A look at the S.F. Conservatory of Music at 100. Pictured: David Stull, the school’s president.
Clarinetist Andrew Friedman was holed up in a practice room at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music the other morning, working over Steve Reich’s “New York Counterpoint” for a performance he and conservatory colleagues were giving a few nights later at the Contemporary Jewish Museum.
Friedman had been pursuing his graduate degree at the University of North Carolina until last spring, when he read that Carey Bell, the San Francisco Symphony’s principal clarinetist, had joined the faculty of the conservatory.
“I saw that and said, ‘I have to go there,’ ” says Friedman, 23, who hadn’t thought orchestral playing offered him enough expressive range — until he heard Bell play. “Under the radar, during spring break, I come out here, took a two-hour lesson with Carey
at Davies Hall, and that was it.”
Friedman is one of many students drawn to the conservatory in recent years as the institution, now celebrating its centennial, has made clear its ambition to become one of the world’s premier music schools, hiring major artists and reshaping the curriculum to reflect the music world as it exists today.
That aspiration, says conservatory president David Stull, who arrived in 2013 after a decade as dean of the Oberlin Conservatory in Ohio, was signaled in 2006 when the conservatory moved from its longtime Sunset District home — the Mission-style building at 19th Avenue and Ortega that was formerly a home for unwed mothers — to its rightful place in the Civic Center Performing Arts zone.
The decision by the board and then-president Colin Murdoch to buy, renovate and extend a Beaux Arts building on Oak Street, close to Davies Hall, the San Francisco Opera and now SFJazz, said something about “proximity to greatness” and the conservatory’s desire “to be in that pantheon,” Stull says.
Under his energetic leadership, the conservatory has taken the next step, creating two new programs: Roots, Jazz and American Music, a partnership with SFJazz, whose all-star Collective members are on the faculty, and Technology and Applied Composition, now in its third year. Directed by composer MaryClare Brzytwa, the program, whose faculty includes movie composers and music folk from Facebook, trains students to score films, do video game sound design and otherwise use the technology creatively. Half the program’s 38 students are women.
In addition, all conservatory students are required to take “professional development” business courses designed for musicians making their way in a wired-up, gig-economy world.
“With the advent of technology and changes in how funding works, smaller ensembles can now become just as prominent or more so than the New York Philharmonic,” Stull says. Music students today, he adds, need to be critical thinkers who “can no longer rely on managers, or that they’re going to join an orchestra. They absolutely need to be driving themselves.”
Another milestone in the conservatory’s evolution begins next spring, with the
ground breaking of a planned 12-story building on Van Ness Avenue across from Davies Hall. Scheduled to open in 2020, the Mark C av ag nero designed structure will contain dormitories, two recital halls — one a street-level space visible to passersby, the other a penthouse venue with a view of the City Hall dome — a recording studio and restaurant. The details and the name of the donor making the project possible will be announced next year.
Stull, an Oberlin-trained tuba player, has hired marquee artists like soprano Deborah Voight, composer Mason Bates and jazz guitarist Julian Lage to join a solid faculty that has long included distinguished players like San Francisco Symphony concertmaster Alexander Barantschik and guitarist David Tanenbaum.
“When you build your faculty at the highest levels, you will attract top talent,” Stull says. He’s talking in his office, where the tuba owned by the late Cleveland Orchestra tubist Ron Bishop sits in a corner, an unexpected gift from Bishop’s wife. “Students care first and foremost about who their teacher is.”
Take Lukas Janata. A Prague Conservatory graduate, he traveled to 27 American states scoping out grad programs and meeting faculty composers. (Yale’s David Lang told the kid he doesn’t usually do interviews but said OK because he couldn’t resist his story). Janata applied to four schools, got accepted to three and was torn between two: New York’s Juilliard and the San Francisco Conservatory. He chose San Francisco.
“The main thing that got me here was my teacher, David Conte,” says Janata, 23, referring to the prolific composer who chairs the composition department and who, Janata notes, studied with composer Nadia Boulanger. “I really feel his pedagogy is very strong, and I wanted to study with
him.”
The welcoming vibe of the city and the conservatory also influenced him.
“That’s also the reason I chose SFCM before Juilliard. The attitude is more personal,” he says. “It’s a smaller school, and I feel more like part of the community.”
Over the decades, that conservatory community has included such esteemed musicians as the San Francisco violin virtuosos Yehudi Menuhin and Isaac Stern, who studied there; composer Ernest Bloch, the director from 192530; and contemporary composer John Adams, who taught there from 1972-82 and directed the New Music Ensemble.
The conservatory was founded in 1917 as the Ada Clement Piano School by Clement and fellow pianist Lillian Hodghead.
“They moved Lillian’s parents out of this beautiful house on Sacramento Street into a cottage next door so they could run a music school in it,” Stull says. “They were trailblazers. At the time, women did not start cultural institutions. In her memoirs, Ada Clement talks about chasing down Bloch to be the first director, how they imagined a great building, instruments, an endowment. There was a vision early on.”
Tanenbaum got his degree at the conservatory in ’78, began teaching there in ’82 and was later appointed department
chair by longtime, much-loved president Milton Salkind (his Rolodex is on view in a centennial exhibition in the Oak Street atrium, flipped to Aaron Copland). The guitarist was familiar with “august” East Coast institutions like the Manhattan School of Music, where his father taught, and Baltimore’s Peabody Institute, where he’d studied for two years. The conservatory felt different.
It was funky, not particularly organized, “very laid back, very West Coast,” Tanenbaum says. “But there was a certain freedom to it. It felt like there was room to do things here artistically.”
He forged bonds with artists like Aaron Jay Kernis, the composer who studied at the conservatory for a spell and has written four pieces for Tanenbaum, and Adams, who has featured the guitarist in several works (he’s in the orchestra playing the premiere of Adams’ “Girls of the Golden West” this month at San Francisco Opera).
Adams, a Harvard grad, was working at an Oakland dry goods warehouse when he got a call to teach at the conservatory.
“I was not stolen from a major institution,” the composer says with a laugh.
The old conservatory “was a very humble place. There were some wonderful people on the faculty I learned a great deal from. Mack McCray (the pianist, still there) was a tremendously important figure for me. I wrote my first mature piece, ‘Phrygian Gates,’ for him. It gets played all over the world,” says Adams, who premiered another of his perennials, “Shaker Loops,” with the conservatory ensemble.
Robin Sutherland, the symphony’s sterling pianist, got his degree at the conservatory in ’75 and now serves on its advisory board.
“I was a refugee from Juilliard,” says the pony-tailed pianist, who studied for a year at the New York school with his teacher, Rosina Lhévinne, until she became too ill to teach. Feeling no affection for Juilliard or New York, Sutherland came to the conservatory and studied with Paul Hersh.
“I found what I was looking for — a welcoming environment,” Sutherland says.
In his first year, the pianist was dispatched by Salkind on a moment’s notice to sub with the symphony for an ailing McCray, scheduled to play a Paul Hindemith piece under Leon Fleisher’s baton. Sutherland took Muni down to the Opera House and played the rehearsal and subsequent concert to Fleisher’s satisfaction. S.F. Symphony maestro Seiji Ozawa later hired him permanently.
Sutherland has watched the school’s evolution over 45 years. Now, he says, with the planned new building and stronger ties to the city’s major arts companies, “the conservatory has arrived.”