Ruth Cogen, Diana Engel and Jackie Marlin, right, established the Levine School of Music 50 years ago. Courtesy of Levine School of Music

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Last year Ruth Cogen and her friend Jackie Marlin had a moment of pride as they sat in the audience of the Kennedy Center.

The star of Porgy and Bess was singer Alyson Cambridge, a former student at the Levine School of Music, founded in 1976 by Cogen, 90, Marlin, 94 and the late Diana Engel.

“It was amazing. I had watched Alyson as a young girl taking lessons and singing, so it was just amazing to see her performing in Porgy and Bess,” Cogen said.

This year the Levine School of Music, Washington’s premier community music school, celebrates 50 years with a gala on April 20.

With five campuses throughout the DMV, the school has helped launch many music careers.

“I’ve had a 25-year career in the opera world, and that certainly started at Levine,” said Cambridge, who started taking voice lessons at the school’s D.C. location when she was in middle school. “It had a tremendous influence on my career. They’ve been encouraging me since I was 13.”

How it started

More than 50 years ago, after Cogen moved from New York to Washington, D.C., she was surprised to find there was no major music school in the area.

One day her friend Diana Engel called her and said, “You know, this town needs a good music school, and we should start one.”

So Cogen, Engel and Marlin (a trio of New York transplants) pooled their money — $100 per family — and set up a nonprofit music school. They named it after a friend, Selma Levine, an attorney and piano player who had just died in a car accident.

Levine School of Music officially opened in September 1976 with 15 students in a small brick church on Massachusetts Avenue Northwest.

Marlin, who with Engel was co-director, reached out to the area’s professional musicians, asking them to teach lessons. Somehow she convinced National Symphony Orchestra musicians and local university professors to teach part-time at Levine. “

All it took was nerve,” Marlin said. “We decided we would pay our faculty really well so we could get the best teachers.”

When word got around that D.C.’s new music school hired talented teachers, more students signed up — and the school won a grant from the Meyer Foundation.

Once the ball got rolling, it was clear that the school would succeed, Marlin said. “This wasn’t some cuckoo idea of ours, though we thought it might well be. But obviously there was a need.”

By the second semester, Cogen said, “We had doubled the enrollment. We were teaching on top of the baptismal font and in the nursery school with all the cribs.”

Today, the Levine School of Music teaches lessons to more than 4,000 students at its five locations: Silver Spring, Maryland; West Falls Church, Virginia; Southeast D.C.; Strathmore; and its flagship location in Friendship Heights in Upper Northwest D.C.

When Cogen and her friends started the music school, they never dreamed they would be launching opera stars or Grammy winners.

“Our concept when we started was clearly not that everybody’s going to be a professional musician, but we were building audiences,” Cogen said.

Notable alumni

The school’s alumni range from professional musicians like Cambridge to members of its board of trustees, a cast of luminaries in the music field.

“There’s nothing like Levine,” said Toyin Spellman-Diaz, a Grammy-winning oboe player who started taking lessons at Levine when she was 14 years old in the 1980s.

“It’s unparalleled compared to the other community music schools I’ve seen all over the country,” she said, adding, “There are so many locations of it — that’s very unusual. It has much more reach.”

As a member of the Levine orchestra, Spellman-Diaz performed for George H.W. Bush, she recalled.

“My teachers were incredible,” she said, noting that she studied with Richard White of the National Symphony Orchestra.

“He took me under his wing and began to develop the refinement of oboe playing that led me to major in music in college and go on to be a professional musician,” she said.

Securing a headquarters

Over the years, as Levine’s popularity grew, the organization has had to expand. In 1984, Levine’s main practice hall was a rented convent behind the Duke Ellington School of the Arts — a former dormitory for nuns.

“We were outgrowing that, and we kept saying, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we had our own building?’” Cogen said.

They found the ideal building on Upton Street in Upper Northwest. Located on more than four acres near Rock Creek Park, the former Geophysical Laboratory of the Carnegie Institute was grand — it’s a 1906 Mediterranean Renaissance revival building — but had many small rooms that were perfect for music lessons.

Levine’s Board of Trustees raised the money to purchase the property for $2.3 million in 1992. Seven years later, they completed an $8.9 million renovation of the building.

Today music flows from behind almost every door at Levine’s flagship location, which houses 30 teaching studios, a recording studio and an auditorium.

Marlin and Cogen visit from time to time; Marlin is on the board of trustees, and Cogen is on its council of advisors. Cogen also stays busy as the co-chair of the music committee at Ingleside at Rock Creek, a retirement community not far from Levine’s headquarters.

Looking back, Marlin is amazed at what she and her friends accomplished.

“We did the whole thing by the seat of our pants. We didn’t know what we were doing, but there were three of us, and we could bounce ideas off each other,” Marlin said. “And it worked.”

Correction: The print version of this story misnamed the Meyer Foundation. We regret the error.