What has San Francisco Classical Voice contributed to the world of music over the last quarter century? Consider the appreciation that Wu Han, world-renowned pianist and co-artistic director of Music@Menlo and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, shared with SFCV Senior Editor Michael Zwiebach. “If I had a million dollars,” she told him, “I would give it to your publication. And if I had more than that, I would establish little Classical Voices in every city around the United States!”
In fact, the launch of SFCV in 1998 was followed in due course by the creation of similar online classical music publications in Florida, North Carolina, Illinois, and Ohio, as well as Classical Voice North America. That proliferation had been one of the goals of the late Robert Commanday, the former chief classical music critic of the San Francisco Chronicle, when he received a phone call from his friend, businessman and composer Gordon Getty. Commanday was then 75, Getty 64.
Zwiebach, in an extended interview, recounted the detailed inside story of SFCV’s evolution. “Getty told Commanday that online journalism was becoming a viable thing and that he should continue his work, after retirement, in a weblog format,” Zwiebach began. “I don’t think either of them knew much about the format, but it was an idea, and Getty was ahead of his time. Commanday woke up the next day and said to his wife Mary that what they really needed to do was to found a new kind of journal — online.”
Getty recalled that “Bob and I, as co-founders, both conceived of SFCV as a forum for music criticism online, with no hard copy, at a time when music journalism in the printed press was waning.” Getty’s personal wealth, derived in large part from the sale of Getty Oil (founded by his father J. Paul Getty), enabled him and his now-deceased wife Ann to support major musical institutions such as the San Francisco Symphony and Opera, support that continues to this day, as well as to provide seed money for SFCV.
“It was something we wouldn’t recognize now,” Zwiebach pointed out about the publication in its early days. “It was a ’90s website with very teensy photographs and not a whole lot of layout. Just Bob Commanday doing all the editing and Mary doing all the typesetting, learning how to put it online. Mostly reviews. He didn’t think much of previews. He thought they were filler.”
Looking for writers, Commanday “grabbed a whole bunch of people that he [considered] stringers,” Zwiebach said, “including D. Kern Holoman, who was a recognized Hector Berlioz scholar and professor at UC Davis, and Anatole Leikin, a professor of music at UC Santa Cruz. And he raided his old paper for talent, including Jesse Hamlin and Steven Winn, who’d eventually take a buyout and retire from the Chronicle.” Veteran arts editor and freelancer Janos Gereben contributed news about music, which he continues to do. Commanday himself contributed weekly think pieces.
Aside from ushering music journalism into the brave new world of the internet, Commanday, who was “immensely proud of the classical tradition we had here [in the Bay Area],” had a mission of extending coverage to “all the other organizations that he would always have loved to have covered for the Chronicle,” Zwiebach said.
Zwiebach was still working on his dissertation at UC Berkeley when Commanday, who had taught and conducted choirs at Berkeley in the 1950s and ’60s, recruited him for the newly formed publication. He was assigned to cover smaller organizations such as Sonos Handbell Ensemble and the now-defunct San Francisco Lyric Opera. “Commanday was not averse to having 13 reviews in one issue. Because he was running this himself and was not beholden to a larger organization, he was willing to take all those little companies and things under his wing. And Getty was right behind him on that.
“I always say that I went to the Commanday School of Music Journalism,” Zwiebach continued. “Mr. Commanday would say to me [after I submitted a review], ‘Mike, I don’t think you believe that. You said it, but you don’t believe it. Why don’t you write what you think?’”
According to Zwiebach, by 2002 Commanday “was ready to step away from the day-to-day toil” of editing SFCV. He chose a UC Berkeley alumna, violinist and violist Michelle Dulak Thomson, “to carry his mantle forward.” She was succeeded as editor-in-chief by Mickey Butts, a choral singer better known for his career in business and marketing. “Mickey was very punctilious about editing, and he brought in a whole bunch of editors under him, including me and Catherine Getches [as managing editor] and also Janice Berman [as features editor].”
At around that time, in 2006, “the website had to be upgraded, and Mickey used something like the ancestor of WordPress,” Zwiebach said. “But all that required extra money, and suddenly there was a lot more money being shed by the organization. It became clear to the board that Mickey couldn’t continue because there was no financial structure for that.”
“When I first got to SFCV, it felt like the organization hadn’t quite figured out what was what,” reflected Don Roth, who joined the board of directors a couple of years after becoming executive director of the Mondavi Center at UC Davis in 2006. “I wanted to help stabilize the finances, and I helped create SFCV’s first significant strategic plan.”
“The board went out and hired Patty Gessner as a consultant to do a complete overhaul of the SFCV structure,” Zwiebach added. “And Polly Winograd Ikonen came on to make things more audience-friendly, make the categories a little bit more like entertainment journalism. Polly and Patty were the people who came up with the whole idea of artist spotlights, previews, and all that stuff, and they set a pay scale for all those things. They wanted us to create a database of composers. They asked me to be the chief content editor, which was a new thing.
“And they hired a firm called Rolling Orange to build a website in the open-source Drupal content management system. The new website launched in 2009. But earned income was hard to come by. Getty was saying, ‘I’m not going to sustain you at this level forever.’ He wanted us to be able to walk on our own. We tried to get people to underwrite different parts of the website. And we were working very hard on getting grants. Around 2010 we got a three-year grant from the Hewlett Foundation, which was renewed two more times after that. We hired a grant writer, but the problem was that SFCV doesn’t fit into the preferred categories of grant-making to the arts. Funders seemed more reluctant to support music journalism than to support music makers.”
In 2011, John Robinson became SFCV’s executive director, a position he now holds at Music@Menlo. (Around that same time, this writer started contributing to the publication as one of an expanding crew of freelancers.) “I quickly understood,” Zwiebach tells me, “that you knew a bunch about jazz and world music. And especially after an interview I’d done with [conductor] Michael Morgan, I understood that in 20th-century classical music, all these things are connected. So it quickly became obvious to me that jazz should be part of our purview. San Francisco is also a hub for Brazilian music, African music, Asian music — it’s just endless. But there’s no way in hell that I would be able to cover it all.”
For a short time, the publication established a physical headquarters within what was then classical radio station KDFC’s studio in downtown San Francisco. SFCV would later relocate for a period to a suite on Gough Street. “A physical office was very important to our board at that time,” Zwiebach said. “[Businesswoman] Mary Falvey, the chair of the board, really had an objective to make us a million-dollar organization. Her idea was that if we can’t make it work as just a music journalism site, we could add music education, connecting parents with resources.”
“I wanted to make [the publication] a wonderful bedrock for society,” said Falvey. “For me, one of the inspirations from SFCV has always been to promote classical music as a universal language that crosses generational and cultural lines.”
Although the board decided to hold to the founders’ original mission, SFCV named a designated education reporter and had this writer offer workshops in music journalism to several area high schools and youth organizations. A grant from the National Endowment for the Arts funded a short-lived video series that showcased visiting performers and appealing aspects of the Bay Area’s music scene.
“We went through several executive directors in quick succession, [all] with various ideas about what we should do to square this circle,” noted Zwiebach. “Nobody had answers because there had never really been an online classical music [publication like this] before. I call that our growing-pains period.” Another physical move, to a location in Berkeley, reduced both overhead expenses and Zwiebach’s commute time from his East Bay home.
In 2014, Claudia Campazzo, a violist and fine artist who’d worked in marketing for Strings magazine, was hired by SFCV “to do advertising and provide us with some kind of earned income,” Zwiebach said. “The San Francisco Symphony had become an ad sponsor early on, but there was no systematic approach. So Claudia created a whole set of advertising materials, rates, specific products, and packages. Over time, she’s expanded this with new promotional opportunities for arts presenters.”
In 2015, the board approved Campazzo’s appointment as executive director. “We all felt like she was very focused, organized, and creative, and she knew music,” said Roth.
“In that year she slashed our expenses by 30 percent by making us a virtual organization,” Zwiebach pointed out. “We got rid of every last bit of telephone wire, and we got rid of the office. She also sold a lot of advertising, and within two years we had a rainy-day fund for the first time. When COVID hit, we were really glad to have that fund — nobody got laid off, nobody had to take a pay cut, nobody had to work reduced hours at any point during the entire pandemic.”
“It’s great to have saved our finances, but what’s very important is that Claudia also cared about the quality of our work,” Roth emphasized.
In 2016, the publication brought on Paul Kotapish, a folk musician who had studied architecture and had a flair for design, as managing editor. And with Campazzo’s encouragement, Zwiebach began ramping up jazz coverage, which became a budgeted line item in 2017 and facilitated the recruitment of in-demand jazz freelancer Andrew Gilbert. The extension of coverage to Los Angeles, which has long had one of the country’s leading classical music scenes, was budgeted shortly thereafter.
The 2020 pandemic slowed everything down, but during that time, “we covered a lot about what specific organizations were doing to keep themselves in shoe leather,” Zwiebach said. “We also covered the basics of how technology, including Zoom, could help the music world. And because of the impact of George Floyd’s murder [in 2020], we reaffirmed our commitment to highlighting the contributions of Black and other nonwhite Americans. And that included stepping up jazz and world music coverage because contemporary classical artists, especially if they’re people of color, happily pull down genre boundaries.”
Tools such as Google Analytics have allowed SFCV’s staff and board to keep a closer, more faithful account of the publication’s impact on readers. “You get confirmation of which articles do well,” Zwiebach said, “like the first opera performance in a season, which drives up traffic, or the story about the recent SF Symphony Chorus. And also which articles were unexpectedly powerful, like the Linda Ronstadt profile, which people are still reading, and that went up a year and a half ago. You see what days of the week and what hours of the day people are tuning in. But [every single article] will be there for as long as we exist, and somebody somewhere along the line will eventually discover [an old one] and go, ‘Ha, how about that!’”
As for the role that the publication serves for the music makers themselves, Zwiebach pointed to the proliferation of pull quotes excerpted from SFCV reviews, previews, and features by various organizations. “I wrote a review about the San Francisco Choral Society that was splashed across their website for literally years because no one else at that time had come to review them. How much coverage had the Golden Gate Symphony or the Redwood Symphony gotten without us? Or new-music organizations like Other Minds? People have frequently said to us, ‘You’re punching way above your weight class,’ because that kind of coverage, to most organizations, is invaluable.”
Campazzo, who continues as executive director, forged an ongoing arrangement with the Rubin Institute for Music Criticism, placing promising young critics as interns at SFCV. “All of our other writers are knowledgeable about music,” Zwiebach said. “Many of them are actually musicians, so they can ask nitty-gritty questions different from those of a reporter from the general media. I can assure my interviewees that SFCV has a pretty alert set of readers, so go ahead and get into some detail.”
A redesign of the website in 2020, including a more interactive front page and a new logo and color scheme, was another of Campazzo’s accomplishments. “And she continued to excel at selling ads,” Zwiebach said. “[Organizations] know that we pull the audience and that they need to be seen by that audience.”
As the latest managing editor, Peter Feher, who started working for SFCV in San Francisco and now lives in Cleveland, has “excelled in handling the heavy workflow, brought more rigor to fact-checking and editing,” and embellished the visual appeal of articles, Zwiebach said. “I think Peter’s layout skills have become exceptional. The website looks great.” Feher won an award for layout from the San Francisco Press Club this year.
Getting music lovers out of their homes is one of SFCV’s most tangible and valuable achievements. “I’m always hoping somebody will go, ‘Oh, I would really like to hear that orchestra live,’” Zwiebach said. “And that’s where you’re getting a sense of what the art form is really about. Part of jazz, for example, is watching the musicians looking at each other, picking up the cues, and egging each other on. It’s exciting.”
Currently, SFCV is “at our max in terms of what we can possibly handle,” Zwiebach continued. “The budget is good, but we only have two editors and an assistant [Simon Cohen, a Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley] who works with Claudia and sometimes with Peter and me. We’re still trying to digest Los Angeles, keep up with jazz, and we’d like to go further into world music. We heard from Gordon Getty that he’d like us to do more reviews of recordings and media.”
Another new opportunity came about when the San Francisco Chronicle’s Joshua Kosman retired last April after 36 years at the paper, where he’d served as Commanday’s assistant and later successor as chief classical music critic. In the months following Kosman’s retirement, Campazzo facilitated an unpublicized arrangement to provide the Chronicle with review and feature copy penned by SFCV contributors and edited by Feher.
Zwiebach remains enthusiastic about and grateful for his continuing role at SFCV. “I didn’t realize when I started this job what I was in for. I’ve learned something new every day, and that’s not just a cliche. Now, in 2024, I’m pretty sure that I don’t have a complete grip on what ‘classical’ is — and that’s a good thing. And I can’t believe that I work for a periodical with such great literary values and which is still very vital, illuminating things nobody else would spotlight.”
