San Francisco Conservatory of Music


The San Francisco Conservatory of Music is a private music conservatory in San Francisco, California, United States. As of 2025, it had 447 students.

History

The San Francisco Conservatory of Music was founded in 1917 by Ada Clement and Lillian Hodghead as the Ada Clement Piano School. In 1923, the school was incorporated as the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, becoming the first music conservatory on the west coast. In 1956 the Conservatory moved from Sacramento Street to 1201 Ortega Street, the home of a former infant shelter. It resided there for fifty years, before moving to its current location at 50 Oak Street in 2006.
In 2020, the SFCM added the new Bowes Center at 200 Van Ness Avenue, a 12-story building that includes dorms with acoustic insulation for 400 of its students, 27 rent-controlled apartments for residents of the older building that was replaced by the construction, and some public performing spaces, including a penthouse concert room with views towards the north and west. The Bowes Center's $200 million cost was largely funded by donors, including $46.4 million from the William K. Bowes Jr. Foundation. The San Francisco Chronicle's architecture critic John King characterized the building's design as " against the strict rules of the historic district but the air of gravitas. For starters, the building is skinned in translucent glass that conceals insulation and the structural frame — a touch that adds a milky visual depth..." As of 2021, the Bowes Center was envisaged to fully open to the public in February 2022.
In 2020, SFCM announced a partnership with the talent management company Opus 3 Artists, and in May 2022 it acquired the Dutch classical music label, Pentatone, funded by a private donor. The music website "Classical Voice" described this "combination of a music-education organization with two professional music businesses" as "unusual."

Admissions

In SFCM's audition process, many of the areas needed to enroll feature a "prescreening" round, including composition, voice studies, strings, conducting, TAC...etc. A student can be denied or accepted based on the pre-screening results. Once the student is accepted beyond the prescreening round, they are called to San Francisco for a final audition to get to know the faculty, and perform for their chosen major's instructor. Once that is clear, the student is either accepted or denied admission into the conservatory. Some areas of the conservatory are more competitive than others, such as composition , and the strings department. The faculty values the applicant's personality and musicianship in the auditions.

Directors

  • Ada Clement and Lillian Hodghead, 1917–1925
  • Ernest Bloch, 1925–1930
  • Ada Clement and Lillian Hodghead, 1930–1951
  • Albert Elkus, 1951–1957
  • Robin Laufer, 1957–1966
  • Milton Salkind, 1966–1990
  • Stephen Brown, 1990–1991
  • Milton Salkind, 1991–1992
  • Colin Murdoch, 1992–2013
  • David Stull, 2013–present

    Notable faculty (past & present)

  • Jeffrey Anderson
  • Elinor Armer
  • Luciano Chessa
  • David Conte
  • Jacques Desjardins
  • Mason Bates
  • Jake Heggie
  • David Garner
  • Patricia Craig
  • Eugene Izotov
  • Nancy Zhou
  • Mark Lawrence
  • Susanne Mentzer
  • Garrick Ohlsson
  • David Tanenbaum
  • Deborah Voigt
  • Indre Viskontas

    Notable alumni

  • George Duke
  • Barbara Eden
  • Léopold Simoneau
  • Peter Scott Lewis
  • Miguel del Aguila
  • Shahad Paranj
  • David Garner
  • Isaac Stern
  • Aaron Jay Kernis, Pulitzer Prize winning and Grammy Award-winning composer, member of the Yale School of Music faculty
  • Carla Kihlstedt