Third Street Music School Settlement
Founded in 1894, Third Street Music School is the oldest community school of the arts in the United States and traces its roots to the late 19th century settlement house movement. As part of this settlement movement in which young university graduates “settled” in poor, immigrant communities to improve the quality of life, Third Street originally employed live-in social workers and gave baths to children along with their music lessons. It was the unique inspiration of Third Street founder Emilie Wagner to make high quality music instruction the centerpiece of a community settlement house that also provided social services to the immigrant population of the Lower East Side.
In this context, music would provide a source of spiritual and cultural nourishment, inspire achievement in its young students, and serve a universal language to unite the community's Jewish, Irish, Italian, Russian, Greek, and Hungarian immigrants. Third Street soon grew to include an extensive library of books and music, a rooftop playground and a summer camp in New Jersey, and provided help with housing, employment and medical care. By 1915, Ms. Wagner's vision had inspired similar music school settlements in thirty American cities.
Over the years, graduates of Third Street have joined the rosters of major symphony orchestra and opera companies across the country. The School's most famous graduates include concert violinist and music educator Josef Gingold, and renowned songwriter Irving Caesar, whose more than 2,000 works include Tea for Two, Swanee and I Want to Be Happy.
Read more about Third Street Music School Settlement: Mission, Notable Faculty and Students, Early Benefactors
Famous quotes containing the words street, music, school and/or settlement:
“If the street life, not the Whitechapel street life, but that of the common but so-called respectable part of town is in any city more gloomy, more ugly, more grimy, more cruel than in London, I certainly dont care to see it. Sometimes it occurs to one that possibly all the failures of this generation, the world over, have been suddenly swept into London, for the streets are a restless, breathing, malodorous pageant of the seedy of all nations.”
—Willa Cather (18761947)
“I cannot say what poetry is; I know that our sufferings and our concentrated joy, our states of plunging far and dark and turning to come back to the worldso that the moment of intense turning seems still and universalall are here, in a music like the music of our time, like the hero and like the anonymous forgotten; and there is an exchange here in which our lives are met, and created.”
—Muriel Rukeyser (19131980)
“Im tired of playing worn-out depressing ladies in frayed bathrobes. Im going to get a new hairdo and look terrific and go back to school and even if nobody notices, Im going to be the most self-fulfilled lady on the block.”
—Joanne Woodward (b. 1930)
“The Settlement ... is an experimental effort to aid in the solution of the social and industrial problems which are engendered by the modern conditions of life in a great city. It insists that these problems are not confined to any one portion of the city. It is an attempt to relieve, at the same time, the overaccumulation at one end of society and the destitution at the other ...”
—Jane Addams (18601935)