The Colburn Schoool

Colburn School

Three students from the Colburn School

By Catherine Wagley

How Los Angeles' leading music school marries excellence and access.

Ray Ushikubo is nine years old and telling me about passion. He is describing the slow parts of music that allow for freer interpretation, and the fast parts that must be clear and precise. He is explaining how you have to feel the phrases of each composition. “I think about how this part is fun, or this part is sad. I like to express my emotions,” he says. “But I’ve found that I need techniques.”

I point out that, earlier, when I’d watched videos of his Vivaldi and Mozart performances, clips I’d found on YouTube, he had seemed to be both very focused and also engrossed in each moment. I’d been impressed. “You seem to love it,” I say. “Yeah,” he replies, and then repeats himself for emphasis: “Yeah.” This is one of the only times during the course of our conversation that Ray, who is studying piano and violin at The Colburn School of Performing Arts, will use an incomplete sentence. Usually, he articulates his thoughts with concise, well-chosen predicates and subjects; he’s also good at inflection. When he uses the word “passion,” and he uses it often, I get swept up in his excitement. He’s a special kid.

I am sitting next to Ray on the far side of a long table in a conference room on The Colburn School’s third floor. Ray’s parents sit to the left, while John Collinson, the school’s Manager of Corporate and Foundation Relations, and Ory Shihor, Ray’s teacher and an acclaimed pianist in his own right, sit across from us. Tarsa, an Australian Bearded Dragon who belongs to Collinson and has befriended Ray, flits across the table for part of the interview and then spends the rest of the time perched on Collinson’s shoulder. Her pink and orange skin meshes nicely with Ray’s orange, white, peach, and gray striped polo shirt, and they pose for a picture together before we begin talking. But even though Ray’s support system, human and non-human, has shown up en masse, Ray speaks for himself and everyone trusts him to do so. It’s only when he has a question or can’t recall a fact that they chime in.

Ray realized he wanted to make music at the age of five. “I saw a Japanese drama,” he recalls, “and one of the heroes was a conductor and very good at piano and violin.” He wanted to be very good, too. Three and a half years later, he has already played both piano and violin at Carnegie Hall, a result of winning the American Association for the Development of the Gifted and Talented International Young Musician Competition, and placed first at the Southwestern Youth Music Festival, among other honors.

He began studying with Shihor at Colburn only one year ago and has been studying violin with Robert Lipsett, Colburn’s Jascha Heifetz Distinguished Violin Chair, for just three weeks. “He has lots of passions,” Ray says of Lipsett. “I like those passions and learn [from] those passions. And also, he’s very nice.” When Ray plays – and I know this from YouTube, since I’ve yet to hear him in person – his brow furrows slightly, and sometimes he opens his mouth as if about to speak to his instrument. At the best moments, his eyes drift peacefully shut. Certainly, there’s a seed of great passion there.

Later, when I talk to The Colburn School of Performing Arts Dean Bob McAllister, he tells me that, while Ray may be an exception to most rules, it’s not exceptional for the students at The Colburn School to be precocious and motivated like young professionals, even if professional musicianship isn’t every student’s ultimate goal. The individual attentiveness and specialized instruction that distinguish The Colburn School have always led to impressive results. Alumni of the program include conductor and pianist Michael Tilson Thomas, jazz pianist Eric Reed, and violinist Michelle Kim.

The Colburn School is young in some ways, older in others. It began in 1950 as a preparatory affiliate of University of Southern California’s school of music, and originally stood in a converted warehouse near where the Felix Chevrolet lot stands today. In 1980, when USC decided it could no longer afford a community music school, prolific investment banker, philanthropist, and amateur violist Richard D. Colburn stepped in. The school became an independent non-profit and changed its name to The Colburn School in 1986. In 1998, it moved to its current building on Bunker Hill, right next to the Museum of Contemporary Art and across the street from what would soon be the Disney Concert Hall. The Colburn Conservatory School of Music was established in 2003 – a strange progression, since in most community school-conservatory partnerships, the community school is what comes as an afterthought – and the campus expanded down the hill by 326,000 state-of-the-art square feet in 2007.

The complex has a clean stoicism to it, with no windows on the ground level of its street-facing face, and a tall slanted roof over the Zipper Concert Hall that makes it feel as though it’s receding backwards, away from Grand Avenue. Long glass walls cut down the middle of the building’s right side. But it doesn’t feel austere in the least; in fact, it’s a surprisingly low-key space. “We want a welcoming approach and ambience at this school,” says McAllister, who has also been at the forefront of the school’s major push toward accessibility.

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