Story by Patrick Mott • Images Courtesy of Pacific Symphony

The largest orchestra formed in the United States in the last 40 years – and one of the most celebrated and successful – first took shape on paper at a kitchen table and played its first notes in a Cal State Fullerton rehearsal hall.

Keith Clark, a young American conductor living and working in London and Vienna, had recently moved with his wife to Fullerton in 1977 to take the post of Head of Orchestras at Cal State Fullerton’s prestigious Music Department. Clark had a habit of doing much of his composing and other creative work at his kitchen table. “As with most composers,” he says, “I found that this was the best place to do serious work, and the proximity to the refrigerator was the best inspiration.”

The plans didn’t remain inside the Clark home for long. Soon the conductor, with the help of Cal State Fullerton faculty, administration and students, and with the backing of enthusiastic local arts patrons, had rounded up a stage full of top professional musicians, obtained initial grant funds and zeroed in on a suitable concert venue.

The nucleus of musicians who would become the Pacific Symphony Orchestra assembled for the first time in 1978 in one of the large ensemble rooms at Cal State Fullerton, a rehearsal hall that would become their home for the crucial first few years of its existence.

It was a cultural birth whose time had come for Orange County, and the formation and emergence of the ensemble was, by many accounts, rapid, dramatic and firmly grounded at and by the university.

The dean of the university’s College of the Arts, Jerry Samuelson, calls the orchestra’s beginning “one of the distinguished moments in our young history.”

“I’m very proud of the university,” Samuelson says, “because during the first two years of the orchestra’s existence, almost up to its move to the Orange County Performing Arts Center [in 1986], the university was kind of the orchestra’s umbrella.”

Underneath that umbrella was a beehive of activity.

The university’s foundation handled the musicians’ payroll in the early days “and if the orchestra was a little short of money during that time, the foundation carried it until it could raise enough money to cover the checks that needed to be written,” says Samuelson. “Financially, it could get a little dicey in those early stages.”

The university also provided precious office and rehearsal space on campus without charge and allowed the orchestra access to its array of percussion instruments – such as side drums and tympani – that otherwise would have to be purchased or rented and transported to rehearsals.

Most notably, the university provided musicians. Among the nucleus of the ensemble’s first roster were several full-time and parttime music faculty members and a handful of the best of the university’s music students, who were offered class credit for participation. The result was to be the university’s “professional orchestra in residence.”

The unusual collaboration between local professional musicians, university music faculty and students was part of Clark’s initial plan for the formation of the orchestra, realized on his kitchen table and taken from his extensive experience with European ensembles and musicians. In Europe, he says, students are often absorbed into professional orchestras and, in a sense, “apprenticed” to professionals rather than being trained in a strictly academic setting.

“My goal as a teacher was to bridge the gap between the worlds of academia and professional music for our students,” says Clark, who holds music degrees from both UCLA and the Vienna Academy of Music. “As a student in Vienna I’d seen faculty members take their best students into the Vienna State Opera pit to learn the repertoire by sitting beside them. This master-apprentice approach to music education – which is rarely practiced in the United States – is what I hoped to establish at Cal State. I always intended the orchestra to have a large educational component.”

The education, he adds, was not intended to stop with the “apprentice” students. Those students, in turn, would act as mentors to the younger players in the all student university orchestra.

Apart from CSUF faculty and student musicians, Clark dipped into the unusually deep talent pool of Southern California’s professional musicians – studio players, teaching professionals and others – and assembled a roster with several notable names of “first-call” pros.

All musicians were compensated, professionals at union rates and students with scholarships. Clark’s wife, Doris Dressier-Clark, who had acted as administrator for musical organizations in Europe, volunteered to manage the new orchestra. She would manage the ensemble through its first decade, helping to build an audience base of 12,000 subscribers and a budget of nearly $5 million. Her office space, according to her husband, was “an unused closet” in the CSUF music department. Her salary: $1 per hour “to pay our babysitter,” says Clark.

“It was a good time for an orchestra to start here,” says Todd Miller, a professor of music at CSUF since 1971
and an original professional member of the orchestra who continues to perform with the Pacific Symphony as a percussionist. “And over the years, for the most part, it’s really been a lot of fun. The quality has kept improving every year.”

Cynthia Ellis also was a charter member of the ensemble – at age 20. A graduate music student and a member of the university’s student orchestra at the time, Ellis brought her flute to an audition and was offered a student fellowship in the professional orchestra.

“The thing I remember most,” says Ellis, who today teaches at CSUF and continues to play flute and solo piccolo with the orchestra, “was trying not to let on that I was still in school with all these professional musicians around. Concerts were an even bigger event for me then because they happened less often than they do now.”

During its first two brief seasons the orchestra did not appear as the full Pacific Symphony Orchestra but rather as the 40-member Pacific Chamber Orchestra. The first season’s budget: $12,000. The new ensemble’s first concert, however, was ambitious: a performance of Bach’s “St. John Passion” with the Roger Wagner Chorale in Fullerton High School’s Plummer Auditorium. There would be one other concert that first season.

The response by the concert-going public was enthusiastic–so much so that after the initial concerts, plans were set in motion to nearly double the size of the orchestra to true symphonic size in order to be able to mount concerts that would include the greatest works in the orchestral repertoire. In its second season, which included five concerts, the chamber orchestra’s budget increased to $50,000. By its third season the newly named Orange County Pacific Symphony Orchestra was at full strength and working with a budget of $90,000.

“Those were really good times for our Music Department and for music in general in Orange County,” says Lloyd Rodgers, a professor of music who teaches music theory and composition at CSUF and who was instrumental in recruiting his old friend and fellow UCLA music student Clark. “In the approximately six years before the Orange County Performing Arts Center was built, we were looking at six years of very dynamic activity and some award-winning recordings on the part of the orchestra. And it was always very much a part of Cal State [Fullerton]. It was embedded in our department.”

Clark says the symphony during that time was a “town and gown” organization “and the relationship of a professional orchestra and a university music department was unique in the USA.”

World-class guest artists began to arrive to play and record with the orchestra. Artists such as violinists Yehudi Menuhin and Ruggiero Ricci, soprano Anna Moffo and pianist Leonard Pennario often agreed to perform for substantially reduced fees.

“It was the healthiest musical situation I have ever been in,” says Clark.

The orchestra quickly outgrew the limited confines of Plummer Auditorium and moved first to the 2,000-seat Good Time Theater at Knott’s Berry Farm (where acoustics were far from ideal) and then to Santa Ana High School Auditorium, where the seating capacity was similar and the acoustics were considered, at the time, to be the best in Orange County.

While the ensemble was amassing successes, fundraising continued to be nettlesome.

“It’s always a problem,” says Clark, “whether you’re the Chicago Symphony Orchestra or the Second Philharmonic of Lake Woebegon.” Much of the major contributions, he says, were in the form of in-kind donations, and few individual contributions exceeded $100. Symphony volunteers and administrators, such as Fullerton realtor Tom Key, sometimes would write personal checks to cover concert expenses and payroll.

The orchestra’s unique relationship with CSUF, however, often saved the day.

“What we were able to do – and this is still the American way of doing it – is if you can earn half your budget selling tickets then you have to go raise the rest of the money somehow. That’s the standard across the country. We always had great ticket sales from the beginning and virtually no administrative costs, and we were able to keep our overhead down and pay our musicians as we used them. We could control our costs. We were able to sustain that for years.”

Helping to keep a tight grip on the finances were an early board of directors made up of local businesspeople and enthusiastic volunteers such as Key, and arts patrons Marcy Mulville and Elaine Redfield. Directors’ meetings were held in a small room at Key’s real estate office in Fullerton.

During its first decade under Clark’s baton, the orchestra began to receive national recognition, partially for its first six commercial recordings. One, a recording of the violin concertos of Samuel Barber and Gian Carlo Menotti by violinist Ruggiero Ricci, is now in the Classical CD Hall of Fame, says Clark. Another, a recording of the music of Aaron Copland with soprano Marni Nixon, received a Grammy Award nomination.

After nearly five years under the Cal State Fullerton “umbrella,” the Pacific Symphony Orchestra formally separated from the university. “The board felt the parting was necessary,” says Samuelson, “because if they were going to be the professional orchestra of Orange County they needed to be totally independent. It was an evolution.” The separation, says Clark, also enabled the orchestra to apply for grants independently from the university and to manage its own payroll.

“We had a very accelerated growth in a very short time,” says Ellis. “But the orchestra was ready for those steps. My greatest hope was that the public would embrace the orchestra as it does now. We have a very vibrant arts community here, and the orchestra is a great orchestra.”

The ties that bound the Pacific Symphony and the university remain. University music faculty members continue to perform with the orchestra, as well as student alumni. In November 2007, the Pacific Symphony Orchestra and Pacific Chorale (directed by John Alexander, a former head of CSUF’s choral music department) performed Mozart’s “Requiem” and other pieces as part of a concert in the university’s Meng Concert Hall commemorating the 50th anniversary of the founding of Cal State Fullerton.

“The reason I wanted to bring them back for the anniversary is that I think the birth of the idea for the orchestra and the support of the university was a major accomplishment for this young university, and we’re very proud of it,” says Samuelson. “The PSO is an absolute success story in modern times.”

 

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