The children’s string program at the Brownsville/George Ramirez Performing Arts Academy downtown got a major boost with the delivery of about $50,000 worth of musical instruments Friday morning.
The 80 or so violins, violas, cellos and basses donated by the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley will be assigned to students on the waiting list for the string program.
Hilda Ledezma, executive program director for the academy, said the program had enough instruments for 20 children thanks to donations from various individuals. But thanks to UTRGV and the Brownsville Society for the Performing Arts, the program could boast as many as 100 students from low- to moderate-income families “who could only dream of having these types of instruments, because they’re very expensive,” she said.
“I have no words to express the joy that I have,” Ledezma said.
“Right now we have our Paper Orchestra,” she said. “Paper Orchestra is for the little kids interested in the program. They work with their parents to build their own little paper violin. They not only learn the anatomy of the instrument, but they learn how to take care of it and how important it is. … Then eventually they graduate to a real instrument. So this is going to allow us to graduate more children to an actual instrument.”
Michael Quantz, UTRGV professor of music and BSPA president, said it’s taken about five years to actually get the instruments delivered. They were originally acquired through a grant written by Sue Zanne Urbis, now-retired chair of the university’s music department, and Martha Placeres, a graduate student at the time and now director of Orchestra and String Studies at Florida Southern College.
“It was a $60,000 grant to get stringed instruments into the hands of kids in Brownsville,” Quantz said. “They were successful. We got the program and then we had an outreach through the music academy with UT Brownsville (now UTRGV). But when we changed over to a new institution then we didn’t have the space for that program any longer.”
The instruments went into storage. Then about four years ago Quantz showed them to Kurt Martinez, director of the UTRGV School of Music. The men agreed that getting the instruments where they belonged was long overdue.
“So we started asking around and we went up to the provost, Dr. Janna Arney, finally,” Quantz said. “She said, ‘Well, that sounds great. We should do that. And then she immediately came back and said, ‘Oh, this is going to be really hard.’”
As a state institution, the university “can’t just donate stuff,” he said.
“She and her crew worked for about four weeks with the UTSystem, all these attorneys and all this stuff to figure out how we could do it,” Quantz said. “They figured it out. They didn’t tell us. The description would have been too scary for us. They said, ‘OK, it’s all done. Do it.’”
Then came the pandemic and everything ground to a halt. Now, with enough people vaccinated, they decided the time was right, Quantz said.
Most of the instruments are used and half- or three-quarter size to fit small hands. A few require minor repairs and all of them need new strings — roughly a $1,600 investment. Still to come are a couple of basses, a cello and a “fist full of bows,” Quantz said.
“This is the first time in Brownsville that a large number of children will have this opportunity, especially the under-served children of our community,” Quantz said. “There’s no other way they could afford these kind of instructional moments on pretty expensive instruments. The average cost of one of these instruments is $600.
“The great thing about this is the instruments that Dr. Urbis and Dr. Placeres chose to purchase are very high quality student instruments. … The first time a student draws the bow across the string they will know what a quality instrument sounds like. … That is really priceless because they’ll carry that with them throughout the whole course of what they do with the instruments.”
Brownsville’s first youth symphony could happen “sooner than we might think,” he said.
Teaching music to underprivileged kids was a high priority of the academy’s namesake, George Ramirez, who led its creation in the former Stegman Building and co-founded the BSPA, which Ramirez headed at the time of his death in 2019.
“In fact the upstairs was designed specifically to start a string orchestra,” Quantz said. “I thought about him all morning long.”
Martinez said he’s happy the instruments were finally able to be donated.
I’m extremely excited about the ramifications of this,” he said. “This is really what it’s all about. It’s about building community, integrating art in the community and bettering the community through art.”
