Reaching Every Child Who Wants to Make Music

Twelve-year-old Celeste walked into the Neighborhood Music School in Boyle Heights in 2019 wanting to belt out Broadway tunes. Seven years later, she is in her first year of college and was just accepted into the highly competitive LA Youth Philharmonic summer program. Now she sings opera, in Italian and Spanish, on full scholarship.

Neighborhood Music School has been making transformations like Celeste’s possible since 1914, when a pianist and composer named Carrie Stone Freeman founded what was then called the Los Angeles Music School Settlement. Almost 20 years later, the school moved into a Victorian house on South Boyle Avenue and forever changed the community and how music is taught. 

“Suddenly she’s learning Italian, she’s learning Spanish, she’s learning all of these things, and she’s amazing,” says Karen Louis, the school’s executive director. Celeste is one of more than 4,000 students Neighborhood Music School serves across Los Angeles County each year, including through outreach programs that take the school’s mission well beyond the Victorian’s walls.

Standard tuition today is just $68 a month. The school’s robust scholarship program brings it as low as $5, or to nothing at all. Most weeks, the Victorian runs at its 450-student capacity.

Music as Human Connection

As demand grows, the Neighborhood School has begun expanding to serve more students and reach a broader community. The largest of the school’s recent expansions is its role as the Los Angeles implementation partner for the D’Addario Foundation’s national Immersive Music Challenge, a multi-year study of what consistent after-school music instruction does for elementary students in lower-income neighborhoods. The program begins in second grade and follows each cohort through fifth. 

The school’s reach extends in other directions, too. At the John Tracy Center in West Adams, Neighborhood Music School’s teaching artists bring weekly music instruction to toddlers and preschoolers with hearing loss. The school has also partnered with USC Keck Bionic Ear Lab and their Cochlear Implant Music Hour to help adults navigate their devices and rebuild their relationship with music. Some of those participants were musicians before they lost their hearing.

“It’s all human connection,” Louis says. “It’s all connecting ourselves to music, to our humanity, and to our joy. That’s the thing that brings it together.”

Nowhere is that human connection more potent than in the classrooms of the Victorian itself where teachers, like Frank, a local musician who grew up in Guatemala and the United States, bring out the best in their students. Frank regularly drifts to the corner of a group class and sits beside the one student who is struggling to help them find their way. 

“His strength is going one-on-one within the classroom,” Louis says. “That’s really where he connects. It’s just beautiful to watch.” Frank’s story is, in Louis’s telling, not unusual. “While there’s all this amazing stuff happening with the students, it’s also the teaching artists who become deeply impacted by this work.”