LEONARD ALTMAN, HELPED PRESERVE CARNEGIE HALL.

Byline: The New York Times

Leonard Altman, musician, teacher, writer and arts administrator who played an important role in the preservation of Carnegie Hall died Tuesday at St. John's Hospital in Santa Monica. He was 76 and lived in Santa Monica.

Tim Page, a friend of Altman, said Altman had committed suicide by taking an overdose of pills. He had been rendered virtually immobile by Parkinson's disease in recent years.

Altman moved to California in 1979 and was appointed executive director of the Los Angeles County Music and Performing Arts Commission. He was also an adviser on music and dance to the California Arts Council, and from the late 1980s he was director of the Maestro Foundation, which presented private concerts in California homes.

Altman was born in Boston in 1920. He attended the Boston Latin School and completed a bachelor's degree in music at Harvard University and a master's degree at New York University. In the 1950s and '60s, he contributed articles about music to Stereo Review, The American Record Guide and Musical America and was the editor and publisher of Listen: A Music Monthly from 1963 to 1965.

In the late 1960s and early '70s, he produced more than 200 music programs for WNYC-TV, as well as hundreds of radio programs for stations in New York, Boston and Los Angeles.

Altman was also editor in chief of Leeds Music Corp., a music publisher, from 1960 to 1963, and the chief executive officer of the Concert Artists Guild - an organization that supports young musicians early in their careers - from 1969 to 1973.

Several times he took up the causes of historic halls that were in danger of being destroyed. Soon after he moved to New York from Boston in 1958, he helped Isaac Stern start the Citizens Committee to Save Carnegie Hall. When that effort succeeded, Altman joined the hall's board, remaining a member until 1974.