Youth Backer Pulled Strings for Orchestra

Sue Bozman says she’s jazzed.

“I can’t believe I’m lucky enough to have people paying me to lobby for music, art and education, when I would do that as a volunteer,” says the director of public information for College of the Canyons.

Bozman, who has been at the college since 1988, says she sees herself primarily as an “advocate for students.” She is also credited as being the driving force behind keeping the Santa Clarita Valley Youth Orchestra alive and helping it move in 1990 from the nearby California Institute of the Arts to its present location at COC.

Having moved to the Southland from Massachusetts in 1983, Bozman says she and her husband picked the area specifically because they wanted to move to an area that had a youth orchestra for her two young boys. Santa Clarita’s youth orchestra began in 1961 at the L. A. Conservatory of Music as a program for gifted high school musicians. In 1969, the conservatory was merged into the music department at the California Institute of the Arts by Cesare Pascarella, the late original music director and conductor of the youth orchestra.

Bozman and her husband, David, first got involved in 1985 when CalArts planned on ending the orchestra program because of budget problems. At the time, their son Alex played cello in the orchestra. “One day Alex came home from his music lessons,” Bozman says, “looking heartbroken and said: ‘Mom, they just told us there’s no more money to keep the orchestra going. We can’t let it die. Please do something to help.’ ”

Bozman called CalArts, a stone’s throw from COC, and worked out an agreement to stave off the orchestra’s impending closure. Then she and her husband began pulling together the funding effort.

“People like Betty Castleberry, the foundation’s first president, really helped,” Bozman says. “No pun intended, but she was instrumental in getting a music program into the Newhall school district, and she wrote our first grant.”

Bernardo Feldman, COC’s music department director and foundation vice president, says Bozman is underplaying her own contribution.

“Working with people as unselfish as Sue and her husband . . . makes you work harder just to keep up,” Feldman says. “If I had a hat, I’d take it off to her.”

The Bozmans founded the Santa Clarita Valley Youth Orchestra Foundation, a nonprofit, volunteer group made up of parents, teachers, business people and artists from Santa Clarita, Valencia and Lancaster.

The foundation has used everything from bake sales, wine tastings, concerts and grants to raise approximately $90,000 over the years. The money has been used to pay the salary for one of the orchestra’s two conductors, buy and repair instruments loaned to students and since 1990 to help finance the college credit training for an average of 75 aspiring classical musicians a year.

The orchestra, which has also sparked the creation of an adult orchestra, is now part of COC’s regular curriculum. College of the Canyons pays the other conductor salary. Playing in the youth orchestra is open to students of all ages.

Bozman, who now wants to establish scholarships specifically designed to bring minority students into the orchestra, says her most satisfying moment with the orchestra came at its June fund-raising concert at the Lancaster Performing Arts Center.

“I was sitting in the audience, and there was our orchestra dressed in formal black attire, under professional lighting with a professional actress (Tippi Hedren) narrating on stage,” she says. “I felt so proud, my heart almost burst. It was then I really saw we had created something very special, something which now has a life of its own and will be here for a long, long time to come.”

Personal Best is a weekly profile of an ordinary person who does extraordinary things.