San Anselmo’s San Domenico Upper School is a private, all-girl catholic high school set in a pastoral wooded campus just outside San Francisco. Although it is among the oldest independent schools in the state of California, over the past few years San Domenico has been gaining notoriety in the music world for a relatively recent development at the school — its Virtuoso Program, a rigorous course of study for ambitious and talented young string players.

The 24 girls in this 30-year-old program face an intense academic curriculum, in addition to countless hours practicing their instruments and rehearsing in string quartets and with the string orchestra, so it’s no wonder that administrators at the school haven’t traditionally seen the need to burden their students with additional music festivals and competitions. Yet in 2005, led by musical director George Thomson, the Virtuoso Program’s Orchestra de Camera entered the ASTA’s National Orchestra Festival and, unsurprisingly, was bequeathed the Grand Champion award for most outstanding high school orchestra nationwide.

SBO recently caught up with Mr. Thomson, a veteran of several professional symphonies as both a conductor and player, to discuss the finer points of this unique program and the circumstances that led him there.

School Band and Orchestra: Would you tell me a little bit about your own musical background?

George Thomson: I grew up out here in the San Francisco Bay area. I basically got all of my exposure to music in the public schools. I started on the violin in the third grade because that was the standard practice in that district. My parents didn’t play and I didn’t have a piano in the house. Regardless, I pursued music with great interest through elementary school, junior high, and high school. My father would always say with mock frustration, “You pay for all those music lessons, and what do you get? A musician!” But my parents never put a damper on my musical enthusiasm and when I decided in high school to take choir instead of a second year of calculus, they were fine with that.

I went on to the University of California, Berkeley, and my primary interest was really scholarship — music history — but I started doing a lot of conducting at that time, and I was playing a lot. I continued on to do some graduate work there in music history, and I was getting more and more drawn into the history of conducting.

SBO: Going back to your high school days, was there a particular moment when you decided that music was something you would pursue at the next level?
GT: I can’t say that I had a “breakthrough moment” so to speak. It was more like, at a certain time, I realized that I’d always been playing music and it just seemed very natural that I would continue pursuing it. The idea that it could be more than a pursuit, that eventually I’d have to make a living… well, I was always very fortunate as I got older that I had opportunities to do musical things for which people would pay me a little. So I just sort of slid right into a musical career. I certainly didn’t bank on going into teaching, especially at the secondary school level.

As far as being a musician and pursuing music, I was a pretty hopeless case…

SBO: Hopeless in the sense that you knew you’d always be doing it?
GT: Right. I couldn’t imagine not playing music. But the idea of going to a conservatory — I never even imagined it. Really, the idea that you could just play the instrument all the time for a living? That was not what I was thinking. It was so fun that I never thought I would be able to do it as a job. I always assumed that music would be my enjoyable pursuit and that at some point I’d have to do something else “legitimate.”

But after a while, I realized that I was supporting my education by playing music. So I thought, “Wait a minute, I am making a living — now!”

SBO: What types of jobs were you being offered?
GT: Further along when I was at college, I met a lot of great composers and played new music. I got in on the period instrument/early music scene as it was just getting going in the early ‘80s. I became involved with the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra playing the Baroque violin. I did that for many seasons. I was also involved with new music ensembles and, from there, my conducting career started moving along. I ended up working for the Berkeley Symphony for several years as a conductor under Kent Nagano, the music director. I did a lot of programs there, including school programs and new music concert readings.

I really only got into teaching and working with young people through a youth orchestra job I ended up with. It was while I was with this youth orchestra that I discovered that I actually enjoyed working with children and had a knack for it. Various musicians I knew sort of nudged me towards teaching. A woman named Anne Crowden, who started the Crowden School in Berkeley — which is still thriving — hired me to teach theory at her school. The Crowden School is grades four through eight and basically has music as its focus; they have a full academic curriculum, but it is just music for the first two hours of every day, and then the rest of the subjects — which I think is a marvelous way of putting your priorities!

SBO: I agree!
GT: From there I got a call from Ms. Faith France, who at the time was running the Virtuoso Program at San Domenico School, where I now work. This school has been in existence in one place or another since 1850. It’s a Dominican Catholic school, but this string program that I run now was started in the late ‘70s as a response to what was happening in the public schools. Proposition 13 had just passed and all of a sudden music had become one of those “extra” things which was being trimmed. And, unfortunately, once it was branded an “extra,” even subsequently when funding got better, music is still regarded as an “extra” in many places, and therefore competes in the educational consciousness with sports, clubs, and those sorts of things. Those are the battles we all struggle with today.

So Ms. France came up with the idea that at this small private school she could start a program for string players that basically would have chamber music as its focus — you’d get a few kids and have a string quartet of students who attended the school. What began as one string quartet became four string quartets. And soon there were enough people to have a string orchestra. So over the years, it evolved into what it is now, where students who enter the program play in a string quartet or a chamber group, and then they all play together in an orchestra.

SBO: How did that momentum build from just one quartet to a full string orchestra?
GT: It started out with four students, and the idea was to use that ensemble to raise money to provide scholarships for students to come to this private school, which is a pretty expensive place to attend. Ms. France started raising money and she found some people around here who thought that what she was doing was great, and they were willing to donate money to see that it continued. Now we do a lot of fundraising to keep this up — we have to raise in excess of $400,000 a year to pay for scholarships for students in our program to attend the school. The school, by the way, is pre-K-12 and co-ed through the eighth grade, but girls-only in the high school, and it has day and boarding students.

SBO: Is that all in one building?
GT: It’s an enclosed campus with basically three schools, a primary, a middle, and a high school, which all have separate buildings on this bucolic woodland setting in Marin County. It’s really a lovely spot.

I work mostly with the students in the high school. Of the 160 students in the high school, 24 of them are in this Virtuoso Music program. They have to audition to be a part of it, as well as apply to the school. Basically, my students do everything else that the other students do — they do the whole school day — and then after school, they come down and hang out with me. Each student in our music program is in her own string quartet that meets a couple times a week. The kids get some coaching in that, but they rehearse on their own. And we have the string orchestra, which rehearses twice a week and has a separate, additional hour for each sectional. On top of that, they all take private lessons and work on their solo repertoire. We also have ensemble performance classes where our students have a lot of opportunities to play for each other, and we have recitals and concerts all throughout the year. It’s pretty intensive, but they have a lot of fun doing it.

It’s not like an art school high school curriculum where there are several periods a day devoted to a specialty subject. These girls have a full academic day and then they do the music.

SBO: So the music is extracurricular?
GT: Well, we hate that word, because the music is why these kids are here. We compromise by calling it co-curricular, but the students in this program know that this is the curriculum. It’s like, “Oh, and we also do regular schooling.”

That dread phrase, “extracurricular.” We all struggle with it because that word “extra” makes people think it’s not essential, which is just wrong.

SBO: I’ve spoken with a lot of educators fighting that battle, trying to have an ensemble class meet during the school day, and not, say, at seven o’clock at night.
GT: That’s right. All I can say to the people around here who want music to be extra and optional and everything else is, basically, well, when I was in school, somebody made me play basketball. I would’ve liked to have just taken Basketball Appreciation, where I’d sit and write papers on the evolution of the point guard or something like that, but no, even though it was not my passion, it was just one of those things that society thought I had to do; there was a time when music and art were thought of the same way.

I have the privilege of working with very talented students who are extremely motivated and we are able to do a whole lot, but I could actually succeed with quite a range of students, as long as they were willing to put in the time.

SBO: You mentioned it vaguely earlier, but what exactly is that time commitment? What’s your rehearsal schedule?
GT: We have two two-hour rehearsals a week, plus an hour of sectionals, and we give three major concerts each year. I assign material for sectionals, on which I quiz and grade the students every week.

There are also a couple hours of chamber music every week, which really informs their orchestra playing. It gets them used to working in a small group and dealing with each other socially, as well as musically. We like to think of the chamber music as the core learning aspect of the program because it demonstrates what the young women do on their own, when there’s no coach present. Maybe, the first violin doesn’t like viola, or they just had an argument, or maybe the other three don’t like how the cello is doing something and they have to figure out how to tell her that… there’s a lot of drama around it, but that’s really a skill that kids must learn in any group project. One positive aspect is that it’s not like the group science project where one person does all the work and the other members of the group sit around and get equal credit.

SBO: Sure, in a string quartet, everyone’s accountable.
GT: Right, and that model carries through to the spirit of the whole program, in which everyone has to keep everyone else up; you succeed as a group.

SBO: But at the same time, do you find that the elevated talent level and expectations increase the pressures around maintaining such high standards?
GT: I find that students are acutely aware of what the standards are, and they keep each other on track. They’re high school students, so lots of things are always going on, but when it comes time for a concert, boy, everything gets very serious and everyone is focused. Usually you’ll see students spontaneously practicing in groups — for example one person in each section in the orchestra having a little rehearsal to make sure that everyone is together and on the same page — and they do that on their own. Sure, I give them plenty of hoops to jump through to make sure that level of musicianship is maintained — to make sure they’re practicing — but if somebody isn’t doing their part, everyone knows it; so when it’s time to play the concert, everyone prepares. The high standards are really the students’ doing; I just have to give them an idea of what’s possible.

So that’s why when students are interested in coming here, we have them visit, come to a concert, and sit in on a rehearsal to see what it’s like. Because we include this in the application process, kids tend to come into the program really buying into the idea of how much work is involved, and they want to be part of a high-level ensemble. Not all the girls are the most technically advanced players — I tend to favor students who are keen and who are willing to put in the work and be flexible, kids who aren’t too rigid — but if a student is slightly behind the others technically, she usually catches up very quickly. It’s telling that each of these young women wants to be in that quartet with the three other people who are a little bit better than she is — which, of course, is mathematically impossible — but that’s the kind of attitude that exists here. They want to be in an environment that is going to raise their own game.

SBO: So how competitive is it, then?
GT: Well, there’s no way that it’s not going to be competitive to some degree, but that’s kind of the nature of orchestral music. We understand that it will be a part of the life. We have auditions often: if you want to play solo with the orchestra, you have to audition; at the beginning of the year there’s a placement audition with excerpts; and sometimes we’ll have those throughout the year.

However, we try to set it up so that the kids aren’t competing with each other for chairs; I rotate the seating fairly rigorously. The way I see it, most anyone in the orchestra could sit just about anywhere. I don’t rotate completely arbitrarily, but I like to give people the experience of playing at different positions in the orchestra. That said, I do try to reward exceptional effort and avoid situations where one student might profit from someone else’s weakness, so that students don’t try to sabotage each other. I try to set it up in such a way that the result makes everyone better.

We have blind auditions and I have in other educators and musicians who don’t know the students come in and work with them. It’s kind of nice to not have it all on me.

SBO: Sure, you have to maintain the sense of trust with the students, but also stay objective to some degree. In 2005, The Virtuoso Program played at the National Orchestra Festival. How did that come about?
GT: I know there are a lot of programs that perform frequently at festivals and state Music Educators Association meetings, but we really don’t do that. There are lots of performance opportunities we haven’t traditionally taken advantage of.

Because this festival was new and it was nearby — so it was practical to get to — my boss at the time thought, “Why not? Let’s just try it and see how we do.” As it happened, we did really well, and that sort of gave everyone a taste for it. The experience was great for camaraderie and ensemble building, so we decided that the next time the NOF came towards the west coast, we would try to do it again.

We tend to focus our efforts on the concerts we prepare here on campus, although every year we do try to engage in at least one off-campus performance. We were on NPR’s “From the Top” a year or two ago. Occasionally we’ll collaborate with artists from San Francisco. A few years ago, we did something with the S.F. Jazz Festival where we were playing behind Charlie Haden and Michael Brecker, which was great. We also did a few shows with guitarist Sharon Isbin a year and a half ago.

When those sorts of opportunities come along, we consider them, but our students are really busy. We’re well aware that we’re already using a lot of their time, so we tend to think carefully about the outside activities that we pursue.

SBO: You’ve worked with several different types of symphonies representing different demographics. What are some of the challenges of working with an all-girl high school orchestra?
GT: Well, it’s a really interesting environment. I know there are a lot of different views about single-sex education. Of course, here at San Domenico, perspectives are skewed because the students have all consciously made the choice to receive this kind of education.

Most of my students also play in youth orchestras around here, so they’re out there playing in co-ed ensembles regularly — they’re not exactly cloistered here — but I think they’d all agree that there’s a different interpersonal dynamic. It’s basically the standard mantra that people say about single-sex education: it frees people to act and interact in ways that they might feel constrained from doing if there were members of the opposite sex around. The girls themselves are very honest about that.

SBO: What about musically? What’s unique about an all-girl orchestral ensemble?
GT: I don’t know. What does it mean to play like a girl? If you look at the string section of any youth orchestra, the gender demographic is definitely skewing. I can’t imagine in terms of the expressive range and the energy and the passion that they bring to it… I don’t think that having boys around would necessarily increase that range. These girls can play anything I throw at them and with gusto. I can’t really ascribe a gendered quality. They play with passion, and it is a passion for the music.

For “From the Top,” we sent in a tape of us playing a finale of this string quartet, a fugue, which is very fast and very energetic. The producer’s comment was that these girls were playing as if their very lives depended on it. When they get going, that’s the kind of spirit they have. I don’t think that’s particularly attributable to the fact that it’s girls only. If this school were co-ed, we could probably do a program like this and it would probably be successful, but as it is now, it’s just that there is something special about it.

I also wouldn’t say that this is necessarily a better way; it just so happens that it was at an all-girls school that this program was founded. From a recruiting standpoint, there are a lot of kids out there that I’d love to have join us and who would be interested in joining us, but for the fact that they’re male.

SBO: How does it compare to other orchestras you’ve worked with?
GT: I also conduct the Marin Symphony Youth Orchestra, which is co-ed, and there’s definitely a different social aspect to it, but I wouldn’t say that that shows in the music making experience, necessarily. Of course, to high school students, any sort of ensemble experience is only partially about the music making. The social component of any group activity is huge for kids this age.

SBO: Sure, as kids learn how to relate to each other and be social. What about for you personally? What drives you? What do you find rewarding about your experience working with these kids?
GT: I always like to tell people, and this is a little flippant, that I love working with the kids during a performance because it’s usually two uninterrupted hours when nobody can talk back to me! [laughs]

When we’re in that moment, performing, and everyone is giving their maximum concentration, we’ve prepared pretty meticulously and there’s a lot of focus. We’ve developed such a close relationship that I can do things in a performance that are flexible and I’m confident that my student-musicians will come with me. I also have the luxury of time here that I don’t have when I work with professionals. Even though the girls’ technical ability is not nearly as advanced as, say, the folks at the Marin Symphony — which I also conduct — we can achieve results that are pretty close thanks to the time we have to work with. In the performance, watching them give their absolute best and then seeing them be proud of it afterwards is really rewarding.

SBO: Hard work pays off.
GT: Exactly. That ethos is very strong in our program and we’re all proud of it.