Bonnie Hampton is taking a few days away from her duties teaching cello at Juilliard to be part of the celebrations surrounding the 25th anniversary of the chamber music master’s degree program at the San Francisco Conservatory, the first of its kind in the country. At 75, she is as vital and aware and connected as ever, with plenty of energy. She has the continual blessings of a great teacher — seeing her students go out into the world and accomplish astonishing things. Like her teacher, the famed Margaret Rowell, Hampton has made a difference in the musical life of the Bay Area and the country, by nurturing talent and by sharing her own excitement for chamber music with everyone she comes in contact with. On the eve of the celebrations, Hampton talks about her life, the founding of the chamber music program, and the value of being present every day.
At the end of July, I celebrated my three-times 25 birthday: one of the few times I’ve allowed my birthday to be publicly celebrated. Other times, I’ve threatened people who happen to know. When I was 70, I was playing a concert that night, and I invited some of the other people out for dinner. I said, “OK, I’m celebrating,” because I realized, you know, when you start to get a certain age, you’re not going to have that many more; you might as well start enjoying them.
Can you talk about your own background in chamber music?
We’re celebrating 25 years of the chamber music program at the San Francisco Conservatory. My early awareness of the Conservatory was when the university brought the Griller Quartet over — they and the Budapest Quartet were the biggest quartets in this country, and they and the Busch Quartet were the biggest quartets in Europe at that point. They were brought to the university [UC Berkeley] and the Conservatory also got them to have an attachment to them. This was back in the early ’50s. And that set a climate of excitement for quite a few of us young people growing up. We started being very interested in chamber music. And fortunately my teacher, Margaret Rowell, who is kind of a legend in Berkeley and became an international legend in the cello world, believed so much in chamber music that I was introduced to it right from an early age. There are some of us who would have gone east to the big conservatories at that time, but we stayed around because of the Griller Quartet.
And about that time you met the future founder of the Crowden School, Anne Crowden?
I knew Anne well — from the day she got to Berkeley, actually; she was part of a chamber music party at my house. That was sometime in the 1960s. In the chamber music world, everybody knows everybody else.
My first husband, Colin Hampton, who was the cellist of the Griller Quartet — his son [Ian, also a cellist] was a great friend of Anne’s and they had played in the Edinburgh Quartet together. And then Ian had moved to Berkeley and knew that Anne was coming and, in fact, had encouraged her to leave Europe and come to Berkeley. He was about to get married to somebody else, but they were very good friends. She was touring with the Amsterdam Chamber Orchestra and Berkeley was the last stop of the tour and that happened to be the day we were having a chamber music party at my house with Colin and Ian and lots of people.
From then on, when we did cello quintets, we would often have Anne playing with us. And we got her to the [San Francisco] Conservatory, we got her to Stanford [University], because we wanted to work with her.
With the Crowden School — I remember when she started talking about it over the kitchen table (we were very close friends, took walks together, all kinds of things), I thought, “What a great idea.” Because, you know, she was teaching all these kids and their schedules were so full that they never had time to practice. And then a school where there would be good academics but students would also have, first thing, music — it all sounded great. But then I thought, “Oh God, how do you put a school together?” Well, Anne had grown up in a school, because her parents had had a boys school in Edinburgh, in Scotland. So she kind of absorbed what it meant to be running a school. And so it did happen.
How did the chamber-music nucleus group come together at the Conservatory?
There was a little hiatus there, in the late 1960s, when we [Hampton and her peers] went off in different directions and the Griller Quartet disbanded — they had gotten to retirement age. My trio [the Francesco Trio) had a beautiful sponsorship from the San Francisco Friends of Chamber Music. And as young musicians do, I did a multitude of things [teaching privately, investigating contemporary music, teaching at several colleges]. Then we [the trio] had a residency at Grinnell College for three years — no one could believe we would leave the Bay Area for Iowa, but it was a real job. And I have a nostalgia for that period when I was doing so many creative things. I couldn’t handle it now, but then — you know, it’s what a young musician should be doing because you find out all the things you like to do and can do.
We came back to San Francisco in 1972 for a residency at Stanford, but then, fairly soon, we won the [prestigious chamber music award] Naumburg, and Milton Salkind right away got us to come to the Conservatory as the resident trio. And Paul Hersh came about that same time. So we began to be a whole community, let’s call it, of chamber musicians who wanted to be doing that. And Anne Crowden was around at that time [the mid-1970s to early 1980s].
In the late 1970s, we started the Chamber Music West festival. You know, the Conservatory never had a huge surplus of money, but Milton was willing to go out on a limb for a good, creative idea. The festival was very much based on the Marlboro idea, which is where I’d gone some summers in the ’60s as a student musician. And it’s based on apprentice teaching, where older and younger musicians play together, rather than simply coaching. The festival went for over 10 years and it was wonderful.
And that’s where the chamber-music degree idea came from?
So there was this whole atmosphere of chamber music, and then Milton had the idea, mainly, I have to say, stimulated by Margaret Rowell, who went to Milton and said, “Look, you need to do something for chamber music in this school.” It was because of her urging that Milton got the idea of making a chamber music graduate major, which was the first in the country. And then they asked me to be the head of it. So it was teamwork — I was the one they asked to pull it together, but it was because many of us had been doing it.
My concept of it was that it would be groups; we would have two groups and they would be fully sponsored for two years so that they could get their repertoire together, get performing experience, and give themselves a chance. Because young musicians who put groups together, they’re still having to make a living. And so they’re having to run all over the place doing many things. And it’s very hard; you don’t get paid enough from whatever concerts you play. So it was to give that umbrella of support and mentoring and coaching to groups.
The Peabody Trio will be coming and joining in the celebration; they were one of the first groups. And I have to say, many of the groups that were first involved in the chamber music program are still pretty much in the chamber music profession. Of course, it was not always easy or practical to have formed groups, so it started evolving, after four or five years, toward individuals who were going to have an intensive chamber music experience. So it has changed a lot over the years from my original concept, but it is still very viable.
In the early 1990s, I turned the direction over to Mark Sokol. And I’m so glad, because he had such an intensity about his work. He ran it until just last year, when Jean-Michel Fonteneau took over. And of course he was in the Ravel Quartet before he came to San Francisco. There’s some terrific talent that has come through the program. And I have to say, now that I’m at Juilliard, and I travel around doing different residencies and master classes, San Francisco still has one of the most creative, cutting-edge programs. I just got a message from Jean-Michel on the works he wants me to coach on the master class and it’s Beethoven’s Opus 127, it’s Bartók or Britten quartets, and [György] Kurtág. Now, this is serious business. And it shows that there’s this wonderful, intensive activity over there. And when I’m out at my house in Berkeley, all my colleagues from the Conservatory come over and we play quartets. So my connections with the Bay Area are still very real — I may work here at Juilliard but the Bay Area is home, where I live.
And your generation has brought so much to the Bay Area’s musical life.
I visit the Crowden School every time I’m out there and I love what’s happening there. Because that’s the earlier age of students learning about chamber music, learning about playing together, learning how to listen. When students of Anne’s or from the Crowden School would come to me at the university [UC Berkeley], you could always tell that they knew what it means to play with other people.
I want to say, by the way, that chamber music is like a microcosm of life. I mean, you have to learn how to get along with other people, how to work with them, and that the goal is the music — which we’re so lucky to have; the goal is to find the best performance of that music that you can, and try to start growing with it.
What do you tell young musicians about choosing music as a career?
I really do feel that if a person can think of anything else that they would just as soon be doing, other than music, they should be doing it. Because it doesn’t take music away from them. They can have music in their lives forever. But in order to say, “This is what I’m going to do,” you have to be willing to scrape along. It isn’t necessarily just handed to you, or easy. You have to want it very badly.
But I also feel that this is a very big country and there’s a lot to be done. Traveling around with the trio and touring, you can tell where a person or a small group of people have been able to create an environment and community around music, and they’re excited about the concert. There are other places where you go and you get the concert sponsorship and you see the hotel and the concert hall. When I was president of Chamber Music America, we had a rural residency program where groups would go into rural areas and do work in schools and communities, and they would make a real difference. And I know how much difference we made when we were at Grinnell College. And I’m really glad we had that experience.
Are we in an era when performances sound too much alike, where concerts are predictable? This is a criticism you hear of symphony orchestras. What do you tell your students about being individuals, so that the music sounds like them rather than somebody else?
I’ve made comments in the past about what I’ve called “mainstream playing.” I would say this: I think it’s the result of recordings. Now, the way one can edit, one can make a perfect recording. And live performances are often criticized because they don’t sound like that perfect recording. How many times have you read in a review something about players' being out of tune? Well, for heaven’s sakes, in a whole concert, if a string player doesn’t play something a little out of tune, then they aren’t very human. But what has happened is that young players really go after accuracy, which means that you don’t take as many risks, you don’t allow yourself the same kind of momentary response to the music on the stage.
It’s an older aesthetic, in a way, which says that the first thing to do is to get into the character and the spirit of the music itself and then bring one’s own personal response to it. And that does not mean that you just use the music as a vehicle for your personality, but it means that you don’t just try to be a note-perfect blueprint of the score. You make something alive out of it. And with so many wonderful musicians, that is what they’re trying to do.
Having lived this long, are there things that you bring up in lessons that your students would have no notion of?
Absolutely. Not always; I mean, I like to live in the here and now. But on the other hand, I know that in my work with [Pablo] Casals — and he was in his 80s when I was studying with him — I remember things from those lessons quite often, and how important they are. They are the renewing kinds of things that keep one’s juices flowing.
Such as?
I came across, this summer, all my notes from my lessons with Casals — I had put them away and had to rediscover them — and I was so stimulated by them. It wasn’t as if I didn’t know all those things, but to have them fresh, so to speak. And I think that maybe some of the things that I try to get across to students now, maybe someday they’ll remember and think, “Oh, that’s what she was talking about!”