Add Joy to Learning

Add Joy to Learning, Inc. (AJL) Began With Musician's Need to Help Inner City Youth

Like the air they breathe, music is all around the young people of the big city who thrive on its relevancy. It reaches them and surrounds them like no other media. But can the music they follow so attentively day in and day out be reached by them? For many the answer has been no because of a lack of familiarity with the business.

Audrey Levine's Add Joy to Learning, Inc. after-school program makes dreams about careers in the music industry possible. She ought to know because when she founded the program, Audrey herself was trying to tap into a particular art form, which seemed to be tantalizingly close and yet seemingly out of reach.

Inspiration for opening up a course for enthusiastic music fans began like many others. It appeared on paper and the author of that paper, Audrey Levine said to herself, "Hey, you know what? This could work in real life and serve the inner city youth." The paper she had written was a marketing thesis completed near the end of her own studies in the late 1980's at New York University. She admits the paper didn't result in such a terrific grade, but the idea was worth pursuing.

Audrey was a product of the suburbs and the special problems of inner city youth at first seemed light years from her life experiences. But she had moved into midtown Manhattan and was knocking on doors of music publishers, record companies and radio stations because she was a musician wanting to be heard.

AJL got off the ground when by chance, an accountant and an attorney, both working in the New York music scene, heard Audrey's pitches at a couple of music workshops. They were as enthusiastic as she was, and with their know-how, AJL became a non-profit society attracting youth to her classes, now held at Manhattan Comprehensive Night and Day High School.

Each Friday afternoon, students from throughout the New York area make their way to the AJL classes, which offer for them inside information from professionals behind the acts the young people will be plugged into as soon as they exit the auditorium. AJL is singularly unique because of its emphasis on learning about the business behind the making of compact discs.

Audrey gauged correctly the need for filling in information gaps beyond the playing and singing. Everybody wants to be a performer. There were enough programs for that, but urban kids did not realize there are so many other things that can be done. Most people involved in the music business are not musicians. They are audio engineers, producers, accountants, attorneys, music publishers, and several other business professions.

One of the students was particularly interested in learning the business of managing musicians and AJL has provided plenty of background on that rather difficult discipline.

What makes AJL so special is that the participants go out of their way to cross great sections of New York to be at Audrey's sessions without the obligation of a school credit. "They are amazingly attentive because the subject matter is of great interest to them. They love coming to class and they want to know what business skills are behind the marketing and production of their favorite artists," Levine notes. "Among the students currently attending the class, about half of them would be quite serious about their career moves."

The young enthusiasts may be part of an enormous listening audience of music now. Their goal is to be much more than an audience.

FOR MORE INFORMATION CONTACT:

Audrey J. Levine, Director
P. O. Box 1214 Stuyvesant Station, New York, NY 10009
(212) 995-1137
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