Bruin Music Tutors offers free lessons to budding musicians at Daniel Webster Middle School

As snippets of songs from clarinets, basses and violins blend and clash, eighth-grader Elida Flores glides her bow across the strings of her instrument. Her tutor, fourth-year psychobiology student Connie Yang, sings the corresponding notes and taps her foot to the beat.

When Flores finishes playing her violin, Yang points at a sheet of music and outlines the rhythm. Both position their bows, ready to begin the piece again.

“When I perform finished pieces, I remember how my tutor helped me get there and helped me with the hard parts I had trouble with,” said Flores, a student at Daniel Webster Middle School.

Flores has learned about the violin through free music lessons offered by Bruin Music Tutors, a group of UCLA students.

The tutors provide weekly lessons for about 20 students in the band and orchestra at Daniel Webster, located a few miles from the UCLA campus.

The program began last year after Julia Selfridge, now a fourth-year psychobiology student, saw that some students in the Los Angeles Unified School District lacked the means to fully develop their musical skills.

Flores and many of her classmates cannot afford private music lessons or their own instruments. The music classes at Daniel Webster are also large enough that it can be difficult to make time for one-on-one instruction.

“(Students) love it, they come back every week,” said William Barrett, the school’s music teacher.

For the students at Daniel Webster, their worn school instruments and half-hour private lessons are precious.

One of Yang’s students, who Yang said was a loud troublemaker outside of the classroom, always remained quiet and attentive during his music lessons.

First-year biomedical engineering student Anna Nonaka recalled when her pupil, Elizabeth Becerra, gently laid her violin on a chair when she stood up to leave.

“It’s an old violin, but she treated it so carefully,” Nonaka said. “Where I grew up, people would take a $5,000 violin and throw it around.”

When Becerra, an eighth-grader, gets the chance to take a school violin home, she’ll spend up to 45 minutes practicing.

“I get so into the music, I don’t want to put the violin down,” she said.

Flores also immerses herself in music at home. In sixth grade, she spent her allowance on Beethoven CDs.

She had just started playing the violin at the time and wanted to hear how other people performed, especially since the sound of strings was foreign to her.

“When I heard music on the radio, I never thought there was more music than drums and guitars,” Flores said. Two years later, she’ll still place a Beethoven disc in her CD player, put on her headphones and tune out the world.

“It just has this power to it where the instruments pop out. It’s like my inspiration,” Flores said.

As the Daniel Webster students fall in love with music, UCLA students rekindle an old romance. A number of the tutors played an instrument growing up, but did not have the opportunity to play regularly with others in college.

“I didn’t want to drop my instrument, but I had no time or desire to put in six hours of symphony practice and practice outside of that,” Selfridge said.

For Selfridge, tutoring provides an opportunity to play for pleasure while also helping students like her ““ students who plan to continue making music. Flores said she hopes to one day have a career as a violinist.

“I feel music should be everywhere,” she said. “Music can inspire people to do good in the world.”

In the classroom at Daniel Webster, Flores’ lesson is almost over. Yang shows her how to properly position the bow of a violin and tells her to practice before their next tutorial.