* A cartoon of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, wigged head atop a diapered baby's body and looking like a cutout escapee from Monty Python's Flying Circus, sits before a piano, preparing to demonstrate the sheer brilliance of his composition;

* An assortment of feet, in various modes of shoes, socks and sandals, tap to an engaging beat, demonstrating the physical dimensions of something called tempo;

* An outrageous bird, whose hairdo bears a striking resemblance to a certain Mr. Beethoven, lays an egg which hatches a moment later, revealing a tuba.

No, these are not the deranged dreams of a musicologist, but the images of a visual and auditory phantasmagoria for children which its creators hope will soon become the vanguard of a revolution in musical education.

The goals of "Symphony Sam," a projected 30-minute television show and educational video, are ambitious but simple -- to create in young children a basic understanding of, appreciation for and, perhaps, the desire to create, classical music.

Chief among those who are putting finishing touches on the show's pilot segment is the producer, a name familiar to many Denverites: Carole Katchen.

Katchen, a Denver native and former resident, has been highly regarded for her eclectic artistic endeavors since she was a teenager. For decades, her many Denver friends, patrons and clients have watched her progress from writing to painting to sculpture to dance to film -- and find success virtually every step of the way.

Next on her agenda -- "Symphony Sam" -- the pilot episode of which is expected to premier this autumn on Arkansas public television. Katchen has high hopes for the show, envisioning regional or even national PBS distribution. She is also planning for grant and donation funding to enable the show, in video or DVD, to become part of elementary schools' music curricula.

Now a resident of Hot Springs, Ark., Katchen currently runs a film production company, Basset Hound Productions, which she co-founded with close friends and fellow Arkansans, Richard and Laura Rosenberg, conductor and executive director respectively of the Hot Springs Music Festival.

Although there are "a great many ideas" waiting in the wings for Basset Hound Productions, Katchen told the Intermountain Jewish News during a recent visit to Denver, its efforts are presently given over to the "Symphony Sam" project.

Its philosophical premise --"Classical music is the birthright of every child" -- says a great deal about why a team of talented and accomplished people are contributing to the show, Katchen says.

"I guess the philosophy of the show is that we want to put something that is so fun and so exciting that kids will want to watch it just because it's entertaining, but while they're watching it, they will have a door opened for them to an entirely new world," she says.

She cites studies indicating that learning musical basics helps kids develop teamwork skills, and do better at mathematics, science and language.

"The skills that you learn as part of a musical ensemble are absolutely invaluable. You have to learn to cooperate, to communicate, to listen not only to all the instruments in your group but to what each musician says about their ideas. It's an opportunity to create something with other people. You're creating something that didn't exist before. What an awesome thing for a child."

Other reasons are perhaps less tangible but no less profound.

"Besides personal satisfaction, classical music represents maybe 400 years of the finest cultural and artistic development of Western civilization," Katchen says. "Kids who are growing up in the slums or in rural Arkansas or Mississippi, who never encounter any classical music, don't have an entree into all of that wonderful accomplishment of humanity."

Interestingly, and perhaps ironically, music is just about the only art that Katchen has never practiced herself.

"I am not a musician," she admits with a momentary blush, "I don't play an instrument and I've never studied music. I just love it."

Her lack of musical acumen notwithstanding, Katchen says the convergence of skills and talents necessary to make a television show form an exhilarating nexus for her.

"What I like about doing this," she says, "is that it calls on everything I have learned in half a century of artistic endeavors. Everything I have learned as a writer, a painter, a ballroom dancer, all of it, has come together."

The show is hosted and was co-conceived by Katchen's friend Kabin Thomas who teaches music at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. Thomas, who portrays the "Sam" of the title, is a tuba player who grew up in the slums of Detroit. He "found music when a young teenager and it changed his life," Katchen says, providing personal testimony for precisely what she hopes the show will achieve.

The show is being produced in a "modular" fashion, with segments of animated or live action footage of no more than three minutes, to stay within the anticipated attention span of its intended kindergarten to third-grade audience.

In addition to Thomas, Katchen is bringing to the project Richard Rosenberg as music director, well-known Denver photographer (and Katchen's friend since high school) Nicholas DeSciose as cinematographer; and 11-year-old Annie Xu of Hot Springs, the daughter of Chinese immigrants, who narrates segments. Nationally recognized artists, including Katchen herself, are doing the art and animation.

After several intensive weeks of shooting individual musicians and a full symphony orchestra at the Hot Springs Music Festival, Katchen was back home in Denver in July to confer with DeSciose and to edit the film.

Final editing for the pilot show will be completed in August, after which it will be passed on to the Arkansas Educational Television Network for public broadcast. Once funding is obtained, further episodes will be produced. Basset Hound Productions hopes to have the entire first season -- seven episodes, with one hour-long segment -- finished by June, 2004.

Katchen recently got good news on the project, the announcement that the prestigious Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival will feature two one-hour documentary films about "Symphony Sam" in October. She hopes the showcase this provides will help carry the word to important people in television.

Revenue from the project is a down-the-line proposition, Katchen says. PBS distribution would essential raise visibility for eventual video and DVD sales. These, in turn, will hopefully be facilitated by donors interested in giving the program to schools at no cost.

"The bottom line is we want to get classical music to kids," Katchen says. "Classical music has always been important, but right now, with all of the schools being forced to cut back, budgets decreasing and people scrambling for money for anything, we can offer a classical music curriculum for them that will either be free or low charge. This is an opportunity for every child in that school district to be exposed to classical music at no extra expense to the school. And it's a very easy format for the teachers to use."

The focus is exclusively on classical, and not popular, music because "we want to bring something to kids they don't already have," Katchen says. "They get popular music everywhere. Turn on the TV, Britney Spears; turn on the radio, the Beatles. It's everywhere around them. People are talking about it, it's part of our broader culture. They don't even know what classical music is."

Breaking that barrier, and debunking the widely-held perception that classical music has an elitist edge, are among the goals for "Symphony Sam."

"We don't think classical music is just for the wealthy or just for the well-educated or just for the upper middle class," Katchen says. "We think it's for everyone and so we're creating a show that is so fun and so funny."

The artistic and perhaps spiritual power of the musical arts is among this artist's strongest motivations for doing the show.

"I've always felt that musicians are the most blessed of artists, that there is such power in music and it so easily crosses borders, languages, cultures. What an incredibly powerful thing it is.

"I have been a painter forever, for 40 years probably, and early in my career I was allowed to take my pastels and paper into rehearsals of the Denver Symphony Orchestra. I would sit in the middle of the bass section and I'd sketch while the musicians were playing. When I got done and looked at the work, I saw how much the very lines I was making were affected by the music."

That's just one snapshot from a lifetime that has been devoted to art for its own sake.
Katchen was just seven years old when she was first published -- a poem that appeared in a local Red Cross publication. She began to emphasize her writing, over visual arts, as a girl, largely because of a seventh-grade art teacher "who told my mother that I would never be an artist, so I just stopped thinking about being an artist," she says. "So I wrote."

Not that it wasn't a good decision in itself. In 1965, at the age of 19, her first book was published. Picked up by Scholastic Book Services, I Was A Lonely Teenager, written and illustrated by Katchen, sold over 700,000 copies. More books followed.

"Eventually I decided that I liked visual arts better because they are so direct," she says. "In writing I found myself constantly thinking, what is the right word, how to I put the words together. But in drawing and painting, there are moments where my arm goes and my mind disconnects and I found that very attractive."

She was a good enough writer to support herself while she developed a career as a painter and sculptor. She studied art in California then returned to Denver, quickly earning a following for her work, carried in those days by the prestigious Saks Gallery.

Katchen, however, had further ambitions. During the 1970s disco craze, she studied ballroom dancing as a "bar skill," she says with a laugh. When she moved to California to escape Denver's oil recession, and its impact on the arts market, she became obsessed with dancing. "It just sort of took over my life," she says.

Characteristically, she became so good at it that she ended up winning a national championship.

In Los Angeles, she then became a successful artists' publicist, and began exploring the world of cinema. She did a children's talk show for public access television and wrote the screenplay for a horror film, "Scream Play," which, more than a decade later, remains mired in the limbo of post-production.

"I don't know if this was even a B movie," Katchen says with a laugh, "but it was fabulous to work on and I learned so much. It was the most fun thing I ever did, up to 'Symphony Sam.'"

The movie experience was an excellent training ground for what she's doing now, says Katchen, who recently moved to Hot Springs, a once-thriving resort that went through a long decline and is now experiencing a renaissance as a fine arts center.

"I have done so many interesting, exotic and strange things in my life," the artist admits, "and every one of them has been such an incredible opportunity."

As a creator of art, Katchen says she has always been driven by "a raging curiosity -- I always want to know what is out there," and a strong aversion to boredom and inactiviity.

"The other thing that really drives me is the need to communicate," she says. "Words are what a writer does and my paintings are always about communicating -- something about relationships, about people. Each painting I do is like a conversation -- people saying things, people doing things, but a little ambiguous, so that people can enter the painting and complete it. To me, the painting is not done until somebody sees it and relates to it."

Dancing is the communication of partners, she adds, and her current passion, television, "is the ultimate form of communication in our world today."

"I think it all works."

In the end, one simply cannot resist asking Katchen this supposedly unanswerable question: What is art?

"I don't know if I could tell you what art is but I can tell you some of the things I think are necessary to have art," she replies after a moment's thought. "There has to be a human touch; there has to be a thought or an emotion being expressed; there has to be a structure. There are elements of design that have to be in a piece of art in order for it to be a valid piece of art, in order for it to be something I would hang on my wall.

"And whether it be a painting, a sculpture, a piece of music, a book -- there has to be rhythm, there has to be movement, there has to be balance, there has to be tension. Otherwise, why bother?"

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