Robert P. Commanday, Editor

Last week Isaac Stern came to the Bay Area and, for once, did not play the violin. He talked instead, something that he's also very good at. Though here on a book tour, flogging his newly published autobiography, My First 79 Years (Alfred A. Knopf), his central message Thursday evening was arts education for the young. His audience of 500 at the Osher Jewish Community Center in San Rafael heard the artist in his famous other role as advocate and crusader, urging the parents and grandparents to "get up and yell...[otherwise] "nothing will happen."

As far as most in that audience were concerned, he was preaching to the choir, of course, urging that we "insist on quality, that the children should know and play music, art, in the same way that they learn to play sports and to win." Everyone there was happily in agreement as this eminent artist and spokesman said, "Arts education is a basic necessity for a civilized life. There are young people around you, at 4, 5 6 ,7--the whole future of the United States as a civilized nation lies in the heads of those kids... Every child can be expert, to what degree and in what discipline, you never know.

"But imagine what a world it would be if teachers, primarily from kindergarten through eighth grade, the critical years, if those teachers were the members of the highest paid and most respected profession.... Children who are taught music from the age of five, [develop from it] all their abilities, memory, logic, math. If there is something that makes the art form natural to them, then the kids' minds open up like flowers. And if each of us does not take a sense of responsibility, then we deserve that they're not going to live in a civilized United States."

Truer words can't be uttered, nor a more persuasive advocate found, but it's hard to imagine some or a few of that audience, having enthusiastically applauded, going out and acting on Stern's urging. We are like that.

The crucial arts education activists are individual parents taking responsibility for their own kids, encouraging, supporting, and insisting that their children take lessons and practice, finding the best teacher, staying with it, following through until (best case scenario) that moment when the child finds his instrument's "voice" and, discovering his own necessary love for music, is prepared to take it from there. That's what happened to Stern, as he notes in his autobiography, and that's what happens at the artistic birth moment of every artist, large and small.

Properly we look to the schools, and despite the artistic poverty in the picture, there are, Stern pointed out, a "thousand points of light" represented by the individual singular schools around the country. "There' s an [exceptional] school here, a school there, because some people in the administration of those schools and the parents have insisted on having something at the top value of what the kids need, not what we think they need." But school music, too, has to start with the parents and parental follow-through, then look to the pitifully few public school music teachers as the last hope for involving youth in music.

More important, then, to heed this senior statesman, America's most honored and decorated classical performing artist, when he says, "The question is to get teachers to know as much as possible and give them every support, including financial security and independence . Mayor Giuliani and School Superintendent Rudy Crewes have said they intend to put arts back into the curriculum of 1000 primary and secondary schools in New York, and it's on its way, but what I haven't seen is who's going to teach. Go out and make other people care."

Stern has another vision to implement and extend his own teaching, by "using television, the instrument that's causing the problem, using it for our purposes. I'd love, for example, to be able from my home in Connecticut, to have simultaneous classes with kids in San Francisco, Beijing, Paris, Moscow and Tel Aviv. The advantage is that we are able with these modern mechanisms to get to so many people simultaneously, so that each of these teachers [reached that way] can handle 1000 times more than I could if I had a hundred lives. It can spread not only the value of music but how to teach, how to get into the heads of their young charges, how to explain to many violin teachers to teach their charges to use their instruments to make music, not to use music to play an instrument." His model for that was Naoum Blinder, the San Francisco Symphony's concertmaster with whom Stern studied from age 12 to 17, and with no one else since. "You learned from him how to become your own person," he wrote in the book, "he gave me the greatest thing, he taught me how to learn," he said Thursday night.

The story of Stern's performing for the intensely music-hungry people of Israel during its wars, retold in the book, is connected to his discovery and encouragement of the young, emerging Itzhak Perlman, Pinchas Zukerman, Yefim Bronfman, and to the teaching he has done wherever he's gone. Clearly it has nourished him. That was apparent in the Academy Award-winning documentary film "From Mao to Mozart," the 20th anniversary of which he will celebrate in two weeks when he travels to Beijing in two weeks. In the celebratory concert there, he will play the Mozart G major concerto and the slow movement of the Brahms Concerto, both of which he played in the film, and with the same conductor.

"Additionally there is going to be the Beethoven Triple Concerto," he added, "with the cellist -- if any of you who saw the film saw in the last scene the little boy with the scab on his knee who played the cello, very touchingly -- his name is Hwang Jiang. [He is now] a first rate solo player, around the world, today. The conductor for that part of the concert is my younger son, David." The announcement of this trip is good news for it resolves the cliff-hanger in the book's epilog, which left the reader not knowing how pending surgery for an incapacitating carpal tunnel syndrome in Stern's bow arm would come out. It worked. He has been rehabilitating the arm and will play again, and teach and teach.