I arrived at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music in January of 1975. Back then it had barely emerged from being a neighborhood piano school. The old Mission-style building in the Outer Sunset district was still more or less unchanged from the kiddie shelter that the school had purchased back in 1955, after nearly forty years in a house on Sacramento Street. The building was shabby and construction was just beginning on a new addition, noise and dust and disruption adding to the already chaotic atmosphere caused by students practicing in a building without soundproofing. It was a dump—dirty, dark, smelly, and crowded.
Practice rooms weren’t particularly hard to find. There weren’t many rooms, but there weren’t many students practicing regularly. Pot- and cigarette-smoking, lounging around on the vinyl-and-wicker furniture in the grimy student lounge, wandering around on the roof, and aimless chitchat were the favored pastimes. I could carve out a practice room for the evening (my favorite was Room 14, with its worn-out but still serviceable Steinway M) and stay there until the building closed. I got a lot done.
The Conservatory staggered along financially, barely staying afloat, so as the old guard folks who went back to the Ada Clement/Lillian Hodghead days faded out, the school hired young folks who could be had on the cheap. Some of the hires didn’t work out—the guitar teacher who got busted for selling pot to his students, for example. Others, like John Adams, wound up doing quite well indeed. Boundaries between faculty and student were often permeable if not downright nonexistent.
My situation was such that I was mostly hanging around with the older and more-established faculty, so my participation in Conservatory excess was modest. I never had an affair with one my teachers, never joined a late-night pot party in an upstairs practice room, never had sex on the roof or under a piano, never partied for days in a Haight-Ashbury flat, never worked on the side as a hustler or stripper or pot dealer. I was a stuffed shirt amidst hedonists. On the other hand, I was among the tiny huddled group of SFCM students who were of actual professional caliber, and like my paltry few peers, I spent my time practicing, studying, rehearsing, reading, and writing instead of horsing around. We "good" students each had our own reasons for being at SFCM instead of Juilliard or Curtis or Eastman or Peabody or wherever, but we were very good indeed, and we’ve all gone on to quite respectable careers.
SFCM offered a surprisingly nourishing environment for a self-motivated student. Despite the ratty building, the horrid pianos, the casual attitude towards academics, and the prevailing air of mediocrity, one could find gifted and dedicated teachers who valued their adept students and who responded with an intensity of involvement unthinkable in most other conservatories, not to mention colleges and universities. Those faculty established a culture of committed teaching, a culture that persists to this day as SFCM’s most irreplacable attribute. It was at SFCM that Laurette Goldberg transformed me into a life-long Baroquenik, as I came within a hair’s breadth of making the harpsichord my primary instrument over the piano. But because it also was at SFCM that I found my beloved piano teacher Nathan Schwartz, I remained a pianist and grew exponentially under Nate’s classy and compassionate guidance. At SFCM I worked frequently for Margaret Rowell, ‘cello teacher extraordinaire who stands to this day as my model of everything that’s fine and noble about an instrumental teacher. At SFCM I studied theory with Sol Joseph, usually privately because your basic SFCM dopeheads couldn’t deal with Sol’s ardent intensity and skipped class, leaving the two of us alone.
So I blossomed amidst the dust bunnies, the marijuana whiffs, the feckless fellow students, the occasional third-rate teacher, the beaten-up pianos, the noise, the shabbiness, the crowding. Before long an entire new wing opened up, sporting spiffy new studios, practice rooms, an electronic music lab, and a fine new concert hall with, mirabile dictu, new pianos. It wasn’t such a critical change that SFCM lost its overall sense of anarchic freedom. We had more room to kick around in, but otherwise the place retained a solidly disreputable air. At least for a while. Bit by bit the potheads faded away. We profession-bound types increased our numbers.
Three up-and-coming SFCM students of the 1970s: Dan Nobuhiko Smiley (SF Symphony), Elizabeth LeGuin (UCLA), and little me
For my money the most significant development of that era was a wave of faculty hires, almost all young folks, many right out of SFCM. There was a brief and exhilarating period in which an exceptional student just might have a chance at snagging a faculty position right after earning a degree. That happened to a number of us, and then shortly afterwards that particular doorway closed. Because of that brief hiring wave, we remained an exceptionally young school throughout the 1980s.
Seedy disreputability faded away as the school’s burgeoning national reputation and deeper pockets brought in consistently higher-caliber students, while the faculty aged and turnover became glacial. The potheads were gone for good by the mid-1980s. The composition department might have been the last holdout; I remember being assigned to teach piano to a composition student who could not read the bass clef but whose sultry sex appeal made him an object of lust amongst students and faculty alike. I would pass him if he’d just show up for class in a Speedo, remarked one of my colleagues. SFCM remained remarkably tolerant of kids who had no apparent future in music but who were interesting to have around, but fewer and fewer of those types were being admitted, crowded out by up-and-at-’em kids with buckets of talent and drive.
That SFCM is gone for good. It was on terminal life support by the late 1990s, and certainly it didn’t survive the move to Oak Street, where the school now dwells in an imposing and antiseptic sealed box. Amenities abound. There are a lot of really good pianos. Air circulation is superb, the temperature is controlled, and the building is kept squeaky clean. Three concert halls offer a spectacular variety of music to the public. On the other hand, every door requires keycard access—meaning even senior faculty are locked out of most of the building. Faculty are scattered hither and yon throughout the building’s eight stories and it’s perfectly possible to go four or five months between seeing a particular colleague. Everything is computerized, the lines of authority are clear, and everybody is expected to follow the rules and regulations. It’s efficiently run for the most part. Standards are high, workloads for students and faculty alike are high, the tuition is high. A student of 2010 comes to SFCM expecting a solidly professional education, not four years of experimentation, freedom, sex, and altered consciousness.
The occasional ghostly remnant of a goofier past pops up here and there, but those little whiffs of yesteryear are fading fast. SFCM 2010 is a vastly better place to work than the SFCM of my earlier years. Better pay, working conditions, insurance, opportunities, all that. It’s a grownup school now.
But all grownups were kids once, and as long as a few of us remain who remember those scruffier, looser, and dodgier days, SFCM will always have a spirit of randy adolescence about it. And when we go…well, maybe then it will be time for SFCM to consider indulging in a second childhood, before the long gray autumn of cranky senescence sets in.