A City in Harmony
Composing an Inclusive Musical Community at the Victoria Conservatory of Music
Words and imAges by siMon oGden
The commanding stone structure on the southeast corner of Pandora and Quadra is not what it seems. At first it appears to be another member of Victoria’s congregation of grandiose heritage churches, each vying to outdo the others in scale and piety.
The building itself appears heavy, both in mass and solemnity. It’s a serious place for serious people performing serious tasks. It was commissioned in 1889 by the growing Victoria Methodist community—a non-conformist offshoot of the Church of England named for their “methodical pursuit of biblical holiness”—who had outgrown their original church building (where the CTV studios are now housed at Pandora and Broad). The original church had developed an impressive music program, complete with a full orchestra, and part of architect Thomas Hooper’s brief was to design the new building with splendid acoustics.
In 1925, the Methodists merged with the Presbyterian Church to form the United Church of Canada. As the Presbyterians already had a grand church building of their own, they found themselves with a redundant house of worship. In 1996, the United Church put one of them up for sale, leaving the choice of which building to surrender up to the buyer.
The Victoria Conservatory of Music happened to be looking for its forever home at the time, after tenancies in Craigdarroch Castle and St. Ann’s Academy. A building designed to exemplify music made the choice between churches an easy one, and the magnificent Casavant Frères pipe organ that backdrops the stage of the old sanctuary, now the Goolden Hall, must have made the location seem like a godsend.
The conservatory bought the property in 1997 for $2 million, the current price of a 60-year-old single-family home in Oak Bay, and retrofitted it with classrooms and offices. Today VCM comprises five unique schools. The classical programs now operate alongside the School of Contemporary Music. The Department of Postsecondary Studies prepares musicians for the business side of their career. Early Childhood Music offers a foundation in music for kids under one year old to age five, and the digitally focused School of Music Technology and Creativity approaches music-making forensically.
This all makes the VCM the second-largest independent music school in the country, behind Toronto’s Royal Conservatory. The VCM’s ambition is to become widely known as Victoria’s multi-discipline performing arts complex, as it already boasts three rentable performance spaces and over fifty classrooms and rehearsal studios. This identity is set to be defined more clearly over the next few years, with imminent upgrades to the facilities.
You may have spent a night with a favourite band in the Alix Goolden Performance Hall. You may even have known that its deconsecrated innards contain a hive of young and intense students of the classical canon. But the bewildering depth of programming the Victoria Conservatory of Music offers, and how welcoming it is for all ages and musical ambitions, is a revelation to most Victorians.
Perhaps most surprisingly, the conservatory is also a progressive wellness centre. It’s one of the largest music therapy clinics in North America, administering to 1,900 clients a week, of all ages. According to VCM’s new CEO Nathan Medd: “The youngest client in therapy right now is a premature infant, and the oldest is 107.” The reach and potential of music therapy is staggering—it’s used to treat a vast spectrum of challenges, both physical and mental, from cognitive health to pain relief to anxiety.
Medd is a UVic theatre grad with a master’s degree in nonprofit management from Harvard who recently returned to Victoria following tenures at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa and the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. His affection for the conservatory is obvious and not without history—he helped establish the Metro Studio Theatre (the name derives from the building’s original incarnation: the Metropolitan Methodist), the performance space occupying the southwest corner of the building, while working with Intrepid Theatre in 2006.
The term “conservatory” has a sober, academic feel to it. There are certainly serious kids in here who would terrify you with their savage talent, young musicians building a career who play intricate things with impossible ease. But Medd is quick to reassure that the conservatory has room for everyone, at any level, and loads of playfulness in its approach. He mentions the Academy Flute Choir, the BC Fiddle Orchestra, and the Joy of Life Choir—an “intergenerational group of singers doing it for the hell of it.”
There’s the Sing and Strum Ukulele group, and the Contemporary School’s Artistic Director Daniel Lapp’s Folkestra, which he describes as “a band, a community, and our own weekly kitchen party. All instruments are welcome and only a modest playing level is expected.” There’s nothing sober-sounding about that. Indeed, exploring the Conservatory’s vast menu of options will make you feel like it’s not too late to stoke your own smouldering musical ambitions.
You will, however, have to share the halls with those scarily talented kids. You should know before you start shopping for a cello that Camilo Aybar, a member of the VCM’s Collegium program (an “enriched program for talented young classical musicians”—read: “the elite lane for kid savants”), recently finished composing the five-movement Pandemic: Symphony No. 1 in D Minor, which “captures the entirety of the COVID-19 global pandemic from start to finish.” Camilo wrote it at the age of fifteen, as a way of dealing with the fear and uncertainty of the shutdown. The movements are titled “Outbreak,” “Lockdown,” “Restart Plan,” “Variants of Concern,” and “Vaccine.” You have to hear it to believe it.
Pandemic was a step up in ambition from Aybar’s Micro-Symphony in Three Movements, the last movement of which, “Drammaticamente,” was “inspired by an argument [with my sister] about me taking too long of a shower,” and rises to an “an intense march where each instrument takes turns playing the melodies until they come together in a triumphant finale.”
Another marvellous secret of the Conservatory is its music library, stocked with over 60,000 titles of music biography, history, and theory, and sheet music for almost every instrument, all available for loan to the public as well as students. It’s a room full of free inspiration, and as good a place as any to start your exploration of the school. Late fees are 20¢ a day per item.
Medd is focusing on overcoming the obstacles that COVID presented. “For many arts orgs, the pandemic wasn’t last year, it’s now. Downtown areas are slow to recover, and the behaviour of audiences remains unpredictable.” This is making it a city-wide challenge to rent out performance spaces like the Alix Goolden. Security issues on Pandora have intensified as well, as the street encampment around the neighbouring Our Place Society drop-in centre grows.
Enrolment, however, has been steady through the pandemic, thanks to a nimble switch to online classes and the donation of digital white boards that allowed students and teachers to interact, replacing the old backboards at the heads of the classrooms. Donations play an outsize role in the financial plan—the largest gifts contributed to the conservatory over the years have been through its Encore Legacy Society, which encourages potential donors to consider the VCM in their wills. This means a significant bump in the annual budget can land unexpectedly, and not without a touch of melancholy, but it also speaks to the enormous amount of goodwill the conservatory enjoys in Victoria.
The image of the VCM as a cathedral to orchestral music of the past is but a fraction of the story. Its equal devotion to contemporary forms, the healing power of music, accessible and fun programming for all ages, and post-grad business preparedness make it exceptional. The conservatory is an exemplary union between a piece of Vic’s history and her future as a world-class cultural hub, and it deserves its praises sung.
