Settlement Music School

If music is a rearrangement of something gone before, David Sanford's sources are as eclectic as Mahler's. The 29-year-old Pittsburgh native heard his Chamber Concerto No. 3 premiered Monday by Speculum Musicae in the new music series at the Settlement Music School. Sanford explained before the performance that he was grappling with 12-tone writing and its tonal applications and, in this work, with his flirtation with Schumann's Manfred, and with an irresistible tune - and its harmonic implications - by Charlie Mingus and Jack Walrath.

The Settlement Music School in Philadelphia has received the largest grant in its history - $1 million - to expand an innovative program for the handicapped that provides 800 students with therapy, education and social interaction. The $1 million grant is from the Samuel and Rebecca Kardon Foundation in Philadelphia, which is headed by Emanuel S. Kardon, chairman of American Packaging Co. and a longtime supporter of the 78-year-old school. "We just received the grant this month; it is specifically for our nationally recognized program for the handicapped," said James McClelland, director of development at the school, whose main branch is at 416 Queen St. in South Philadelphia.

Settlement Music School has done something it has rarely had to do in its 102-year history: hire a new executive director. Helen Eaton, 40, president and executive director of the Chicago Children's Choir, has been named to succeed Robert Capanna, who retired Dec. 31 after a 27-year tenure. When she starts at the end of August, Eaton will be only the sixth director of the school. The move from a children's choir to a community music school is not as far a leap as it might seem. The Chicago group serves more than 2,800 singers in its choirs and through programs in 45 schools.

Whatever stereotypes are current about Russian string playing were jostled last night when cellist Misha Quint and pianist Dmitri Rachmanov played their local debuts at the Settlement Music School. Quint, 30-year-old Leningrad native, and Rachmanov, 32, a Muscovite, had specialized in new Soviet music before leaving to take up residence in New York. Their program last night, sponsored by the Network for New Music, included the first local performance of Alfred Schnittke's Sonata, as well as the premiere of Philadelphian Matthew Greenbaum's Ordre (1990)

Of all the former students of Settlement Music School who have been chosen for the centennial-celebrating Settlement 100, a selection of alums with interesting postgraduation stories to relate, Robert Capanna, the school's executive director, nominates John Blake as "Mr. Settlement Music School. " Not only did the jazz violinist attend the school, but so did his four brothers and sisters. And Blake has returned many times throughout the years to help promote music education for young people.

THE CHANTS from families whose children attend Penn Alexander School were simple and blunt. "Ten more in! Ten more in!" the 60 adults and children yelled Wednesday outside a University Council meeting at the University of Pennsylvania. The group braved the chilly temperatures to demand that 10 students, wait-listed to attend the prestigious K-to-8 school under a new district-imposed lottery system, be allowed to enroll. "Broken Compact, Broken Families, Broken Community" read one sign.

Although most schools in the area were closed Monday for Presidents' Day, the halls of the Philadelphia High School for Girls were filled with the sounds of aspiring young musicians and singers belting notes in a foreign language and pounding on drums. The high school hosted the first Philadelphia Festival of Young Musicians, an all-day music program featuring more than 200 third- to sixth-grade students from city public, private, and charter schools who gathered to rehearse and then perform in a concert.

If you combed through the piano recital programs of the coming year and put the most forbidding pieces into one concert, you'd have Ieva Jokubaviciute's recital Thursday at Settlement Music School. In the program, titled " New Century, New Paths" and presented by the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, this fully matured Lithuanian pianist skillfully guided one's ears through Debussy, Schoenberg, Scriabin, Janacek, and Berg in performances that confidently created a trajectory from which all the composers benefited.

Anthony Patrick Coppa, 85, of Merion, a mechanical engineer who also played piano and counseled troubled children at the Youth Study Center, died of natural causes Monday, Oct. 8, at his home. Mr. Coppa spent more than 40 years as an engineer, specializing in structures. He worked for Westinghouse and General Electric in Valley Forge. He was born in Philadelphia on March 22, 1927, the son of Nicola and Felicia Coppa, immigrants from Italy. Mr. Coppa, who grew up in South Philadelphia, attended public schools, graduating from Central High School.

Settlement Music School appointed Karin Miller Orenstein branch director of its West Philadelphia branch. Orenstein is a former faculty member of Settlement and taught piano at the 105-year-old school's Germantown and Camden branches. TMG Health Inc. , a King of Prussia firm that handles claims administration and other services for Medicare, Medicaid, and other health plans nationwide, promoted Shawn Reed to director of financial planning and analysis. He had been a senior financial analyst.

The train ride to the Majdanek concentration camp killed several of the Jews who had survived the 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising. To avoid dying of thirst in a packed boxcar, the 25-year-old Marian Filar licked his own sweat. And on the day he arrived at Majdanek, he had no shame in lapping, like an animal, from a puddle on the ground. Still, how did he survive? "I wonder myself," Mr. Filar told Inquirer music critic David Patrick Stearns in a 2003 interview. On Tuesday, July 10, Marian Filar, 94, a concert pianist who from the 1950s to the 1980s was a music teacher, first at Settlement Music School and then at Temple University, died at his home in Wyncote.

Dorothy Kulp Gerson, 99, a former music teacher at Springside School in Chestnut Hill, died Dec. 30, of respiratory failure at Spring House Estates, the retirement community in Lower Gwynedd. A memorial service was set for 1 p.m. Thursday, March 22, in the auditorium at the Estates, 728 Norristown Rd., Lower Gwynedd. Born in Philadelphia, Mrs. Gerson graduated from Germantown High School in 1930 and earned an associate degree in music at a junior college in Massachusetts in 1932.

  Miguel Ficher was a research chemist at hospitals in St. Louis and Philadelphia, but a 1995 article in The Inquirer profiled him foremost as a musical researcher. After all, the story reported, he was the son of Jacobo Ficher, "the Russian-Argentine composer and conservatory director of enormous prominence in Argentina. " Because of that heritage, music critic Daniel Webster wrote, Dr. Ficher set out in 1987 "to create a dictionary of Latin American classical composers to complete the pantheon in which his father would be a prominent member.

Charlie Birnbaum and Rollin Wilber walked down the long hallway, wondering what they'd find at the end. They stopped outside the apartment door when they heard the Steinway. "It's a mazurka," Charlie whispered. Their old professor was playing Chopin, his favorite. The men lingered. Chopin's sublime music can stir the heart. What they heard, however, was the music of a frail old man, 93, with dementia, who stumbled and hit wrong notes and forgot to use the pedals.

Fests: 1 controversial, 1 not While controversy rages over rebranding the 48-year-old Puerto Rican Festival as the "Latino Arts and Cultural Festival," there is a smaller, unrelated Latino festival ready to dance into town this weekend with no controversy at all. Longtime Puerto Rican community activists, including Wilfredo Rojas and former City Councilman Angel Ortiz, are meeting today to decide how to stop the social services agency Concilio from...