Slide on down Mission Street and you’ll hear lots of sounds — mariachi at full blast, street hawkers trying to sell you handcarts, the grumble of BART in a hurry, Cuban habanera, Irish jigs, cool jazz, acoustic gospel; well, hold up.
You just walked the 20th–21st Street block, a few yards from where the Community Music Center just reopened its campus on 552 Capp Street.
High notes this dreary time of year are in short supply, but the return of the Community Music Center’s main location after a two-year renovation felt good, with folks turning out in full to see the “new” digs. The nonprofit music school kept busy even without its main location, bringing education and performance opportunities to thousands of residents and students from its Outer Richmond location and school programs, with tuition aid to the tune of $3 million each year.
But you can tell it’s good to be home. Saturday’s grand opening had live music pouring down Capp Street from the front patio, from the theater in the back and from rooms on both stories of the two houses that bookend this little campus.
“Campus” is a good word. Ever been on a college quad when you could stand still and hear someone practicing the piano, an a cappella group warming up and someone’s laptop blaring “Party in the USA” all on the same breeze? The Mission location feels like that. San Francisco has always been good about cramming a lot into small places but the new space is a master class in how to build here.
Facing the street: two lovely Victorian homes, the left fully accessible but no less attractive for the modernization. A pleasant brick patio anchors the space and tucked behind it all are two concert halls, one in a repurposed carriage house. The whole scene smells of new paint and old wood — just a fine remodeling job.
“It’s a Victorian from 1881 which has been sliced and diced and created into this music school” laughed Executive Director Julie Rulyak Steinberg of the original home, intimate but a little snug. “And while it is beloved, it is small and inaccessible to those with mobility needs. We had been completely out of space for decades.”
In 2012, a stroke of luck: “We had the opportunity to purchase the neighboring property — a once-in-a-lifetime expansion in place, to develop this campus feel. It was a labor of love: twelve years to fund a project, develop it and eventually see it through. We broke ground in February of 2022 and had our ribbon cutting ceremony on Wednesday.”
The new building is already being seasoned with rhythm. On the ground floor, faculty member Maestro Curtis worked the ivories with Herbie Hancock’s “Cantaloupe Island,” looking Miles-Davis-levels of cool as he grooved with students. After audience members clapped during a lull in riffs, Maestro laughed. “Aw, we were just playing around.”
Playing around — there really is a sense of joy and jamming that counters those humdrum music lessons which haunt many of us. Upstairs in the new space, folks sat down for piano sessions in a spacious front room while down the hallway a teacher plucked out the first of many chords with a toddler and his tyke-sized guitar. Office space aplenty for the center’s dozens of faculty, whose makeup of dozens of professional artists seems more collegiate music department caliber and less hardscrabble community organization.
Outside, the bluegrass band swapped out for a gospel group. In the carriage house, a Cuban jazz group was in full music lesson mode, stopping now and then to introduce a new technique in an impromptu history lesson. Maestro and his wife, vocalist Nola Curtis, now led folks in “Hey Jude”. From the old building’s open windows, first-time vocalists tried The Supreme’s Where Did Our Love Go?
It all mixed, mingled and wafted out onto the street, drawing folks in until the very last minute of the open house. In that moment, even I, whose highschool piano teacher greeted me after my senior-year recital with “well, you tried” — I didn’t — considered signing up for lessons.
And you should. Private classes, group music sessions, training for the kiddoes and summer camps are the CMC’s bread and butter. If you’re like me and stubbornly prefer to tap your toes from the safety of an audience, CMC has plenty of events of every style to take in — many of them free. Who knew?
“We’ve been San Francisco’s best-kept secret for 103 years,” Rulyak laughed. They deserve a little more fame this century.
M. T. Eley is a San Francisco-based writer.
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