Building on hope, not only for city's children, but also for all orchestras

Thompson says benefits beyond music are showing up in Tune Up Philly's first class, benefits the program will attempt to quantify.

"We're going to show what's happening academically, in their attitudes, their attendance, their relationships with parents and the school," he said. "We're going to do a very rigorous evaluation."

Tune Up Philly, largely underwritten so far by local philanthropist Carole Haas Gravagno, is still trying to complete funding for its first three years of operation in a single school. But if Philadelphia embraced the idea on a scale commensurate with its promise, the city would be dreaming even bigger.

Let's talk about what $100 million could do. Following standard nonprofit financial practice, $100 million placed in an endowment would generate $5 million a year in income, which would support at least 20 Tune Up Philly sites around the city. That's still a long way from putting full-time music education back in all 176 of the city's public elementary schools. But it would be a start - a highly visible one that could be built upon.

Gifts of that sort are not unprecedented. I suspect $100 million invested in Tune Up Philly would do more than the $100 million pledge by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to the Newark, N.J., public school system. It stands to succeed more promisingly than the $500 million Walter Annenberg aimed at education reform in the 1990s.

And generosity on that scale might soon seem almost quaint. In August, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett said they had extracted pledges from more than 30 billionaires to give away at least half their fortunes. That's an enormous amount of money looking for a destination. Why not Philadelphia?

The wealth is there and so, presumably, is the will to effect big change. That change wouldn't happen overnight. But if Tune Up Philly follows the trajectory of its impressive first three months, it won't be long before Philadelphia achieves Thompson's wonderfully economical articulation of the program's grand vision:

"Orchestras everywhere."

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