The May Treat Morrison
Chamber Music Center at
San Francisco State University Turns Fifty
The Morrison Artists Series is a program of the Morrison Chamber Music Center. After fifty years of bringing admission-free, magical, musical programs performed by the world's greatest chamber music players to the Bay Area and inspired learning opportunities to generations of gifted students, the Morrison Chamber Music Center's goal remains constant, offering, in the words of founder Edward Hohfeld: "the finest music in the most accessible way."
In addition to the concert series, the Morrison Center at San Francisco State University prepares students to carry chamber music's artistic gifts and human values into the world of the future. The unique attributes of ensemble playing--the collaborative creativity of the performers as they interpret a piece, the uplifting spirit of their achievement, the ability of music to reach beyond human barriers--all this conveys the message that we all have equal potential to experience harmony and to create it together.
Three outstanding musicians directed the Chamber Music Program successively until 1989: Ferenc Molnar, Andor Toth and Laszlo Varga. Since 1989, the members of the Alexander String Quartet have served as co-directors of the Instruction Program.
In addition to coaching all chamber music classes, the Quartet members help prepare students for careers as teachers by engaging them as assistants in their own teaching activities. They also give students the opportunity to appear, under their guidance, at schools and in other public and private performance venues. Under the auspices of the Program, the Alexander Quartet also extends its activities to coaching chamber music in Middle and High Schools of the Bay Area, and the group conducts seminars at schools and colleges throughout California, North America, Europe and Asia. Two yearly seminars bring to the State University campus the leading young ensembles of San Francisco and its suburbs, and the success of those seminars is now attracting participants from elsewhere in California.
The Alexander String Quartet is a quartet for the community. In a strikingly innovative collaboration with the concert-presenting organization San Francisco Performances (link to performances.org) --a collaboration that Chamber Music America cites as a model to be emulated throughout the U.S.A.--the Morrison Chamber Music Center's resident quartet conducts interdisciplinary classes connecting music with literature, history, language, sociology, science and math for the general student body in selected inner city San Francisco High Schools.
San Francisco Performances also presents the Alexander Quartet annually in a series of Saturday morning concert-lectures, joined by the distinguished composer/commentator, Robert Greenberg, that takes place at a downtown venue and attracts an SRO audience of devoted fans.
In addition, the Quartet maintains close ties with the Community Music Center, San Francisco Youth Symphony Orchestra, California Youth Symphony Orchestra, the S.F. Conservatory Preparatory Division, the Crowden School in Berkeley and the San Domenico School in Marin County. Such services to the music-loving public, to musical institutions and to students are made possible by the residency of the Alexander String Quartet at San Francisco State University.
