San Francisco Classical Voice

Not all of a listener's musical thrills happen in the performance halls. They'll come unheralded, in many different locations, often unanticipated. For example, Friday last while visiting The Crowden School in Berkeley, relocated since this summer in the "Old Jefferson (Elementary) School," I got that old warm feeling of being where the real thing was going on. Four teenagers, 13 and 14 years old, were playing the last movement of Dvorak's "American" String Quartet, in F, not just a finely tuned, accurate performance, but a lively one, in the spirit. Next, three others produced a movement of the Mendelssohn D minor Piano Trio. Good. Well Done.

The cellist was Jonah van Bourg, an eighth grader whom I had just seen accompanying the chorus at the piano in the preceding class period. "Oh yes," the school's founder and director, Anne Crowden, said offhandedly, "a lot of them play piano." It turns out that she prefers them to begin with piano--and singing, before taking up a string instrument, maybe when they start here at the fourth grade level. And they all sing in the all-school chorus . When I arrived at 8:30 a.m., Laura Kakis, of the faculty, was teaching the students a textless arrangement ("doo-doo-doo") of Mozart's "Magic Flute" Overture by one of their teachers, Arkadi Serper. Then they all stayed on in the largish auditorium for the next period to play in the orchestra.

What was so remarkable was that this activity was completely unremarkable at The Crowden School, just what goes on every day. It is a full-time academic day school that teaches all the regular subjects to just 66 students in grades four through nine but specializes in music (or as the bulletin puts it, "musical growth.") For Crowden that means chamber music, around which the program is built. At the school's Annual Spring Concert last May, I had heard movements from six quartets and quintets well played by 25 different students, and that in addition to pieces by the Senior and Junior (orchestral) Ensembles. Both of those then joined as the Orchestra, doing a good job on the Allegro assai from Bartok's Divertimento for Strings and on "Oda a la Tristezza" to a Neruda poem, composed and conducted by an 8th grade violist, Noah Schwartz.

The next event will be "An Evening of Music" on October 22 with John Adams, the composer, as guest conductor. One of his children is a Crowden student, another has graduated from there, and his wife, Debbie O'Grady, is vice-chair of the school's board. Other prominent musicians are staunch supporters.

This is an exciting thing, positive and encouraging to hear and watch these serious, focused young students. While there's currently much talk (and some beginnings of action) about educational reform in America, this and many other schools are showing how, and have been for some years. The Crowden School happens to be a private school, but it's not exclusive. Crowden noted that 16 per cent of the earned (tuition) income budget goes for scholarship, a fact on which Millie Rosner, a cello teacher and something of an institution herself, commented, "Anne doesn't turn anyone away. She's got a soft heart."

Besides the 66 full-time students, 195 more come to the school in mid- and late afternoons for music instruction in its "community music center"-- beginning to advanced instrumental training, choir, woodwind ensemble and musical theater. After 15 years crowded into a Berkeley church facility, the school at last has a home that can handle that much activity, the "Old Jefferson School." Too small to serve as a public school any longer, the building, at the corner of Rose and Sacramento streets, was sold by the City of Berkeley to The Crowden School. It's a handsome Arts and Crafts style building designed by Henry Higby Gutterson in 1922, with airy, high-ceiling rooms and light pouring in from windows all around, a great ambience. There's a campaign to raise $825,000 by July for structural strengthening.

The Crowden School is not alone in this kind of activity by any means. In San Anselmo, the Music Conservatory of San Domenico has about 65 music students in its college preparatory high school of 150 girls (half of them boarding, half day students). "All 65 music students have ‘major' scholarships," Faith France, the Conservatory Director since 1965 reported. "Twenty of those are in our Virtuoso Program."

Last April I heard a thrilling preview of a program played by six of the San Domenico Virtusoi, who went on to perform at the Kennedy Center's Millenium Stage, in Washington D.C. and at Bargemusic in New York City. Jia Yiao, 17, from Beijing, played two Paganini Caprices. A 16 year-old pianist Lin Tung who had just performed the Rachmaninoff Second Piano Concerto with the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra in which she has been playing violin for three years, performed Chopin's Fourth Ballade. Then she picked up her violin and joined four colleagues, 14 to 17 years of age, in the first movement of the Schubert C major Quintet. And it was good. San Domenico's Music Conservatory will give its next program a week from Sunday, October 25, at 3 p.m., at the San Domenico Music Pavilion, San Anselmo.

Talk about talent. There's a lot of it. Some, fortunate enough to get this high level training and who are focused and gifted, go on up the levels into professional careers. Many from these schools have done that. At the top level in the Bay Area we have the major facility of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music with its full program and well-established Preparatory Division. There's the Community Music Center on Capp street in San Francisco, set up to handle a broad range of music instruction.

Soon, coming to the Museum of Modern Art at 3 p.m. this Sunday, October 18, the California Summer Music program presents some of its students performing their compositions (see listing in the San Francisco calendar for October). This is a three year-old academy for string, piano and composition students, ages 12 to 23, that meets for three weeks at the Robert Louis Stevenson School in Pebble Beach. And there's the Young Musician's Program at the University of California, Berkeley.

There'll come a day when more of our public schools will again be offering proper music programs, the kind that are actually still in operation in a few enlightened communities (far more in other states than in California, it must be said, and more in southern than northern California). Don't anyone dare ask, "What's the point of training and graduating so many musicians? Where are the jobs?" We can't have too many musicians. It isn't like having too many lawyers. Just listen to the music at any one of these upcoming events. Give these kids a place to stand and they can move the world.

(Robert P. Commanday, the editor of San Francisco Classical Voice, was the music critic of The San Francisco Chronicle, 1965-93, and before that a conductor and lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley.)

©1998 Robert P. Commanday, all rights reserved