New Digs on the Block

A crowd of construction workers, some sporting T-shirts reading “I Built the Colburn School of Performing Arts 1997-1998,” sat on the dust-filled steps of the facility’s new 416-seat auditorium a month before seats--and students--were scheduled to arrive. Munching on chicken-and-pesto sandwiches provided by their hosts, they peered intently at the stage. Out walked 12-year-old Cynthia Gong, Timothy Braun, also 12, and 11-year-old Eugenia Chang, wearing hard hats of their own. Precise and passionate, they played a movement from Beethoven’s Trio No. 1, triggering whistles as well as applause.

The May 22 lunchtime concert was a thank-you--for helping to convert a dream into a reality. The $25-million building, on Grand Avenue near 1st Street, is a coming-of-age for the 48-year-old institution, which provides music, dance and drama instruction, after school and on weekends, to students ages 2 1/2 to 18. It’s also a welcome addition to the downtown “culture corridor,” a neighbor of the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Los Angeles County Music Center and the long-awaited Walt Disney Concert Hall. Colburn’s impact should increase measurably when it expands to include a planned college-level, degree-granting conservatory that could cost as much as $150 million to set up.

After the concert, the students seemed more focused on their music than the new home. Though acoustically isolated classrooms and a state-of-the art concert hall are nice, assessing their performance took center stage. “More echo than usual since the carpet wasn’t in,” concluded Gong, a Pasadena pianist who performed for Prince Philip last fall.

Still, the significance of the occasion was not lost on the trio: “This building can make a difference in the way people see the city,” said Braun, a Palos Verdes violinist. “Instead of just thinking of Hollywood and sports, maybe they’ll think of the arts.”

That’s certainly part of the intent of the project: elevating the profile of culture in general--and the Colburn School, in particular. Named for its main benefactor, Los Angeles businessman and music-lover Richard D. Colburn, the school seeks to provide arts education “to as many youngsters as possible, starting as early as possible.” The most talented are trained for on-stage careers.

Having a foothold downtown should be a boon--psychologically and practically--administrators say. “We visualize a Lincoln Center of the West, with each institution part of the mass of cultural activity,” says Toby E. Mayman, a former congressional legislative assistant who has served as executive director of the school for the past 18 years. “The L.A. Philharmonic can hold chamber music concerts in our auditorium and our drama department will have access to CalArts’ ‘black box’ theater in Disney Hall.”

Cross-pollination, in fact, is already underway. Willem Wijnbergen, the new managing director of the L.A. Philharmonic, called to discuss reciprocity his first day in office and MOCA has distributed free museum passes to the school. The L.A. Opera, which already invites the Colburn Opera Club to three dress rehearsals a year, plans to give students discount tickets to “Lucia di Lammermoor” next season and introduce them to the star--Korean soprano Sumi Jo. Down the road, Colburn musicians may even participate in master classes with L.A. Opera performers.

The school is a role model for others of its kind, maintains Lolita Mayadas, executive director of the National Guild of Community Schools of the Arts--a group with 230 members. And with diminished funding for arts education, she says, these programs are that much more crucial.

“Colburn is one of the best institutions in the guild--one of the few located on the West Coast,” she says. “Like the others, they have an ‘open-door’ policy that admits anyone, regardless of talent. It’s easy to turn out arts professionals if you only take gifted kids. They do it through the quality of their teaching.”

The Colburn School dates back to 1950, when educator Dorothy Bishop established the USC School of Music’s prep division, to share the university’s resources with young people. In the 1970s, the curriculum was broadened and the name was changed to the Community School for Performing Arts. Colburn--who made his fortune in foundries and construction equipment--stepped in to save the school in 1978, when the university could no longer pick up the tab. He shelled out $200,000 to cover the debt. Two years later, the school became independent, and in 1986 it took Colburn’s name.

“Music education costs many times more than teaching sociology or accounting because it can only be taught on a one-on-one basis,” says Colburn, an amateur violist who co-founded the L.A. Chamber Orchestra and has served on the board of the Philharmonic. “That’s why music schools run such deficits.”

He has continued to keep the school afloat. This year, tuition covered only 67% of the $1.2-million operating budget; Colburn made up the difference. And it’s his $150 million that will fund the planned conservatory.

The “inferior education” he encountered as a young music student, Colburn says, fuels his commitment. “Early on, I was hampered by the fact that my teacher was a jack-of-all-trades, teaching banjo, violin, guitar. While there are some outstanding institutions catering to the best of talent emerging at 16, 17, or 18, there are few dealing with it during the more important formative years.”

Martin Bookspan, the voice of PBS’ “Live From Lincoln Center” since 1976, calls Colburn “a lovable character with no sense of limits”--in music and in life. The 87-year-old businessman invites members of the Philharmonic to play with him and entertains the likes of Yo-Yo Ma, Alfred Brendel, Isaac Stern and James Galway at his Beverly Hills estate. In June, he married wife No. 8, with whom he’s expecting his seventh child.

“I know of no other person as dedicated to ensnaring young people into music since Mrs. [Mary Louise Curtis] Bok established the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia in the 1920s,” Bookspan says.

Colburn’s largesse supports a current enrollment of 900 students, most of them studying music. There is a 60-member faculty, including college professors and master teachers like Ronald Leonard, principal cellist in the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The open-door policy means that prospective students don’t have to audition for admission, Thayer says, but maturity and commitment are evaluated. Students have to pass examinations and do well on regular progress reports. Performing, through recitals, is “strongly encouraged.” Individual instruction starts at $448 per 16-week semester; theory and other group classes cost about $200.

“I send my son to study here, which for a teacher is the ultimate test,” says Colburn master clarinet instructor Yehuda Gilad, who also conducts one of two outreach programs at the school that together bring music to 20,000 elementary-age Los Angeles kids.

The proof of the pudding, of course, is in the professional world, which absorbs a steady stream of Colburn graduates. One violinist was recently named associate concertmaster at the N.Y. Philharmonic while former students hold--or have held--principal chairs in the symphony orchestras of Cincinnati, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Minnesota, St. Louis and New York. Notable alumni--some of whom will appear in the school’s distinguished alumni celebration series this fall--include jazz pianist Eric Reed, violinists Leila Josefowicz and Tamaki Kawakubo, as well as conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, music director of the San Francisco Symphony.

Tilson Thomas took his first classes in keyboard harmony at the age of 9, attending the school from 1954 to 1962. “The associations forged through my teacher Ingolf Dahl led to my working with members of the emigre community such as Jascha Heifetz and [Gregor] Piatigorsky who, along with studio musicians, conducted master classes at the school,” he says. “Indeed, one could say that the basis of my international career was the work I did in L.A.”

If faculty talent was plentiful, amenities were not. Until 1980, the school was housed in World War II barracks on a USC parking lot. When Colburn entered the picture, the operation moved to what was once McMahon’s Office Warehouse on the fringe of the campus, where it stayed for 18 years. There was no air conditioning. There was no performing space. Productions were booked at the university at times when stages were free.

Though improved conditions were long a goal, finding a new home was a challenge. Alternatives included Mr. Marty’s clothing manufacturing warehouse (rejected because columns would interfere with dancers) and Washington Boulevard funeral homes whose chapels were suitable for music. When plans to build on a lot east of the Shrine Auditorium fell through in 1989, the school turned its focus downtown.

“I asked whether there was any chance of getting the space across from Disney Hall,” Mayman recalls. “ ‘Not a snowball’s chance in hell--that space is reserved for a tax-paying residential building,’ one mover-and-shaker said.”

With the economy in a nose dive in the early ‘90s, however, local politicians hooked the school up with L.A.’s Community Redevelopment Agency, which offered up three Bunker Hill locations. The school cut a deal for the present site at a rate of $1 annually for 86 years. In November 1987, ground was broken for a 35,000-square-foot, three-level building designed by Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates, the firm responsible for the renovation of L.A.’s Central Library.

Providing five times the usable space of Colburn’s previous quarters, the new facility is connected to California Plaza by a landscaped bridge. There are maple “sprung” dance floors that bounce to prevent joint injuries, and a $280,000 recording/post-production studio that can be rented out. The cathedral-ceilinged concert hall is named after Herbert Zipper--a Viennese conductor and Holocaust survivor. Zipper formed a secret orchestra in a Nazi concentration camp and became a music educator in the U.S. after the war. He was artistic advisor to the Colburn School from the 1970s until his death last year.

The famed Jascha Heifetz is also commemorated in the new building. In the early 1990s, actor James Woods acquired the maestro’s Beverly Hills house and donated the studio to the school. By late summer, it will be reassembled on the top floor and used for violin classes.

“Being in this space is like going from a car that barely runs to one that purrs,” says Joseph Thayer, a professorial-looking former French horn player who has been dean of the school since 1983. “I keep waiting for postpartum depression to set in--we feel like we’ve birthed an elephant.”

On June 29, summer session began at the new Colburn School--though finishing touches were still being applied. Dance studio mirrors had to be hung and seats for the Zipper Concert Hall still weren’t installed. Though faculty was offering private instruction, group classes (including intensive thrice-weekly “cello boot camp”) wouldn’t start for two weeks. That was good news for exhausted staffers unpacking cartons and deciphering the new telephone system. A grand opening is planned for October.

The facility is already injecting life into an area relatively barren at night. “We bring a wonderful presence since we’re busiest late afternoons and weekends when businesses on California Plaza are closed,” Thayer says.

Now that the school has emerged from the shadows, enrollment is expected to soar. Administrators hope for a gradual expansion, topping out at 1,500. Adults, who now make up less than 5% of the program, are among those expressing an interest.

“Though I’m no Thelonius Monk, there’s so much more color and complexity to my chords,” says Stephen V. Wilson, a U.S. District Judge who has been taking jazz piano lessons at the Colburn School during his lunch hour since January. “In my chambers, I find my mind drifting to harmonies--the fate of the accused,” he quips, “may ride on whether I hit a C ninth right.”

Yet another element will be added to the mix when a four-year, college-level conservatory takes form in back of the school. Colburn will fund the project from the recent $1.2-billion sale of his company U.S. Rentals--the second largest equipment renter in North America. The $150-million commitment is said to be the biggest gift ever made to a local arts institution.

Patterned along the lines of Juilliard and the Curtis Institute, Colburn’s conservatory will be the first started from scratch since Boca Raton, Fla.’s Harid Conservatory was established in 1987, Thayer says. Plans for faculty, operating budget and administrative needs should be completed by late August. The school expects to admit about 90 orchestra instrumentalists, some 20 piano players and create a small voice department. The building may also house KUSC-FM, which has already approached the school.

“People in the Midwest and far West have had to look eastward for the kind of musical training that will now become available--tuition-free,” says PBS’ Bookspan.

Tilson Thomas says the region--and the Colburn School--are on a roll.

“Culturally, the West Coast hasn’t painted itself into a corner as much as some other parts of the world,” he said. “Diversity--and the fact that we face east as well as west--give us a sense of greater possibility. The Colburn School is an example of that. With its move into the new building and expanding perspective, it’s becoming a wide-reaching and hugely influential force--taking great things from tradition and redefining them for the future.”