During the Depression years, few could afford private music lessons in the Taylor family's Sugar House neighborhood. So Beverley Taylor Sorenson learned piano and harmony from her older sisters, and wound up playing foxtrot and waltz tunes for a Salt Lake City dance school for 50 cents an hour while she was still a teen.

The older Taylor girls, Virginia and Helen, who would grow up to be accomplished musicians, played piano in the Marlow Theater on 2100 South, entertaining audiences as they watched silent movies. "The music was going all the time in our home," Sorenson says, now 84. "In those days all performances were live."

As a girl, Beverley Taylor wasn't the most gifted musician in the family, but 70 years later, she has become one of Utah's most generous -- and most strategic -- arts patrons. Through her philanthropy, she has proven to be the consummate accompanist, her funds and passion providing the music that the state's policymakers and arts educators dance to. Her funding has inspired a redesign of Utah's elementary education curriculum, returning dance, theater, music and visual arts instruction to selected Utah classrooms. As a result, this accompanist may leave a more lasting mark on both the arts and education in Utah than even the most gifted performers.

Sorenson has invested more than $20 million of her own money since 1994 to fund arts programs in Utah elementary schools, while her family foundation has pledged millions more to Utah universities to establish new programs to train arts teachers. This display of personal commitment and passion inspired the Utah Legislature this year to pony up $15 million more to fund arts education, as part of four-year pilot program involving 59 elementary schools throughout Utah.

"She won you over with sweet love," says Senate President John Valentine.

What's remarkable is that Sorenson's efforts to drive a major education-reform initiative transcended politics and ideology, succeeding at a time when the wounds of the divisive 2007 voucher fight were still festering.

"This is not a left-right issue. This is about children, about the world we want them to have and the world we want them to create," adds Michael Young, president of the University of Utah. "She ennobles them and raises their awareness of the world. Music is highly correlated with better performance in math and language. You get the scientists by making them into artists first."

Sorenson and her children control the purse strings to the state's largest family fortune, generated by her late husband, inventor James Levoy Sorenson, who died of cancer last January. Over the past two decades, the Sorenson millions have benefited Utah universities, genetics research, children, the deaf and numerous other charitable enterprises.

But arts education occupies a special place in Beverley Sorenson's vision for a better world. She decries the erosion of the arts from elementary education, which she blames for declines in academic achievement and increases in absenteeism and behavioral problems. Funding constraints are to blame, but so is a national obsession with accountability that brought us the No Child Left Behind legislation and a focus on math and reading at the expense of physical education and art, observers say. While accountability is important, it can take education reform only so far, cautions Michael Hardman, dean of the U.'s College of Education.

"A lot of focus of NCLB is focused on children responding to academic tests," Hardman says. "It's not focused on developing the creative learning, who will be a critical thinker actively engaged in in learning. Beverley is focused on the creative learner."

Music in the family » Sorenson is descended from Mormon pioneer stock. Her grandfathers ?-- both named Taylor, but from unrelated families -- converted to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the late 19th century and later immigrated to Utah, where they became church leaders.

"When pioneers came across the plains, the first thing they built was a theater," Sorenson says, retelling a bit of Utah lore that's regularly recounted by others among the state's arts advocates. "It gave them courage."

Her parents, Frank and Bess Taylor, raised six children in their home on Lake Street where an upright Steinway was a focal point of family life. Beverley attended Forrest Elementary, which once stood at the intersection of 2100 South and 900 East, and graduated in 1941 from East High. She completed a degree at the U. in 1945 and moved to New York City to teach in a Brooklyn Quaker school.

That's where she met James Sorenson, a young Idahoan then serving in the Merchant Marines. At the time, Beverley was living with her sister Helen, a gifted composer studying at the Juilliard School with her husband Grant Johannesen, who was by then well on his way to becoming a world-renowned concert pianist.

Although Grant and Helen grew up in the same Salt Lake City neighborhood, they did not meet before attending the famous music school. But their life together was cut short in 1950. On an October day, Helen was heading home on U.S. Highway 40 near Daniels Summit after performing in Vernal when the car's driver swerved to miss a cow. The crash killed Helen but no one else in the car was injured.

By then, the newlywed Sorensons had moved to Salt Lake City where James got busy patenting biomedical devices, which formed the foundation of a multi-enterprise empire that would include real estate, film and garments. Beverley concentrated on raising their eight children, which included musical training on voice and piano. Years later, in the 1990s, she had a realization while trying to connect with a teenage grandson who seemed more interested in his portable CD player than the world around him. Children from both affluent and poor families have lost critical opportunities for personal and academic development because of the absence of art education, she came to believe.

"This happened without people noticing," says Sorenson, the matriarch of a family that includes 47 grandchildren and 30 great-grandchildren. "As a result, children don't have art in the school. The band disappeared. It was sad we lost something for our children. That was wrong. That's why I do what I do. I'm trying to right a wrong,"

Bringing arts back to schools » Sorenson's devotion to arts education may smack of nostalgia, but her theories are grounded in social science, brain research and learning theory. Peer-reviewed research over the past decade has documented strong correlations among elementary students' participation in arts programs and academic achievement. Yet arts and music instruction has slipped away from U.S. classrooms since the 1970s. Funding constraints and a focus on fundamentals have caused administrators to slash arts training.

"When money got tight and administrators got fearful, they tightened up their thinking," says Eric Jensen, a California education reformer and author of "Arts with the Brain in Mind." "Those factors created a climate where arts could get thrown out of the classroom. It wouldn't happen if we had today's research behind it. The nationwide arts advocates have been scrambling for the last seven years as funding has been channeled to raise test scores for schools' survival."

At an age when most people are enjoying the twilight of their lives, Sorenson embarked on an investigation into innovative elementary schools that used art to teach across subjects. After observing successes at Lincoln, Jackson and Oakridge and other Salt Lake-area elementary schools, Sorenson began investing her personal resources into a campaign to establish arts programs around the state.

Through her organization Art Works for Kids, Sorenson has spent some $20 million of her own money since 1994, establishing arts programs that have touched 80,000 elementary pupils.

Meanwhile, the state lacked programs to prepare arts teachers. "The education to teach it was not available in higher ed because there wasn't much of a demand for it," James Lee Sorenson, Beverley's oldest son. "It was a chicken-and-the-egg problem. It required investment to prime the pump."

In a strategic move, the family foundation began helping build the infrastructure to sustain Beverley's vision. The Sorensons have directed foundation funds to Utah's four largest universities -- the U., Southern Utah University, Brigham Young University and Utah State University -- establishing programs that integrate the arts into elementary-grade curriculum and training art specialists that Sorenson envisions working in each of the state's 500 elementary schools.

"We're helping to teach the teachers and find the best of the best," she says. "You have artists who are wonderful, but aren't good teachers, and you have teachers who are wonderful, but don't know the arts. Now you have the top universities, the deans all working together."

The foundation's philanthropic efforts culminated last summer with a $12 million gift to the U. That money will endow professorships and cover one-third of construction costs of the $30 million Beverley Taylor Sorenson building to be constructed near the Utah Museum of Fine Arts. The building will house a joint venture between the U.'s colleges of Education, Science and Fine Arts.

In the meantime, Beverley brought lawmakers onboard. Last year during the legislative session, Sorenson personally escorted influential legislators to Salt Lake City's Jackson Elementary, a school populated with at-risk students. Her intent was to convince policymakers that arts education works by showing them Jackson's program equipping all its students with violins and the skills to play them.

"I saw them performing not only with violin, but also performing in math, science and reading," says Valentine, an Orem Republican. "They were using art as a way to teach all of these substantive classes. I came away absolutely enthralled by what Beverley was developing. There are a lot of other kids who could benefit from this. It was obvious kids were having fun, but more importantly, they were learning."

Another of Sorenson's key legislative converts was Rep. Greg Hughes, a Draper Republican who had been a spear carrier for vouchers. So moved by what he witnessed at Jackson, Hughes became a chief backer of HB 363, a $15 million four-year pilot program to train and place arts specialists in 59 elementary schools, where they would teach side-by-side with regular teachers. The investment, dubbed the Beverley Taylor Sorenson Learning Program, won unanimous approval in the midst of projected budget shortfalls. Proponents hope the program will someday extend to all 508 of Utah's public elementary schools, as well as the more than 40 charter schools.

Utah is at the forefront of cutting-edge arts education theories because of Sorenson's investments. Many education experts say it's time to treat art as a core part of elementary education, instead of a mere frill, because artistic expression develops both sides of the brain.

"Our brain is really an aggregate of parts that work together," says Eric Jensen, the California academic whose theories were touted in Utah's legislative discussions leading to the passage of HB 363. "The arts do a whoppingly good job in transferable academic skills. Arts develop that capacity to defer gratification. They strengthen memory. To play the music, you have to remember the piece to play. In plays, you have to remember your lines, and you have to pay attention. In music, you have to sequence things. The subskills needed for other disciplines -- the arts builds those."

For Sorenson, her arts campaign is about rescuing a valuable thing that had been carelessly discarded, like the portrait of her maternal grandfather. The painting hung over the stairway landing in her girlhood home on Lake Street, but it could just as easily have wound up in the trash back in the 1930s.

Famed Utah portraitist Lewis Ramsey painted George Hamilton Taylor, a polygamist LDS Church leader, for the 14th Ward building on 300 West. Demolition crews didn't recognize the avuncular man, sporting round spectacles and mustache, as the ward bishop who had died in 1907. The Taylor family pulled the painting from the building's rubble pile and today it hangs in the hallway of the Sorenson's Holladay home.