Concert Society at Maryland History

Ruth Harris, Ph. D.
CSM volunteer

To Eva Hornyak, her mission in 1976 was clear: to create a regular chamber music concert series for the growing community at and around the University of Maryland in College Park. Having spent much of her life in a household where classical music filled the air, she missed the frequent live concerts by international artists that she had attended in New York City and San Francisco when she moved to College Park. Her husband, Bill, a professor in the University's physics department and also a music lover, supported and encouraged her formation of the University Community Concerts, renamed later as the Concert Society at Maryland.

Chamber music audiences had been growing since they were first introduced in the fifteenth century when composers produced pieces for the home, drawing room, reception hall, or palace chamber in Europe. In the twentieth century in the Washington, D. C., metropolitan area, small auditoriums like the Gertrude Clarke Whittall Pavilion in the Library of Congress and the National Academy of Sciences Auditorium provided the facilities for string quartets and other chamber music groups. The various universities in the area also had faculty, student, and occasional guest artist performances. In the Maryland suburbs chamber music groups performed at the Bethesda campus of the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center, built in the 1950s. More support came from the federal government, starting with the 1965 creation by Congress of the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities to help fund the cultural growth of the nation. At the University of Maryland College Park campus a talented music department sponsored student and faculty recitals. For several years a College Park campus group also presented guest performances, including some by the National Symphony. But the campus-sponsored classical music concerts diminished, possibly, Eva Hornyak surmised, because students became more enamored with the rock-and-roll that pervaded the 1950s, '60s, and '70s.

As part of the trend of building cultural centers in large cities, the opening of the Kennedy Center in 1971 encouraged the growth of classical music concerts in the Washington, D.C., area and, indirectly, the blossoming of the University Community Concerts (UCC). When Eva Hornyak decided to implement her vision of a chamber music series, she turned to an old friend for advice, Martin Feinstein, then executive director of the Kennedy Center, and she obtained support from University of Maryland Chancellor Robert Buckstern.

Before the first UCC became incorporated, Ms. Hornyak arranged for six concerts for the 1976-1977 season in the auditorium of the University of Maryland University College (UMUC) Center for Adult Education (now the Inn and Conference Center). She recruited for the first board of directors Mary Aylward, Joan Silverman, Mary K. Traver, and Howard J. Laster--all also associated with the university. Laster was chairman of the physics department, and his board colleagues were married to faculty members.

Violinist Jaime Laredo and pianist Claude Frank opened the new series on Sunday evening, November 7, 1976, in the UMUC Center for Adult Education. As Joan Silverman remembered the occasion, "The audience was thrilled, but we were so naive that we applauded and left, and they were all ready to play an encore."

The second season was a forecast of future musical distinction. The Guarneri String Quartet, which gave the opening concert, would join the University music department five years later and retain its original members longer than any other string quartet in the world. The young pianist, Emanuel Ax, and Yo-Yo Ma, the cellist then in his 20s, would rise to world star status. The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center would become a regular and popular performer in the Washington metropolitan area.

With two successful seasons under its wing the UCC Board decide to expand by including special series in its offerings. The first new series targeted future concert-goers. In February 1978 the UCC Board agreed to start a children's music series. "Classical Vibes," a program for "Middle-Aged Children (Ages 8-13)," opened with the Lyric Trio Plus Two in the Tawes Fine Arts Center Recital Hall (now the Ulrich Recital Hall) on September 16 that year. Classical Vibes, which presented two other concerts that year, proved popular but over the course of several years financially drained the chamber music series. The UCC had to pay regular fees to the performers but had to charge lower prices for children than it did for adults.

Under Eva Hornyak's direction the UCC also tried outreach programs, but on an irregular basis. Occasionally the UCC would set up a masterclass or other activity and then find that the sponsoring groups could not support the programs because of a lack of funds for the musicians or logistical difficulties, such as the unavailability of school buses for transportation of students.

As the UCC grew, so did the quest for funds. Hoping to bolster the UCC treasury, the group sought funding from various sources--the federal National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities, the Maryland Arts Council, local businesses, benefits, and individual donors. Violinist Isaac Stern, brother of Eva Hornyak, gave the first of several benefit performances for the UCC on November 28, 1978. In 1980 the UCC Board guided the development of a support group, the UCC Guild, and increased the membership of its board--adding the philanthropist, David Lloyd Kreeger. Kreeger generously gave time and money to the UCC and later became chairman of the board. During Kreeger's term as board chairman Maryland Governor Harold Hughes and his trumpet opened the first of several Celebrity Follies benefits for the concerts.

State and national government grants contributed greatly to the development of the UCC, especially during the 1980s and 1990s. The Maryland State Arts Council Advancement Grant enabled the organization to restructure its staff, establish computerized accounting and box office programs, and to build up a cash reserve. The National Endowment for the Arts provided key support from the 1980-1981 through the 1995-1996 seasons. The National Endowment for the Humanities grants gave substantial support to pre-concert seminars and through 1994 helped fund broadcasts of the concerts with humanities commentary. The Maryland Humanities Council also provided important grant money for the seminars. Corporations and individual music lovers consistently supported the series.

Despite growing financial strains during these early years the UCC maintained the high quality of its offerings--bringing more renowned artists to the community. Among performers in the late 1970s and early 1980s were Leonard Rose, the cellist; Richard Stolzman, the clarinetist; and the Tokyo String Quartet. Through the friendship of Eva Hornyak with Jane Alper of the Corcoran Art Gallery, the UCC initiated what became a long-term relationship with the Cleveland String Quartet. Under a 1982 special arrangement the Cleveland would play one evening at the Corcoran and the next for the UCC, and the UCC would pay for the insurance on the priceless Corcoran-owned Stradivarius instruments the Cleveland used in those performances.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s the UCC administration operated frugally in a nomadic-like existence. For years the return address on stationery was the Hornyak house in Silver Spring. The concert organization operated at times out of Eva Hornyak's kitchen, then in a space in the physics department, for a while in the University Relations office, also in the basement of Annapolis Hall before it was rebuilt, in a room in the University dairy, and by 1981 at a spot in the Armory. But "our office furniture is totally inadequate. We don't even have appropriate desks," complained Eva Hornyak to University Chancellor Robert L. Gluckstern in 1981.

Recognizing that the series needed a professional staff, Eva Hornyak employed Katherine Hay, a young flutist, and in 1982 hired Dr. Rose Ann Fraistat as UCC public relations director. Other professionals followed, among them Ethel (Viti)Beach, Yvonne Beatty, Bonnie Bray, Gilan Tocco Corn, David Gaines, Eleanor Gibson, Ann Matthews, Jeffrey Mumford, Lynne Nemeth, Pauline Robinson, Valerie Stains, Jean DeMart Warren, and Michael Wilpers--all of whom brought talents needed for a musical presenting company.

Meanwhile the UCC experimented with other different series: a Young Artist Series that became a New Artist Series, the Olde Musicke Series, a Student Sampler Series, the Keyboard Series, the Great American Songwriters Series, and the WorldSong Series. Because of the financial difficulties the UCC discontinued the Classical Vibes in 1985. Many of the other series disappeared after a few years although the kinds of performances continued under the general chamber music series auspices. The Olde Musicke Series, started in 1982, and the WorldSong Series, initiated in 1988, proved the most popular and lasting.

The music ranged from fifteenth-century monophonic ballads to atonal twentieth-century quartets. A typical program of a quartet, such as the Cleveland, included a mixture of periods with an eighteenth-century piece, perhaps by Haydn, first; a twentieth-century composition second, just before the intermission; and Beethoven or nineteenth-century romantic music to close the evening. The logic of such an arrangement was to accustom listeners, familiar with traditional harmonies, to the twentieth-century dissonance.

In 1991 in apparent efforts to sharpen its identity and yet broaden the organization, the board took some important steps. It changed the UCC's name to The Concert Society at Maryland in 1991 and adopted a new logo. That same year the board enlarged its membership, voting to allow a maximum of thirty directors. To encourage the presentation of music by young performers and to honor the memory of David Lloyd Kreeger, who had died suddenly and had left money to the series, the board approved the Carmen and David Lloyd Kreeger Fund for Emerging Artists and Composers. Meanwhile, after Kreeger's relinquishment of the board's chairmanship, Paul Dragoumis took over as chairman from 1988 to 1995. On September 12, 1995, the Board elected as chairman Patrick McCuan. Under these chairmen and a supportive board of directors the concert group improved its financial status. Backing up the board of fifteen members were a professional staff headed by Dr. Rose Ann Fraistat, executive director, and a board of advisors that included Emanuel Ax, Carmen Kreeger, Howard Polinger, and the Honorable Sidney Yates.

The Concert Society regular members of the board of directors and the board of advisors continued to serve as volunteers along with individuals who freely helped out in the group�s offices and ushered at the concerts. In a 1996 list of volunteers at the University of Maryland, College Park, the CSM contained the largest number of volunteers of any one component of the University.

As the end of the twentieth century approached, the Concert Society continued Eva Hornyak's mission. Following Ms. Hornyak�s retirement in 1993, the CSM sought to attract patrons by featuring unconventional concerts and locating performances in varied and sometimes unusual locations. Such concerts ranged from that of "America's most innovative string quartet," the Kronos Quartet, at The George Washington University Lisner Auditorium on November 11, 1995, to Ronn McFarlane's seventeenth-century lute recital on November 10, 1996, in the Riversdale Mansion, built from 1801 to 1807.

The Society also was concerned about the future. Like arts presenters across the country, the Society perceived an increasing need for outreach activities because of the cutting of funds for public school cultural programs and the necessity to cultivate future audiences. Granting agencies also responded to this need by encouraging arts presenters to make such initiatives an integral part of the missions and by providing modest support for such programs. Valerie Stains, artistic director after Eva Hornyak's retirement, began to make outreach activities a regular part of CSM programming by scheduling two such events during the 1994-95 season and several outreach activities connected to four performances during 1995 and 1996.

Grants from the Prince George's Arts Council, Chamber Music America, and the Maryland State Arts Council helped sustain and expand these efforts. In the 1996-97 season the Concert Society provided six programs for public school and university students and presented another two outreach activities for community groups.

Over the years by working with university units such as the Office of Multi-Ethnic Student Education, the Concert Society at Maryland also offered complimentary tickets to students, their parents, and their teachers on a space-available basis. In December 1993 the Prince George's County Public Schools Board of Education awarded the Concert Society a certificate of recognition for its generosity in donating tickets for cultural events.

By 1997 the CSM was looking toward the future. A performing arts complex was under construction at the University, and the Concert Society at Maryland expected to be a part of that center in the twenty-first century.