SDSU Goes for Broke to Improve Cultural Image On and Off Campus

It may take more than staging an annual arts festival to make San Diego State University a cultural mecca, but at this stage, what does the university have to lose? Although its music, theater and dance departments regularly present a variety of programming, SDSU’s image remains bound up in athletics and its hyperactive social life.

This weekend, the university’s five fine arts departments have put their collective act together for what they are calling a Creative Arts Showcase.

“This is an effort to consolidate the performing arts, to work together for our own cultural identity,” said Martin Chambers, newly appointed chairman of the music department.

Besides a nonstop calendar that offers plays, films, a choral concert and a combined faculty and alumni dance program, the festival will culminate in a Sunday night variety show in the Don Powell Theatre that combines the SDSU Jazz Ensemble, a musical theater review, two dance numbers and a short film.

The weekend arts festival is not only aimed at the community, but also at the 36,000-member student body, whose awareness of the campus’ cultural offerings may be as hazy as that of the outside community.

“We felt it was time to say to the campus community, ‘Hey, we’re here,’ ” said Joyce Gattas, dean of SDSU’s College of Professional Studies and Fine Arts, and one of the prime movers behind the festival. Like Chambers, she has recently been appointed to her post and exudes an unalloyed optimism about the arts potential at SDSU.

“I see an awakening of arts on this campus,” she said. “We could become a cultural mecca.”

Although Chambers is eager to help raise SDSU’s arts profile and improve community relations, his first task as department chairman--he had been acting chairman since last fall--is to revitalize his own department, where faculty morale and enrollment had both taken a significant nose-dive. Chambers stressed that the department’s enrollment increased 10% last year, but he noted that over the previous decade it had declined precipitously.

“We have 210 music majors at this time,” said Chambers, “although it was down to a low of 160 only a few years ago.”

In the department’s heyday, shortly after it moved into the large, boxy building that greets people as they enter the campus from Campanile Drive, the music department regularly enrolled close to 300 majors.

Chambers attributed the decline to a number of outside factors, including the financial limitations of California’s Proposition 13 and the removal of arts and music from primary and secondary education in the state.

“We also face a smaller pool of eligible and interested music students,” Chambers said. “And, with a proliferation of music schools, there’s a great competition for the fine students. You have to be very aggressive in recruiting those students.”

When Chambers became acting dean, recruitment became the music department’s dominant leitmotif. Resident performing ensembles, such as the Lark String Quartet and the Stauffer Wind Quintet, now regularly visit high schools and junior high schools to contact potential music majors.

“We’re there to perform for them but also to promote our own image. We’re going to the schools to say, ‘If you go to SDSU, you can study with these players,’ ” said Chambers.

Part of Chambers’ challenge is to strengthen his department in a way that is complementary to UC San Diego’s high-profile music department, where faculty members regularly win Pulitzer Prizes and where the noted Center for Music Experiment is based.

“I see us as offering more traditional music instruction, while they are more entrenched in the 20th Century. UCSD’s focus is much more on the current and more experimental. We have a world music program and have an electronic music studio--we do offer those things--but we’re very much into the traditional music school mold.”

Chambers promised more cooperation between the two schools’ departments, which has been rare in the past. He noted that his department has just purchased $35,000 worth of electronic music equipment and has hired a staff member from the Music Experiment to teach the electronic music courses. Last week, SDSU resident composer David Ward-Steinman took a delegation of SDSU musicians across town to perform with UCSD musicians, who will return the favor next Friday on the SDSU campus. According to Chambers, other joint UCSD-SDSU programs are on the drawing boards.

Another innovation close to Chambers’ heart is turning the SDSU music building into a weekend community music conservatory.

“We have a new program on the books, waiting final approval at a higher level in the university. My idea is that it will be a joint community-university effort. I don’t know of any other place in San Diego that has a facility to do it.”