Making Music Leap to Life

PBS presents Beethoven and the Beach Boys

The bass guitars of a hard-rock group twang as psychedelic colors splash on the screen. An enraged housewife looms before the viewer, curlers in her hair and hands over her ears. "Turn that noise down!" she bellows, and the insistent pounding fades.

A buxom diva trills in a concert hall. Suddenly--zap!--she loses the melody and desperately summons the "Melody Doctor." Enter a Groucho Marx double, complete with cigar and leer. To the tune of outrageous one-liners, he re-creates the missing melody, placing huge notes on a blackboard.

Such skits add an engaging beat to Music, the entertaining--and educational --new public television series aimed at older elementary school children that began airing last Saturday night. Produced by WETA station in Washington, the ten half-hour shows--which will be available for use in schools after their ten-week PBS run--combine the high orchestral quality of Leonard Bernstein's celebrated children's concerts with spoofs inspired by Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In. Their purpose, says brash Host Murry Sidlin, 37, is to create consciousness raising in music. Sidlin, who conducts the National Symphony Orchestra in the series, believes "young people are visually sophisticated but often musically illiterate. By using TV we can help the eye lead the ear."

Unlike earlier music programs for children, this one does not toe the classical line. In an allegro collage that threatens the viewer with musical vertigo, the initial program arcs from the Beach Boys to Beethoven, Indian sitar music to music of the Renaissance, the Vienna Boys Choir to the Olympia Brass Band of New Orleans. In subsequent episodes, the series settles down to explore the major elements of music: rhythm, melody, harmony, style. Sidlin provides comic relief as, at a flick of his baton, he changes from conductor to the Melody Doctor or to the loudmouthed host of What's That Rhythm?, a talk-show parody. Each program ends on an upbeat, with excerpts from such masterpieces as Sibelius' Finlandia and Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition.

Funded by a $480,000 research grant from the U.S. Office of Education and $300,000 from the Allied Chemical Corp., Music was exhaustively researched for over two years to discover, among other things, what kids did and did not know about the subject. Its primary goal, says the WETA team, is to combat the lack of music education in schools today. "The state of teaching is at best haphazard," says Sidlin, who taught in public schools for seven years and has subsequently entertained young audiences at over 350 youth concerts. "In some schools now they must justify retaining a music teacher by saying that songs help teach math or reading or science," he complains. "But what in the world is the matter with teaching music for music's sake?"

The WETA production crew is now deep into planning a second Music series --"the Son of Music," quips Sidlin. Their efforts could not have enjoyed better timing. Last week President Carter introduced into Congress a bill that would authorize more than $1 billion for such public television programming over the next five years.

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