She has been a professional musician since she was 14 &mdash; a span of nearly 50 years.</p><p>Linda Ronstadt is best known for the music she made in the 1970s and into the 1980s, but she has amassed a catalog of music that far exceeds her most successful span in 1974-80, when she released six albums, four of which were No. 1 or No. 2 on the Billboard chart.</p><p>These days, Ronstadt, 63, is performing the music of her heritage. Tonight, she will perform at the Midland theater with the mariachi ensemble Mariachi Los Comperos de Nati Cano. Ronstadt spoke to The Star about the show and about one of the many causes for which she is an advocate: music in education.</p><p><strong>Talk about the show you&rsquo;re bringing to the Midland.</strong></p><p>I&rsquo;m singing all in Spanish. I&rsquo;m bringing one of the best bands in the world, Mariachi Los Comperos de Nati Cano. I&rsquo;ve worked with them for 20 years, and they&rsquo;re brilliant musicians and great singers. The best part for me is I get to watch them. We&rsquo;re also bringing a troupe of wonderful folkloric dancers, so I also get to watch them dance.</p><p>One of the things I love about the show is that it is completely indestructible. I can take it to a state fair and then take it to Carnegie Hall, and it&rsquo;s all the same. &hellip; The skirts and the costumes are so beautiful, we don&rsquo;t need a lot of smoke and lights.</p><p>The show is extravagant because the music and the dancing are extravagant. Ranchero music is really a celebration of nature and reproduction and biological exuberance clothed in incredibly beautiful poetic terms. The Mexicans have an incredible gift for poetry. In the pre-European conquest days, poetry was essential to expressing yourself. You had to have poetry. Regular prose wasn&rsquo;t sufficient. They called poetry &ldquo;a scattering of jade,&rdquo; because jade was what they valued way over gold. It&rsquo;s a very rich poetic culture.</p><p>These songs have such beautiful lyrics; it&rsquo;s always a pleasure to sing them. There&rsquo;s never anything shallow or flippant about them. They&rsquo;re always very humorous or romantic or desperately sad. But they&rsquo;re never shallow or inconsequential.</p><p><strong>Are your crowds followers of this kind of music and its traditions, or do you get fans who come to see you for what you did as a singer and musician in the early 1970s?</strong></p><p>We&rsquo;ve always gotten both. When I switched and went to singing in Spanish, I did it so blithely. I couldn&rsquo;t resist. I loved the music; it&rsquo;s so much of who I am, it came roaring out of me.</p><p>The minute I had the leverage &mdash; it took me 30 albums &mdash; I finally said, &ldquo;I&rsquo;m gonna make a record in Spanish,&rdquo; and the record label said, &ldquo;Oh, no, you&rsquo;re not.&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve decided I&rsquo;ve earned this.&rdquo; People said, &ldquo;Oh, what a career move,&rdquo; but it wasn&rsquo;t like that. I&rsquo;d like to say it was premeditated, but it wasn&rsquo;t like that. It was purely self-indulgent. I loved these songs and wanted to sing them. They were better than the songs I was getting in the 1980s, which weren&rsquo;t nearly as poetic or well-written. </p><p><strong>You are a staunch advocate for music in education. In April, you spoke before a House committee about funding for the arts, and you mentioned </strong><strong>Jos&eacute; Abreu</strong><strong>, the founder of El Sistema, a vastly successful children&rsquo;s music program in Venezuela. What is your perspective on music education in the United States?</strong></p><p>It&rsquo;s a disaster what they&rsquo;re doing. One of the things known about the human brain is that pitch is one of the ways in which we sort and process and store information. If you&rsquo;re Chinese and you&rsquo;re speaking a tonal language, pitch is vital. Most Chinese children, when they are in choirs that compete internationally, they usually win because the children almost to an individual have perfect pitch. They do because they start attending to pitch intensely from the time that they are pre-verbal till the time they develop speech.