Director Cornish College of the Arts Band Seattle Wa
Cornish College of the Arts
- By Mildred Andrews and John Caldbick
- Posted eleven/12/2014
- HistoryLink.org Essay 596
Mother to the Arts
No description of Nellie Cornish fails to mention her motherly mode, warmth and generosity, sparkling eyes, quick wit, and enormous free energy. Hundreds of students called her "Miss Aunt Nellie."In her autobiography, Cornish reminisced about her father, a lover of literature and theater who devoted evenings to instructing his children. He questioned teachers for assigning rote memorization of textbooks and was determined that his children learn to think for themselves. His lessons stuck. Nellie began to study music, so to teach it. Questioning traditional pedagogical techniques, she sought out new ideas. She wrote, "As three generations of my ancestors were pioneers, I just had to be a pioneer; life always forced me to use my own initiative" (Cornish, 35).
Equally a child, Nellie Centennial Cornish (her middle proper noun signified the year of her birth) lived with her family in a sod business firm in Nebraska, on a sheep ranch in Oregon, and in an apartment in a higher place the bank that her father founded in Blaine, Whatcom County, after moving to Washington. The banking company was forced to close during the depression of the 1890s and her parents moved to Spokane. Nellie stayed in Blaine and continued to study pianoforte, giving lessons and working as a governess to support herself.
In 1900, Cornish moved to Seattle, where she gave piano lessons in a shared studio in the Holyoke Building on Spring Street. In 1904, she went to Boston to study the new Fletcher Method of pianoforte didactics. She returned to Seattle and teaching piano, then moved to California to take an unsuccessful stab at becoming a professional concert pianist. She decided that instruction was her true calling and studied with Calvin Brainerd Cady (1851-1928) in Los Angeles. Cady believe that music pedagogy was a necessary foundation for the development of logic and critical judgment in children. After those studies, Cornish spent fourth dimension in both Seattle and northern California.
The Get-go Cornish Schoolhouse
In the autumn of 1914 Nellie Cornish returned to Seattle from her latest stay in California and that November 14 (the day of her return or one twenty-four hours after it, depending on the source) she signed a lease for a studio infinite in the Booth Building at Broadway and Pine on Capitol Hill. With the bankroll of wealthy friends, she founded the Cornish School of Music. She believed that creativity should be developed in the average person, as well as in the talented, and that fine art'due south ultimate purpose was enrichment for everyone -- not only the privileged elite -- and she set out to create a school that reflected those behavior.
Cornish was recognized every bit having special talent for teaching music to youngsters, and many Seattle families put their children nether her tutelage for an arts education beyond what the public schools could offering. Within three years, the Cornish School of Music had expanded to take upwardly the entire third flooring of the Berth Building, and an expanded curriculum was evidenced by a new name -- the Cornish School of Music, Language, and Dancing. Helped by the winning personality and humility of its talented founder, Cornish attracted both enthusiastic media coverage and the support of many wealthy benefactors.
With an uncanny instinct for quality and originality, Cornish hired both famous and unknown artists for her faculty. An early recruit was her California mentor Calvin Cady. Before Mark Tobey had gained even local recognition, she invited him to teach painting. Sensing an enormous and unusual talent, she arranged a solo-performing debut for one of her avant-garde dance instructors, Martha Graham, who became an internationally renowned dancer and choreographer. She recruited Maurice Browne (1881-1955) and Ellen Van Volkenburg Browne (1882-1978), founders of the little-theater movement in America, and gave renegade composer John Cage his start.
When White Russian artists fled their homeland in 1917 during the Russian Revolution, Nellie Cornish went to New York to discover drama, ballet, and music faculty amongst their ranks. One recruit was Peter Meremblum, who built the school'southward chamber-music plan and its orchestra. He organized the acclaimed Meremblum Trio (later on quartet) of kinesthesia members that performed to beholden audiences up and downwards the West Coast. Another refugee, Alexander Koriansky, taught drama at the school for seven years before being lured abroad to Hollywood.
Hard Times
The post-Globe War I recession caused a financial crisis for the Cornish Schoolhouse every bit many families of moderate means institute it no longer possible to pay the tuition. In 1920 a group of prominent, wealthy, and artistically minded women and their husbands came to the rescue and formed the Cornish Realty Company to gather financing to build a new dwelling house for the school. The membership was a Who's Who of Seattle high society and included Agnes H. Anderson (d. 1940), David E. "Ned" Skinner (1867-1933) and Jeanette Skinner (d. 1952), Edgar Ames (1868-1944) and Anne Ames (d. 1956), C. D. Stimson (1857-1928) and Harriet Stimson (1862-1936), Albert Southward. Kerry (d. 1939) and Katherine Kerry (d. 1938), Horace C. Henry (1844-1928), and others.
A $l,000 individual bond issue was placed, other money came in the form of gifts, and structure began at a Capitol Hill site ix blocks north of the existing Booth Edifice location. In 1921, Cornish School moved into the picturesque new Castilian-bizarre building at Harvard Artery E and Eastward Roy Street designed past A. H. Albertson (d. 1964), Paul Richardson (d. 1939), and Gerald C. Field (1885-1965). When neighbors objected to the noise emanating from the schoolhouse and sued to have information technology closed, the approximate suggested that they move to the state.
Miss Aunt Nellie
"Miss Aunt Nellie" lived in an upstairs flat at the schoolhouse with her daughter Elena Miranova, a Russian orphan whom she had adopted at age 10. She welcomed students into her dwelling and frequently invited them for java, abode-broiled cookies, and breezy meetings with famous guest artists. She was also quick to help students with tuition costs, assertive it unacceptable that artists should take to justify themselves economically. This was great for the students, less so for the establishment. Without an endowment and largely dependent on income from tuition, the school struggled twelvemonth after twelvemonth, almost always ending each with an operating deficit.
Only even as its financial condition worsened, the Cornish School'south creative vitality flourished, and this helped ensure connected support. When the Cornish Realty Visitor, which leased the new building to the school, was unable to pay the mortgage, a group that included about of the original benefactors formed the non-profit Cornish School Foundation to manage its finances. Nellie Cornish was named lifetime director of educational programs. In 1929, Agnes Anderson, a member of the foundation's board of directors, paid off the mortgage rest, rescuing the schoolhouse from financial doom.
By the tardily 1930s, few of the original trustees remained on the lath. Nelly Cornish wanted to continue to motility the school ahead artistically, but could only tread h2o inside the constraints of the budget. She informed the lath that she would need $15,000 per year higher up earnings to "deport forward the standard I have maintained" (Cornish, 256). The money was not forthcoming, and the board accepted her resignation in August 1939. It was front-page news, and Nellie Cornish was gracious, maxim:
"I experience that I have given the people of Seattle my best efforts for a quarter of a century, but now I want to have some fun -- all by myself. Oh, I'll return to Seattle often, merely I want to write and lecture and accept fourth dimension to myself, and so I can't continue as director" ("Nellie Cornish Leaves School ... ").
She was replaced past Sarah McClain Sherman, who hailed from the East Coast. Nellie Cornish herself moved east and continued her career, managing a children's radio program in New York and condign director of a music schoolhouse in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. She never married, and subsequently her retirement she lived with her daughter Elena and Elena'southward husband, an airline airplane pilot, in Connecticut and so California. They traveled extensively, visiting sometime Cornish students and faculty wherever they went. Cornish frequently returned to Seattle to visit, including for a gala celebration at Cornish School marking her 75th birthday, and then spent the last few years of her life in the city. Nellie Cornish died in April 1956, well-nigh fourscore years of age.
Cornish Without Nellie
Operation of the school following its founder's divergence was overseen by the Cornish Foundation, which had been formed in the 1920s and was composed more often than not of wealthy Seattle women. With the land'due south attending riveted by Earth War Ii, the challenges of the firsthand postwar years, and the onset of the Korean War, the Cornish Schoolhouse, withal without an endowment, struggled along from year to yr in relative anonymity, always running a deficit.
In 1954, with Cornish facing possible closure, ownership of the schoolhouse was transferred to the Music and Fine art Foundation, a much larger grouping that had started life every bit an off-branch of the Cornish Foundation. The purpose of the modify was to effort to "run the schoolhouse on a self-supporting basis" -- the foundation claimed that it did "non intend to become an 'angel' to Cornish," only rather "uses its wide influence to depict financial and moral back up" to the institution" ("Music and Art Foundation Takes Over Cornish"). In 1955, to meliorate reverberate the range of its offerings, the schoolhouse was renamed Cornish School of the Allied Arts. Advertisements the side by side year show that the curriculum included, in improver to the traditional fare, courses in interior design and French, maintaining the founder's insistence on broad liberal-arts education.
Renaissance
Frederick J. Patterson (1907?-1988), a Seattle native, Cornish graduate, and banana program director at the city's KOMO radio station, was appointed to atomic number 82 Cornish in 1958. When he retired in December 1972, he could boast that, for possibly the commencement time in its history, the school was operating in the black, if barely. Besides during Patterson's time, the Cornish School's board of trustees, long an advisory grouping, took over from the Music and Art Foundation direct responsibility for guiding the school'southward fortunes. The schoolhouse was non exactly printing money, only it appeared to have slowed and even stopped the almanac fiscal bloodletting.
The change in the function of the lath seemed to revivify Cornish, which had become sort of a backwater of instruction in the city, not exactly off the public's radar, but somewhat of a cipher to near. Beyond the arts communities, no 1 paid much attention to the school. Nether the leadership of board chairman Max Gurvich (1915-2009), Cornish fabricated major changes. It sought and received blessing past the Northwest Association of Schools and Colleges as a candidate for formal accreditation, which would give information technology the status of a college. Gurvich told the press in 1975:
"Cornish's goal is to surpass in a quantum leap within the next five years the achievements of Cornish in its first 61 years. That is our hope to the community in render for its support ... . The faculty -- and the board members -- are now out selling Cornish. That'due south something new and good" ("The New Cornish ... ").
In 1977, the school, and then called the Cornish Plant, became a fully accredited higher, offering available of fine arts and bachelor of music degrees. But with success came new issues, admitting of a less dire kind. Within just a few years, Cornish had badly outgrown its space at Harvard Avenue and Roy Street, the principal building of which, Kerry Hall, had been given federal historic-landmark status. In 1981 it purchased the former Lakeside Middle School at 1501 10th Artery East, nigh St. Marking'due south Episcopal Cathedral some v blocks north of Kerry Hall. Headed since 1973 by Melvin Strauss (1929-2012), a respected orchestra conductor, the college moved all only its administrative offices and its music and dance programs to the new building.
Strauss retired in 1984, to be replaced by Robert Suderburg. In 1986 Robert N. Funk became president and the schoolhouse was renamed withal again, becoming the Cornish College of the Arts to reflect its accredited condition. An intensive fundraising endeavor was undertaken, and by 1989 the college was able to pay off the mortgage on the Lakeside property, with an additional $800,000 on hand to improve facilities and finance new and existing programs. Much of the impetus backside the bulldoze, and the source of a significant amount of the coin raised, was Ned Skinner (1920-1988), who had supported the school for decades simply died earlier the entrada's successful decision. Amidst other large donors was the Kreielsheimer Foundation, which paid to renovate Kerry Hall while preserving its traditional (and now legally protected) Castilian Mission-way advent.
Once scattered amidst at least five dissimilar Capitol Loma sites, mostly leased, the Cornish College of the Arts at present had two fully owned locations within an easy walk of each other. But it was not done growing, or changing, and more than challenges and opportunities lay ahead.
The New Century
In April 1994 Sergei P. Tschernisch, a founder of the California Plant for the Arts and the dean of the College of Communication and Fine Arts at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, became the new head of Cornish. After assuming his post, he explained what he saw as the role Cornish should play:
"At this point in American history nosotros desperately need to train artists to work in society. The arts confront reality, they make u.s. wiser, they requite us promise. All keen cities are remembered for their culture, not their politics or their economy. I would beloved to see Cornish as an important function in the Seattle arts community, a vital function of this mixture" ("Cornish President Hopes to Interruption Downward Barriers").
Tschernisch built on the school's relationships with the individuals and foundations that had helped sustain information technology over the years, and in 2000 information technology was announced that $7 million had been pledged for scholarships, improvements, and the buy of additional space. Both the Kenneth and Marleen Alhadeff Charitable Foundation and James and Sherry Raisbeck gave a million dollars, and a whopping $7 meg came from the Kreielsheimer Foundation, which was winding down its diplomacy after handing out nearly $100 million over its 25-twelvemonth life. The Kreielsheimer gift was split into $three million for a scholarship endowment, $i million for an existing administrative middle and $i 1000000 for the purchase of a parking lot about the campus, previously owned past the Scottish Rite Masonic Temple, a site on which the school wanted to build an "arts and applied science center" ("Cornish College Gets $seven One thousand thousand").
But plans change. Despite earlier consolidations, Cornish's facilities were notwithstanding scattered around Capitol Hill and beyond, including its chief campus on E Roy Street, the north campus on 10th Avenue E, buildings on Pike and Pine streets, and a downtown site on Westlake Avenue. The school's leaders very much wanted to combine many of its operations in a unmarried place, and a perfect location soon became available -- the recently restored, seven-story, 1928 fine art deco Lenora Square Building, at Lenora Street and Denny Style in downtown Seattle's Denny Triangle neighborhood. Although the request price was $25 million, the edifice'due south owners made a $7 1000000 gift to the school's relocation fund, reducing the toll to $xviii million. St. Marking'south Cathedral agreed to buy the school'southward north campus, and Cornish planned to sell much of the property at Harvard Avenue and Roy Street, while retaining the original Kerry Hall building.
Cornish was non done with its efforts to consolidate. In 2002, it purchased two boosted backdrop in the Denny Triangle, the nearby Sons of Norway and Orion buildings. In 2003 it added notwithstanding another, the Denny Triangle Building, which was planned to somewhen business firm several experimental theaters, a scene shop, and the higher'due south music and trip the light fantastic toe department. That fall five of the college'southward 7 departments moved to the new locations, shortly before massive redevelopment began taking place in the adjacent S Lake Union neighborhood.
In the summer of 2009 Cornish appear that it would open its kickoff-ever dormitories for students, housed in two former hotels nigh the principal Denny Triangle campus. Information technology would now be a residential college, with freshmen required to live in the housing provided.
Changing of the Guard
Also in the summer of 2009 Sergei Tschernisch, having guided Cornish through its period of greatest growth and financial success, announced that he would retire at the end of the 2010-2011 academic year. Under his tenure, enrollment had increased from 500 to about 800. He had overseen an unprecedented expansion and consolidation and spearheaded efforts that had raised more than $47 million. Teachers' salaries, which had long lagged behind those of similar colleges, had reached virtually-parity.
The Cornish lath'due south chairman, John Gordon Hill, praised Tschernisch as "the most influential figure in the history of this establishment since Nellie Cornish herself." Another admirer, Jim Tune, CEO of Seattle's ArtFund, concurred, characterizing Tschernisch's service as "transformational" and crediting him as "the savior of Cornish College" ("Cornish College President Is Set to Retire ... ").
In August 2011 Tschernisch was succeeded by Nancy J. Uscher, a classically trained violist with years of performance experience and, since 2004, provost of the California Institute of the Arts. Uscher had long been interested in Cornish Higher and its practice of exposing all its students to both visual and dramatic arts. When her date was appear, a Cornish spokesman noted that the school hoped to increment its enrollment to 1,200 within the next decade.
Facing the Future
Uscher took over an institution that, after years of struggle and financial shortfalls, had at concluding come into its own. The list of Cornish'due south former instructors and alumni ranges from seminal arts figures like Martha Graham and John Cage to broadcaster Chet Huntley (1911-1974) and singer Ann Wilson of the stone band Center. Artists-in-residence over the years have included such well-known names every bit Marking Morris in trip the light fantastic toe and Imogen Cunningham in photography. The school both taught the arts and fostered public support for them, allowing Cornish to boast without exaggeration that:
"Cornish students, alumni and faculty are working artists -- theater directors, visual artists, gear up and lighting designers, dancers and musicians -- making fine art in and for our community. They are also innovative designers, concern leaders, teachers, passionate and supportive audience members and torchbearers for the arts" ("The Cornish Revolution").
A century after Nellie Cornish leased a one-room studio on Capitol Hill to get-go the Cornish School of Music, what she began endures every bit a unique and thriving Northwest arts establishment. She would exist proud.
Sources: Mildred Tanner Andrews, Woman'due south Place: A Guide to Seattle and Male monarch County History (Seattle: Gemil Press, 1994), 269-272; Richard Berner, Seattle 1921-1940: From Boom to Bust (Seattle: Charles Printing, 1992), 247-252, 256; Berner, Seattle 1900-1920: From Boomtown, Urban Turbulence, to Restoration (Seattle: Charles Press, 1991), 92-94; Nellie C. Cornish, Miss Aunt Nellie: The Autobiography of Nellie C. Cornish ed. by Ellen Van Volkenburg Browne and Edward Nordhoff Beck (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1964); "New Companies Formed," The Seattle Times, November 9, 1923, p. 22; "Nellie Cornish Leaves School; To Live in New York," Ibid., Baronial eighteen, 1939, p. i; "Mrs. Sherman New Director at Cornish," Ibid., December xiv, 1939, p. 28; Louis R. Guzzo, "Music and Art Foundation Takes Over Cornish," August 1, 1954, third section, p. ii; Wayne Johnson, "The New Cornish: 'A Metropolis of Hope,'" Ibid., Oct two, 1975, p. B-half dozen; Melinda Bargreen, "Cornish Relocation Is Moving Experience," Ibid., July 5, 1981, p. E-fourteen; Bargreen, "Cornish President Hopes to Break Down Barriers," Ibid., October 2, 1994, p. M-iv; "Cornish College Gets $vii Meg," Ibid., Apr 27, 2000, p. E-2; Bobbi Nodell, "Cornish College Making a Motility -- It'southward Close to Buying 7-Story Building," Ibid., May eleven, 2002, p. B-i; Frank Vinluan, "Cornish Buying Country for Motion Downtown," Ibid., May 30, 2002, p. E-1; "Business Briefs," Ibid., May 6, 2003, p. C-3; Misha Berson, "Cornish College President Is Fix to Retire In 2011," Ibid., July 2, 2009, p. B-5; Katherine Long, "California Arts Educator New Cornish President -- Violist to Succeed Retiring Leader," Ibid., December 2, 2010, p. B-three; "The Cornish Revolution," Cornish College of the Arts website accessed Nov x, 2014 (http://www.cornish.edu/nigh/history/); Laura Fleischmann, "Cornish College Purchases Lenora Square," CoStar website accessed November 11, 2014 (http://www.costar.com/News/Article/Cornish-College-Purchases-Lenora-Foursquare/43420); HistoryLink.org Online Encyclopedia of Washington State History, "Nellie Cornish signs lease for space in Seattle's Booth Building, where she will soon open Cornish School of Music, on November fourteen, 1914" (past John Caldbick), http://www.historylink.org/ (accessed November 12, 2014). Annotation: This essay, originally written in 1998, was substantially expanded and updated on November 12, 2014.
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