Music: Settlement Schools

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 piano. Now headed by a lanky Uruguayan violinist, Enrique (“Hank”) Caroselli, it has two remodeled Greenwich Village houses, teaches more than 600 children and adults. Fees for lessons in voice, violin, piano begin at 50¢, are shaved or even waived for the needy. Like most settlement schools, Greenwich House is less interested in training professional musicians than in teaching music as an avocation. But it is proud—just as Chicago’s Hull House is of Benny Goodman and Manhattan’s Music School Settlement is of Pianist Ray Lev—of having produced one professional comer: Dante Fiorillo, Pulitzer and Guggenheim-winning (four times) composer.