By Kelsey Sharpe
LOS ANGELES — Public K-12 schools have been in a constant struggle to scrape together funding for music programs, decimated by budget cuts. So you can imagine how surprised a large number of middle and high school teachers were when they found out that their 3,000 students could get professional choral training for a song.
That’s all the payment Rebecca Lord, associate director of choral activities in the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music, asks of students in the L.A. area schools who want to participate in the UCLA Choral Outreach Program that is wrapping up its inaugural year in June.
Lord, who received her Doctorate of Musical Arts in conducting from UCLA in 2011, regularly visits public schools to lead free choral clinics and master classes to train young voices. Then, as a way of introducing them to the opportunities higher education offers them, Lord brings them to campus to watch choral groups at UCLA in action as they practice and perform.
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