Button-eyed, sheepish-smiling Sylvia Foodim, 8, smoothed her dress, perched herself at a big piano, gravely played Beethoven and Schumann, rattled through a Schubert scherzo. She was the youngest. A dozen other dressed-up girls, and one boy, took their turns at the piano. Thus Manhattan's Greenwich House Music School exhibited, in a formal recital, what its piano department is doing for slum children. In the springtime, as their year closes, many of the 50-odd settlement music schools in the U.S. give concerts for friends and potential benefactors.
Greenwich House Music School was founded 35 years ago, in one room with one pupil, one...