A City in Harmony

Communion at the Victoria Conservatory of Music

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, a serious place for serious people performing serious tasks. It was commissioned in 1889 by the burgeoning 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 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, on Quadra and Balmoral just north of the Metropolitan Methodist (as the conservatory building was then called) they found themselves with a redundant house of worship. In 1997, 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 must have 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 Alix Goolden Performance Hall, must have made the location seem like a godsend. 

The Conservatory bought the property 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 the Conservatory comprises five unique schools—a classical program, of course, and one for contemporary music; the school for postsecondary studies; an early childhood program; and Brandes’s tech and creativity department. 

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 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.

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 in nonprofit management from Harvard, 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 performance space occupying the southwest corner of the building, in 2006, its name derived from the building’s original incarnation.

The devotional weight of the building from the street belies the lightness and joy that fills the space once you’re inside. Walking the hallways, the air is always shifting in tone from glittering piano to delicate violin to young voices splendidly in tune. It feels magical, if not a little intimidating, if you’re a middle-aged person suddenly considering the music education you’ve always secretly longed for. But would it be fun?

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.” 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 any smouldering musical ambitions.

You will have to share the halls with the scarily talented kids, though. 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 writing a full symphony in five movements called Pandemic: Symphony 1 in D Minor, which “captures the entirety of the COVID-19 global pandemic from start to finish.” Camilo composed it at the age of fifteen. 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.

The Conservatory under its new CEO is focusing on overcoming the obstacles COVID presented. As Medd says, “For many arts orgs, the pandemic wasn’t last year, it’s now. Downtowns are slow to recover, and the behaviour of audiences remains unpredictable,” making it tough to rent out the big performance spaces, like the Alix Goolden. Security issues out front on Pandora have intensified as well, with the burgeoning street encampment around the neighbouring Our Place Society community drop-in centre.

Enrolment, however, has been steady through the pandemic, thanks to a nimble switch to online classes where possible, and the donation of several large interactive smart boards to facilitate connection. 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 devotion to classical works remains unassailable, but its literacy and scholarship in contemporary forms, its embrace of technological advancements in the music industry, its accessible and fun programming for all ages, and its focus on business preparedness for students with career aspirations make it exceptional. The Conservatory is an exemplary union between a piece of Vic’s history and her future as a world-class cultural bastion, and it deserves its praises sung.