San Francisco’s 103-year-old Community Music Center will celebrate the grand opening of its expanded main campus in the Mission District with a music-filled ribbon-cutting ceremony on Feb. 21 and an open house with free classes, jam sessions and outdoor music for adults and children on Feb. 25.
“The ribbon-cutting is going to be a really special moment for our community to reflect on the history of CMC and to celebrate,” says CMC executive director Julie Rulyak Steinberg. “We’ll have music from our faculty, Marcus Shelby with the CMC Teen Jazz Orchestra, and the Curtis Family C-Notes, and we’ll have the mayor and our supervisor—folks who will be signifying that CMC is entering its new era.
“The open house is really a chance for folks to come and experience our beautiful new space, to connect with our world-class faculty, and see how they might either begin their musical journey for themselves or their children, or to pick up where they left off, to pick up a passion that was paused for whatever reason,” Steinberg adds.
Performers at the open house include the CMC Bluegrass Workshop and Jam Ensemble led by Erik Pearson and Tregar Otton, and the Mariachi CMC Ensemble, led by Martha Rodriguez-Salazar and Daphne Gonzalez Cambambia.
Children, teens and adults are invited to register online, first-come, first serve, for free classes offered at the open house.
The $15.1 million expansion project, completed just over a year after the Feb. 16, 2023 groundbreaking, provides 4,000 additional square feet of space to carry out CMC’s mission of making music accessible for all people, regardless of financial means. (Seventy percent of the student body participates in some form of financial aid program at CMC.)
The new state-of-the-art facilities, built into an 1880s Victorian house next door to the main campus, include a digital piano lab, six teaching studios, seven rehearsal spaces, a multi-use recital hall, and two administrative spaces.
“The group piano lab is outfitted with beautiful new Yamaha Clavinovas where folks can learn together — some are very young students taking their first steps in piano, some experienced pianists are learning new styles — so that’s certainly unlocking the space for us in a new way,” Steinberg says. “The teaching and learning spaces have more latitude, so more chamber groups, more beginning opportunities for adults, and then within those spaces we have a new recital space that is going to give our community and students the opportunity to perform in a more intimate environment.”
The expanded campus will accommodate an additional 900 students, an important addition because the demand for in-person instruction has picked up as the pandemic has receded.
Over the last year, working with partners including the San Francisco Unified School District, CMC carefully planned how more classroom space could be used, getting feedback on community needs and where the demand would be, according to Steinberg.
In the fall, CMC started to seed group classes expected to become a big component of its expansion, including the Sparks program designed for young, beginner students learning violin, viola, cello, guitar and piano.
CMC also has responded to a surge in demand for instructional and performance space from other stakeholders.
“We have more jazz classes than we’ve ever had before, we have a new mariachi class,” Steinberg says. “The other thing that’s been driving demand is that we have been able to open for rentals, for concerts, and arts access projects, which is the first time we have done that since 2019.”
The new facility and the resulting updated look of the entire campus has already generated considerable interest from the public before the grand-opening festivities.
“It’s wonderful to see our expanded facility get additional attention in the neighborhood,” Steinberg says. “It’s funny how now that our courtyard looks quite different and it’s more open to the street, people say, ‘Are you new? We haven’t noticed you before.’ And we tell them, no we’ve actually been here since 1921.”
Community Music Center’s ribbon-cutting is at 2 p.m. Feb. 21 at 544 Capp St. and the open house is from 3 to 5 p.m. Feb. 25 at 552 Capp St.; to sign up for free entry and classes (on a first-come, first serve basis), visit sfcmc.org.