The Colburn School emphasizes performance at its recently established conservatory, where students attend expense-free.
By DAVID MERMELSTEIN
LOS ANGELES
“Richard Colburn really wanted to have the school close to the Music Center,” Mr. Corzo said last month, referring to the benefactor of both the new structure and the adjacent Colburn community school, completed in 1998. “He wanted it to be part of the downtown area.”
Like Mr. Corzo, the conservatory’s students — 96 at present — have their eyes on Disney Hall, literally and metaphorically. They are among the finest young musicians in the world, hailing not just from the United States but also from Asia, Europe and Australia. (Curiously, given the location, none yet come from Latin America.)
“We are a performance school,” said Robert Lipsett, who teaches violin and helped map the conservatory’s evolution. “If you want to be a musicologist, Colburn is not the place. It’s for musicians who are going to make their livelihood as performers, at one level or another.”
The conservatory building — 12 stories with teaching space, practice rooms, an orchestra rehearsal hall, a recital hall, a cafeteria and housing for up to 130 students — is the latest addition to the redevelopment of Bunker Hill, this city’s woefully sterile acropolis on which stand, in addition to Disney Hall, the Mark Taper Forum, the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, the Ahmanson Theater and the Museum of Contemporary Art. It is also the most significant upgrade to the area since Disney Hall opened in late 2003.
Disney Hall’s arrival placed an architectural and acoustic gem in the heart of downtown, but it did nothing to foster street life or diversity on the hill. People drive in for cultural excursions and leave soon afterward. Colburn’s new brick complex looks unremarkable from the outside; it could easily be mistaken for an office building or low-income housing. But for an area awash in white-collar workers who desert at dusk, it promises a young resident population.
The conservatory offers one bachelor’s degree, in music performance, and two graduate programs: an artist’s diploma for students seeking to broaden their repertory and the less structured professional studies certificate for those on the verge of a career.
Colburn’s history is complicated. The school comprises the longstanding School of Performing Arts, sometimes called the community school, and the newly formed conservatory. The school was founded in 1950 as the preparatory division of the University of Southern California’s music school; later it broadened its mission and changed its name to the Community School of Performing Arts. Formal ties with U.S.C. were severed in 1980, and five years later the school was renamed in honor of Mr. Colburn.
He died in 2004 at 92, after plotting the community school’s move to Bunker Hill and ensuring the conservatory’s creation and construction. Though he did not live to see the expansion, which reportedly cost $120 million, his vision permeates the enterprise.
“Part of Mr. Colburn’s dream,” said Deborah L. Berman, dean of the entire Colburn School, “was for gifted students to study at a high level without having to work to put themselves through school or going into further student debt. So it was agreed that this would be a tuition-free program and that room and board would also be provided.”
To cover those costs Mr. Colburn provided an endowment that is now roughly $200 million. The largess allows Colburn conservatory students, selected through a rigorous audition process, an education largely devoid of money worries. (Those enrolled in the community division, primarily children and adolescents who attend after school, still pay for classes.)
The endowment gives Colburn a rare edge in courting prospective students. Only the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, arguably the country’s most elite conservatory, offers financial incentives to rival Colburn’s, and even those pale in comparison.
Colburn students sleep in private rooms, though they share bathrooms. Their suites come with coffee makers and microwave ovens. They are fed, free, in the school’s cafeteria, which is open to the public and has become something of a neighborhood gathering place.
“When we came to Colburn, we had earthly concerns taken away,” said Andrew Bulbrook, a former graduate student now on the faculty as second violinist of the resident Calder Quartet. “We could focus just on music.”
Yet like another impressively endowed Los Angeles arts institution, the Getty Trust, the Colburn has found that riches alone do not bestow unlimited influence.
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“People assume that you can attract anyone and do anything if you have all this money,” Ms. Berman said. “But it’s more complex than that. When you are going after the most gifted students, they look at teachers, location, programs. They tend to be pretty critical.”
So the institution seeks to attract students the old-fashioned way, through teachers, and for such a young conservatory, Colburn’s faculty is unusually rich. Besides Mr. Lipsett the roster includes the pianist John Perry, the cellist Ronald Leonard, the violist Paul Coletti, the oboist Allan Vogel and the clarinetist Yehuda Gilad, who conducts the Colburn Orchestra, which is nearly at full strength after four years. Several active members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the San Francisco Symphony also teach at Colburn.
Teachers interviewed said they were impressed by the longstanding reputation of the community school, which counts Michael Tilson Thomas, music director of the San Francisco Symphony, as an alumnus. More recent community school “graduates” include the violinists Robert Chen, concertmaster of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and two members of the New York Philharmonic: Sheryl Staples, principal associate concertmaster, and Michelle Kim, assistant concertmaster.
“There’s been a lot of great talent here for many years,” Mr. Lipsett said.
Colburn’s teachers must embrace its communal philosophy. “When we hire faculty,” Ms. Berman said, “they must have a strong chamber-music background and approach to music making because that is fundamental to the way we make music here. We work as a team, and as a result we’re not interested in teachers who want to build empires.”
Mr. Corzo echoes her view. “There is a wonderful sense of family, of real connection among the faculty and administration,” he said. “That’s not always the case. Here everyone is really thinking in a very altruistic way.”
Perhaps the best example of the conservatory’s communal spirit is Performance Forum, Colburn’s most prestigious student showcase. The nearly weekly assemblies, always on Thursdays at 11 a.m., gather the entire student body, administration and faculty. Board members and teachers in the community school may also come. A celebratory lunch for all follows.
“The crown jewel of the school is Performance Forum,” Mr. Lipsett said. “It could only happen by writing it into our master plan, and it’s proved to be the most wonderful thing. If a teacher feels a student is at the best of his best, he has an opportunity to perform at the forum. Then we all go down to the rehearsal hall and have lunch together. It’s extremely bonding.”
It is, of course, too early to assess Colburn’s effect on the American, let alone the international, music scene. “Because the conservatory is so young,” Mr. Corzo said, “it may take 10 or 15 years to see that we are creating the impact we want.”
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