diverse community—aligned music with perceived needs and rights in a democratic society. Moreover, by making music available as the centerpiece in a program of socialization and assimilation to immigrants and the urban poor, the Music School Settlement placed music in a new context, made it heard in new ways, gave it new meaning, and thereby exercised a democratizing and assimilating effect upon the music itself.

Social Music versus Individual Instruction

Following the development of Wagner's music program into an independent, dedicated Music School Settlement in 1903, other music settlements were quickly established in Philadelphia, Boston, Cleveland, Minneapolis, Brooklyn, and the Bronx. Appendix 2 lists settlement and community music schools founded between 1894 and 1930. Existing social settlements such as Greenwich House and Henry Street Settlements established music schools as subsidiaries of their larger houses, and these music schools soon outstripped their other arts programs.Footnote ⁶⁴

Growth in the number of music schools led to the formation in 1922 of a Music Division within the NFS.Footnote ⁶⁵ A Carnegie Corporation grant awarded to the Music Division from 1928 to 1931 funded a separate office in New York City that provided guidance and assistance to settlement music programs. The grant also funded the creation of a formal program of social music, defined as “the intelligent direction of group singing, club music, camp music . . . dance music, neighborhood concerts.”Footnote ⁶⁶

The decision to develop a program in social music reflected disputes between social workers and musicians regarding the type of music that belonged in the settlements. In practical terms, these disputes ultimately involved space and money.Footnote ⁶⁷ Music programs that were part of larger social settlement houses were not self-supporting but relied on their parent organizations to underwrite operating expenses, and, as they grew in number and size, they became more costly, required more space, and competed with other settlement activities. As music programs grew and developed, so did their students, who became capable of more advanced work, demanded higher-level instruction, and thus gave the schools a more professional character. This trend was especially pronounced in cities such as New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Cleveland, where skilled artist/teachers were available for advanced musical work.

Whereas social music aimed at bringing people together and enhancing social activities, individual instrumental instruction aimed at excellence in performing concert music, a goal that was attractive to trained musicians and encouraged a conservatory-style approach to music. Some settlement leaders were skeptical of individual instrumental music instruction, which they viewed as a service to the talented few at the expense of the many. They saw undesirable social hierarchies resulting from professionalized music training and therefore favored music making that included all and could be used to reinforce other activities. Furthermore, they objected to using scarce resources to provide music lessons to people in want of basic needs—food, clothing, blankets, adequate shelter, and medical care.Footnote ⁶⁸

Musicians, on the other hand, many of whom regarded social music as a lesser sphere of musical activity, argued for the social benefits supplied by individual music instruction and espoused music as a basic human right. This view was expressed by Music School Settlement director Arthur Farwell (1915–19), who wrote: “The message of music at its greatest and highest is not for the few, but for all; not sometime, but now; that it is to be given to all, and can be received by all.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Musicians instinctively professionalized music instruction and considered an ever-increased quality in musical accomplishment of highest value to their community.

The Music School Settlement, as a dedicated music school, was independent of any affiliation with a larger settlement house and therefore remained free of internal disruptions over the kind of music best suited to settlement work. Music instruction remained its primary mission with social service as an important but subsidiary benefit. In 1905, The New York Times noted the primacy of the School's music instruction and the subordinate position of social work:

In asserting the value of music for its own sake and its potential for making students self-supporting, this statement alludes directly to an underlying and enduring aspiration toward professionalized music instruction (which musicians likely held) and indirectly to alternative socially oriented viewpoints. In seeing music as a primary objective from which a social good may result, it contrasts subtly with statements that social goods—character development, companionship, creation of good citizens, inculcation of spiritual ideals, and “the perception of kindness in a superior intelligence”—should be viewed as the higher objectives toward which music might contribute.

During Melzar Chaffee's tenure as director (1920–45), student achievement had gained momentum, demanding increasingly advanced levels of instruction. An indication of this advancing musical achievement is the number of students from this period, and even earlier, who developed performing careers.Footnote ⁷¹ Chaffee had been skeptical about any social use of music until he attended the National Federation of Settlements conference in 1923, where a combined concert performance by Ossip Gabrilowitsch and Harold Bauer and a stirring testimonial by Bauer won him over, but only to the social benefits of a conservatory-style curriculum.Footnote ⁷²

Debates about the kind of music offered in settlements intensified throughout the Depression until, in 1937, twelve music schools, including the Music School Settlement, separated from the National Federation of Settlements to form the National Guild of Community Schools for the Arts.Footnote ⁷³

New Challenges

Beginning in 1933, Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal began to establish government and city programs to provide social services in response to the Great Depression. Social workers ceased their residency at the Music School Settlement during the following years, and, as a result, the home visits that had formerly limited music instruction to poor families were discontinued. Under Julius Rudel (director from 1945 to 1952),Footnote ⁷⁴ the Music School Settlement's social service function was virtually abandoned, and, as the pursuit of music as art eclipsed its usefulness as social service, the Music School Settlement seemed well on its way toward becoming a traditional conservatory. Rudel hired European-trained musicians to fill leadership positions on the faculty; he instituted an opera program, producing and directing operas performed with the school's orchestra and on its stage; he replaced Chaffee's theory program, which emphasized student composition, with a more traditional academic system. By 1953 the Music School Settlement had officially been renamed the Society of the Third Street Music School Settlement.

The early 1950s marked the beginning of a period of downturn and struggle that lasted until the early 1980s. In 1950 enrollment stood at 1,045 students, but in 1953 this number dropped by about two hundred, and by 1957 another two hundred students were lost. Although there are no extant Annual Reports for the years 1966–73 and 1976–82,Footnote ⁷⁵ the number of students appears to have hovered between 600 and 800 from 1957 until 1973–74.Footnote ⁷⁶ No causes for decreasing enrollment have been officially documented, but they likely included internal issues affecting management as well as an external complex of interlinked social and economic factors.

The school changed directors three times within ten years, and rapid administrative turnover disrupted programs and teaching faculty. Rudel was abruptly dismissed in 1952 when he clashed with members of the Board of Directors over engaging former pupil Ray Lev to perform at a school-sponsored concert.Footnote ⁷⁷ Particularly damaging to the school was the perception of injustice. Students who admired Rudel's professionalism wrote a letter in his support to the Board of Directors and then left the School in protest.Footnote ⁷⁸

Rudel's successor, Robert Ward (1952–55), attempted to stanch the exodus and attract new students by continuing Rudel's opera program, instituting a dance program, and reinstating a style of theory instruction similar to the one that existed under Chaffee. To retain piano students, he attempted to involve them in ensemble playing by teaching them to play string instruments in a course designed around music theory. That Ward did not choose the more intuitive strategy of forming ensembles to play chamber music for piano and strings suggests that the piano students who remained at the school were not sufficiently advanced for that repertory. The string department was also depleted, and the advanced orchestra had to be disbanded in 1954. Once the cohort of advanced students left, the investment of years of program development went with them, and although loss in enrollment could be recouped simply by attracting new students, the loss in momentum, quality, level of advancement, and morale could not. Although the advanced orchestra resumed two years later, the group included nonstudent players recruited from the surrounding community.Footnote ⁷⁹

Director Allan Davis (1955–57) promoted a series of free-admission contemporary chamber music concerts under the leadership of Ralph Shapey.Footnote ⁸⁰ Shapey argued convincingly for the artistic merits and the prestige of the concerts, but, although musicians donated their services and the series brought prominent musicians to the school, the endeavor provided no financial return and attracted no students. Davis's departure marked yet another drop in enrollment.Footnote ⁸¹ Harris Danziger (director 1957–75) inherited a school that had lost a third of its student population.

External factors also played a part in decreasing enrollment and the difficulty of counteracting the trend. Following World War II, the population on the Lower East Side fell by 10 percent with each decade from 1950 until 1980, as people left the city for the suburbs.Footnote ⁸² The enclaves of Jewish and Italian immigrants whom Third Street had previously served were gone. In their place came an influx of new immigrants from Puerto Rico, China, and Ukraine, along with a cohort of young white people. The Lower East Side separated into geographic subdivisions containing these ethnic groups.

Puerto Ricans settled between Avenues A and D from Houston to Fourteenth Street, an area that they renamed “Loisaida,” while white descendents of European immigrants and newcomers, artists, and nonconformists populated the area west of First Avenue, which came to be called the “East Village.” Organizations established in Loisaida, such as the Real Great Society/Charas, the Young Lords, Pueblo Nuevo, and Nuyorican Poets Café were signs of a growing Hispanic community and culture adjacent to the white, bohemian East Village. An influx of Asian immigrants was advancing beyond Chinatown into the East Side below Houston Street.Footnote ⁸³ Third Street's clientele had never before included these groups, and they, for the most part, did not claim European concert music as a traditional part of their ethnic culture and did not come to the school on their own seeking lessons. Director Robert Ward noted in the Annual Report of 1953:

Little in Ward's training as a composer or in the musical and cultural attitudes of the early 1950s would have alerted him to the bias underlying his statement. Moreover, his primary concern was to explain the school's diminishing enrollment, not to make cultural comparisons. However, Ward also noted, with seeming unawareness of the implied criticism of his own institution, that the “grandchildren of earlier immigrants” could access “the finest teachers and training . . . at the expense of a subway token” and no longer attended Third Street in significant numbers.Footnote ⁸⁵ He made no mention of recruiting students from the new immigrant communities.

Indeed, the barriers separating the music school from these new immigrants extended beyond musical and cultural differences to include matters related to ethnic difference and economic disadvantage. Many Puerto Rican immigrants were more segregated than earlier immigrants because of shared ancestry and racial characteristics with African Americans.Footnote ⁸⁶ They took jobs as unskilled laborers with low pay and little potential for advancement. By 1970 a census report showed that a third of Lower East Side residents earned wages below the poverty line.Footnote ⁸⁷ Their circumstances were further aggravated by an economic downturn in the 1970s that plunged New York City into a fiscal crisis with devastating consequences for the Lower East Side. The national and local alliance formed to revitalize New York's corporate center withdrew safety and social welfare services from lower income minority areas while providing tax incentives to stimulate rebuilding in business areas and adjacent residential neighborhoods. Revitalization began in Midtown, and by 1975 it had spread into the East Village, but it did not extend to Loisaida. There minority workers, particularly hard hit by job losses and an eroding industrial base, yielded low tenant income. Driven by fears of irreversible urban decline and redlining by financial institutions, property owners ceased to maintain buildings, “milked” properties for rent, or abandoned them altogether, sometimes engaging in arson for hire to collect insurance. Between 1976 and 1979, there were 454 abandoned properties, mostly in Latino areas in proximity to renovations in the East Village. Population in the two most devastated census tracts fell from 15,000 in 1970 to less than 5,000 by 1980, and though both white and Latino populations decreased, the concentration of Latinos increased in proportion to whites.Footnote ⁸⁸

As in the past, poverty, loss of services, and inadequate housing led to overcrowding, crime, and juvenile delinquency. Streets, parks, vacant buildings, and empty lots were given over to crime and drugs. Educational levels on the Lower East Side were low, with the highest dropout rate among schools in the eastern blocks. These same areas had the highest percentage of unemployment and juvenile delinquency and the highest population of young people under eighteen years of age. By 1960 juvenile delinquency had risen by 118 percent over 1951 with a corresponding rise in the number of youth gangs.Footnote ⁸⁹ The Lower East Side attracted national attention when Mobilization for Youth, a program that began locally in 1957, received $12.6 million in federal funding in 1959.Footnote ⁹⁰ Mobilization for Youth was an influential precursor to Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty Community Action Program.

By the mid-1950s the Third Street Music School Settlement had neither provided social services nor addressed social issues in any systematic way for more than ten years. Decades of success in training students who avidly sought music lessons had not prepared the way for recruiting from a more reticent population that did not come for lessons of its own accord. With all efforts focused on conservatory-style music instruction, attention was diverted from the growing social problems in the surrounding neighborhood. A statement in the school's Annual Report for 1956–57, issued during the early phase of Mobilization for Youth, grasped at redefining “underprivileged” with apparent obliviousness to the material poverty and need of neighborhood residents: “In this era of prosperity, when so many seem to have leisure time, the word ‘underprivileged’ perhaps refers to the emotions.”Footnote ⁹¹ The Annual Report of 1958–59, speculating that the services of a settlement school had become unnecessary, manifested failure to recognize immigrants who did not represent a familiar type:

Throughout the 1960s, East Third Street and its surrounding neighborhood became increasingly inhospitable both to families bringing young children from outside the Lower East Side for lessons and to adults attending evening concerts. In 1969 the Hell's Angels motorcycle gang established its headquarters at 77 East Third Street, a few doors from the Music School,Footnote ⁹³ thus bringing the school into proximity with drug dealing, loud parties, noise from revving motorcycles, and occasional eruptions of violence (usually as a result of visits from out-of-town members). That they were credited by some with providing relative safety from muggings on East Third Street merely attested to the dangers of the surrounding neighborhood.

Additional stress on the neighborhood was brought by homelessness, which increased in the late 1960s and 1970s from various causes, including poverty, destruction of housing, economic crisis, and the deinstitutionalization of mental patients from city mental hospitals that released many into the streets. The city's Shelter Care Center for Men was located at 8 East Third Street, one block from the Music School. By 1972 this facility was serving 12,000 men annually, while nearby Vera Institute's Manhattan Bowery Project treated 3,000 men annually,Footnote ⁹⁴ and the Bowery Mission, Salvation Army, and McAuley Mission operated housing and dining facilities. Thus, an increasing number of homeless men suffering from poverty, mental illness, drug abuse, and alcoholism loitered on East Third Street between First Avenue and the Bowery, awaiting meals and shelter.

A Struggle for Survival

By the 1960s director Harris Danziger recognized a need to reorient the school and attract new students by initiating programs that responded to the social climate of the neighborhood and made use of innovative methodologies. His statement in the Annual Report of 1963–64 articulated for the first time in more than a decade the imperative of “integrating new ethnic groups into the mainstream of American life—or of paying the penalty for not doing it.”Footnote ⁹⁵ He supported Rock and Latin Jazz Workshops to reach out to teens and Latinos, the employment of more advanced students as teachers under faculty supervision, and the use of video technology in violin teaching.Footnote ⁹⁶ Except for Rock and Latin Jazz, these programs did not continue long beyond the departures during the 1970s of charismatic teachers—Tom Manoff, Ramon Rodriguez, Edmund Niemann, Lucy Shelton, Burton KaplanFootnote ⁹⁷—who designed, implemented, and in some cases supplied them with the necessary equipment. Other initiatives of Danziger's anticipated developments and programs of the late 1970s: He established musicianship classes using Orff methodology; he sent Third Street teachers out to local public schools to provide low-cost instrumental lessons to students in after-school programs that grew from 75 students in 1959 to 343 in 1965;Footnote ⁹⁸ and he started the informal, weekly student recital called the “Music Hour,” aimed at increasing student participation and making the recital experience familiar and comfortable for students—a program that continues today.

Adding to the problem of low enrollment, the school's buildings at 55 East Third Street, which had been in constant use since the early 1900s, now needed extensive renovation to meet modern safety regulations. Teaching rooms were small, and the building was inadequately fireproofed and poorly ventilated. In accordance with a decision of the managing Board, the Music School moved to a newly purchased building at 235 East Eleventh Street in 1974. This move encumbered the school with purchase and renovation costs associated with the new building along with the simultaneous expense of ownership, occupancy, and maintenance of the old buildings. The timing of these decisions coincided with the general economic downturn accompanied by interest rate volatility and the issuance of floating-rate financial instruments. A floating-rate mortgage taken on the new building made the school liable for high interest payments when the prime-lending rate rose to 21.5 percent by the end of 1980. In desperate circumstances, with enrollment at a low point and the endowment depleted, the Board of Directors acted with Robert Christensen (director from 1978 to 1984) to sell the top two floors of the new building to retire the mortgage debt.

Christensen undertook a multifaceted effort to restore financial stability and increase enrollment and community participation. In addition to personal appeals to private sources of financial support, Christensen hired a full-time development staff. To attract new students and their families, he revived and updated an old settlement idea: conducting music instruction within a framework that addressed social concerns. Christensen established new programs in Kódaly instruction for basic musicianship and augmented the piano and string programs through Suzuki instruction. These programs emphasized group activities and parental participation, thereby creating a social network that attracted and retained students as it enhanced student achievement. By 1981 enrollment had increased to 1,200. Noting a lack of music in surrounding public schools, Christensen launched Music Instruction on the Lower East Side (MILES), a program that brought nearby public school classes into Third Street and sent Third Street teachers into more distant public schools. The MILES program extended subsidized instrumental lessons to selected students from these classes as a means of attracting minority and lower income families who were unlikely to seek music lessons on their own. Christensen also reinstituted a community orchestra and a free-admission concert series, and he supported children's musical theater and composition classes.

The struggles of the 1970s gave way to recovery and renewed vibrancy during the 1980s and 1990s. Barbara Field, director from 1985 until 2006, focused on growth and stability, continuing many of Christensen's programs such as MILES, Kódaly, and Suzuki instruction while adding new ones. In twenty years as director, she successfully retained a large cohort of teachers, thus promoting a more stable student body and a corresponding significant gain in musical advancement. Under Field, the number of student orchestras increased from one to three, and student chamber music was re-established, thus bringing about more group interaction, introducing fresh and attractive musical repertory, and featuring performances in which students could display their skill before audiences that were increasingly composed of enthusiastic, knowledgeable fellow students and parents. The social aspects of these programs, mimicking the appeal of team sports, helped to retain teenaged pupils, who were both the more advanced and more likely to discontinue their lessons when faced with increasing academic demands of high school. As the student body grew in size and skill, the school-wide weekly Music Hour regularly lasted two hours or more. Field also built generous financial aid and scholarship programs as incentives to musical achievement and initiated aggressive fund-raising campaigns to rebuild the school's endowment.Footnote ⁹⁹

The Third Street Music School Settlement in the Twenty-First Century

As a result of measures taken in the 1980s and 1990s, the Third Street Music School Settlement as of 2007 reported an enrollment of more than 3,000 students and an annual budget of over $5 million. Students now come from all five boroughs of New York and beyond, but the majority are still residents of the Lower East Side. Increasing gentrification on the Lower East Side since the 1980s has brought more middle-class families to the Lower East Side who are able to pay the full price of instruction, and they are crucial to Third Street's fiscal health. The school continues to draw in students from low-income families through its MILES program and delivers $500,000 annually in financial aid.

The growth and stabilization of enrollment through the 1980s and 1990s capitalized on enhancing the appeal of music instruction by placing it in a context of building a community among diverse ethnic and economic groups. Third Street's revitalization efforts during these years were certainly aided by a strengthened economy and an influx of new residents. However, even in a more favorable climate, many other programs and activities competed with music lessons for the time and attention of young people. Moreover, few families are motivated by the possibility that their children might one day have musical careers to sustain the countless hours of practice and years of traveling to attend lessons and performances. Therefore, designing programs to have complementary social and artistic components is not simply a matter of settlement tradition; it has been important in recruiting and maintaining the loyalty of students and reflects the preferences of Third Street families.

Pursuing both aesthetic and social objectives means maintaining a difficult balance between different underlying concepts of music. In practical terms, aesthetic aims demand that students achieve excellence in performance, whereas social aims require providing a place to all who seek the benefit of membership in the community, whether or not they fulfill musical expectations. Yet a significant deficiency in either the aesthetic or social realm may threaten the long-term health of the other and impact negatively on both enrollment and financial support. Moreover, aesthetic and social approaches differ as to the value of music and the ultimate aims of musical instruction: aesthetic experience versus community building. Whereas overemphasizing social concerns risks obscuring the value of music as aesthetic experience, a sole focus on aesthetic goals risks losing people for whom shared experience is integral to a lifelong relationship with music. Just as during the 1930s different convictions regarding individual instrumental instruction and social music caused controversy within settlements, so contemporary instructional practices that are perceived as advancing purely aesthetic or social conceptions of music form a contested sphere among teachers and administrators possessing diverse training, experience, personalities, gifts, and ambitions. However, the travails and triumphs of the Third Street Music School Settlement over the past century show that, despite an inherent dualism, concepts of music as both aesthetic object and social service, have played necessary roles in Third Street's survival, sustaining each other through struggles where neither may have succeeded in isolation. Both are important features in the functioning of music at the grassroots level of a musical culture, and both remain visible in the daily operations of the School today.

Saturday is by far the busiest day at Third Street. An eager throng of nearly four hundred students accompanied by parents and siblings arrive in force at 9 a.m. and remain until well into the afternoon. In the course of this single day, hundreds of lessons are given, three orchestras rehearse, twenty chamber ensembles are coached, twenty-eight performance classes are conducted in piano, violin, and cello, ten classes in theory and composition meet, and at least two Music Hours with often an additional student recital or two take place. There are also preschool, dance, and art classes. All must fit in a building having one performance space, one dance studio, two large classrooms, twenty-four teaching studios, and three art rooms. Though the limitation of space often makes the building notably crowded and noisy, it also encourages interaction. A small courtyard in front of the building serves as a playground filled in fine weather with noisily frolicking children. People of all ages congregate in the first floor lobby and in hallways on the second and third floors, where they eat meals and snacks, read or converse, play cards and other games, draw and color, work at school homework, or simply “hang out.”

Music serves as a focal point for the satisfaction and benefits of social interaction; but social interaction, in turn, reinforces music by fostering commitment to the study and quality of music making. In New York City, parents could save time and effort by hiring teachers to travel to their homes, a more convenient option for many than traveling to the Lower East Side. Parents point out, however, that the isolation of home study can be dispiriting, whereas the social stimulation of a school—friendships with other students, weekly performances, and opportunities to play in ensembles along with their classes and lessons—is motivating. Thus a Third Street community exists, not merely as a product promoted by Third Street staff and teachers, but as the creation of the families who voluntarily contribute to it in return for a higher level of music making and a greater share of its long-term benefits. Parents themselves derive satisfaction from learning about music through their children and from social networking with other like-minded parents.

For immigrants, belonging to the Third Street community is emblematic of belonging in the larger community. Music provides the mechanism for this belonging, and thus it remains, as it was a century ago, a tool for assimilation. Furthermore, as in the past, using music to assimilate people produces a simultaneous assimilating effect upon the music itself, as demonstrated by the words of a Chinese mother of two young piano students. When asked whether she would prefer that her children learn traditional Chinese music, she responded: “They grow here, they go to school here. They don't really know the Chinese music. Even they watch TV, but it's all American! So I don't think it is a problem to learn American music. . . . I think it's great if they learn a different country's music. Like Beethoven! He's very famous!”Footnote ¹⁰⁰

This statement, stopping just short of conferring U.S. citizenship upon Beethoven, does not reflect ignorance of Beethoven's national origin but, rather, the power of context to create new ways of listening and new meaning. Music by Beethoven and many other composers is a customary constituent of Saturday Music Hour and a normal part of a communally shared experience that includes learning and accomplishment, self-realization, aesthetic pleasure, and fellowship with peers. In this context, Beethoven's music signifies belonging in Third Street, an extension and reinforcement of belonging in U.S. life and society.

As in earlier times, Third Street continues to enlist aid and support from professional musicians and bring students into personal contact with them. When Leontyne Price appeared at a benefit luncheon in 1991, she addressed the student piano quartet who came to perform at the event as “dream cakes,” a title they retained proudly for the remainder of that school year. Kurt Mazur conducted the student orchestra in conjunction with Third Street's Centennial Celebration in 1994.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Lang Lang paid a memorable visit to a summer Piano Ensemble Camp in July 2003. Philip Glass has performed his own music twice at Third Street, and in March 2006 he coached and attended a performance by the student orchestra of his music for Company. Footnote ¹⁰² In January 2008 the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center performed at Third Street and included two student ensembles on its program. These personal encounters with artists, who are otherwise unapproachable for many children, both symbolize to students and families their continuity with the wider musical culture that lies beyond Third Street and inspire some to seek a career in music. (Appendix 3 lists professional musicians who received instruction at Third Street.)

In his book Piano Roles, James Parakilas describes the piano as a “cultural go-between through which social spheres that stood in opposition to each other could nonetheless nourish each other.”Footnote ¹⁰³ Similarly, by introducing conservatory-style training among the tenements of the Lower East Side, the Third Street Music School Settlement extended the art of music into the ranks of the poor and working classes, helping to build a united community and promote mutually beneficial contact among people from different social and economic spheres. Changes in the social character of the Lower East Side have changed the criteria for taking in students, as well as the methods of attracting them and meeting their needs, but the school continues to strive for high-quality conservatory-style instruction. By fostering a culture in which musical training and social interaction are complementary, Third Street embodies a symbiotic relationship between contrasting views of music as aesthetic/cultural product and as social action/expression. Moreover, it draws individuals together as a community and connects them symbolically with a larger community transcending social, ethnic, and even temporal boundaries.

The power that lies in such symbolism and a sense of connection with the past became clear during an intensive Piano Ensemble Camp at the Third Street Music School Settlement that took place over two weeks in July 2007. They Shall Have Music was shown to about forty piano students, aged eight through fifteen. Students were immediately curious about this film, however dated, about a New York music school for children, and they recognized the opening shots of lower Manhattan and the Brooklyn Bridge. A palpable thrill of excitement went through the group when dialogue in the film revealed that the school was located “down on Third Street.” The students immediately took “Lawson Music School” to mean “Third Street Music School Settlement.” They watched and listened intently to Heifetz's performances. They nudged one another and laughed knowingly when Mr. Lawson, the orchestra conductor (Walter Brennan), stopped rehearsals and lessons to criticize and correct or to deal with a broken instrument. Students so identified with the plot and characters that, at the film's conclusion, they wanted to know if it presented a true story. The next day, as students were sharing lunch in the school's lobby, several of the younger children burst in among the group, shouting excitedly about a portrait that has hung for many years in the studio where they had been practicing, and which they now recognized for the first time. “It's Heifetz!” they exclaimed.