The Jupiter Trio's winning the gold medal at the Osaka Chamber Music Festival and Evgeny Izotov's leaving the San Francisco Symphony to become the principal oboe of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestras, chronicled in the Music News today, are part of the regular ebb and flow of musical life here. To be expected. This is a great place for music, and a more interesting and colorful, livelier place to live than most. Fine musicians are naturally drawn here and either make it here and stay, or move out, upwards and onwards.

Many, too many I am sure, take for granted the richness of our classical music life, but enough people get into the concert scheme to attend and support a diversity and richness of events afforded in no other region of a comparable population size. That is part of what makes the San Francisco Bay Area great. The newspaper and the politicians and civic leaders of the moment may ignore it because it isn't "commercial" or a popular vote-getting issue, but even that doesn't matter. The tradition, the tide of interest is too deep and persistent among the folks who vote, who think, who subscribe themselves financially and personally to the better things.

You would think that with the slack economic tide today, folks would be pulling in their discretionary spending but it does not appear to be happening in the classical music scene. "We live here, we are going to take advantage of this and participate," is the apparent outlook.

The top schools for music, from the Crowden and San Domenico Schools at the preparatory/middle levels to the San Francisco Conservatory, have no problem with enrollment and are drawing talent that projects a starry future. The summer music camps and other programs are barreling ahead, preparing aspiring students, often of disadvantaged backgrounds, for college and conservatory. Occasionally someone questions the significance of training musicians for a profession that is "hopelessly" overcrowded, and misses the whole point. Young people are studying music, to play, to sing, to compose, because they must. It is the love of their lives and their belief in it is a beautiful thing.

The musicians of the San Jose Symphony who have lost that source of their livelihood, only because of the incompetence of board, staff and leadership, are the better for having given their best, for what they have experienced in music, whatever tasks they turn themselves to for subsistence or a second career. They know that it is the community that has failed music; nothing can detract from their accomplishments and their fulfillment in that.

The members of the Jupiter Trio, like our leading ensembles, Chanticleer, Kronos, Magnificat, SF Chamber Singers, the Alexander and other of our excellent quartets, found each other here and have thrived. The soil nourishes it.

There was a time not so long ago when importation of talent from the east was critical, when the music industry of impresarios and managements set the level, selected our conductors and guest artists, even programming, when the imprimatur and approbation of the eastern press was what mattered. Now our two major presenting institutions, San Francisco and Cal Performances (and the boards that oversee them) are in charge and deciding what will be offered here. The symphonies are more independent than ever before. The Bay Area can celebrate Independence Day in ways broader and more far-reaching than fireworks and flag waving. The fundamental independence of the nation and the history that made and protected it, is what is celebrated, to be sure, but partly because that made possible the independence of a great regional culture. We honor that today.

(Robert P. Commanday, the senior 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.)

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