Music Guild tunes up in new studio

Published 1:00 pm Monday, October 11, 2004

Allen Strange steps over a pile of lumber outside the Rolling Bay building reconfigured as the new home of the Island Music Guild.

“Is this where I sign up for accordion lessons?” he asks guild president Norman Johnson.

Strange, vice president of the Guild, isn’t altogether joking; when the building, being refurbished by landlord Mark Julian opens doors later this year as the Island Music Center, the range of classes and musical options will be mind-boggling.

The former home of Julian’s Eagle Harbor Boat Yard business, located on Valley Road east of Sunrise Drive, will house a performance space with stage; 12 rehearsal studios, including a room for ensembles; a large classroom; a music library; an office; a storage room; a kitchen and lunchroom; and several student lounges in 4,300 square feet on a main floor and mezzanine.

The Island Music Guild, founded in 1998, had been housed at various sites, most recently in a much smaller building on Madison Avenue until its lease expired last spring.

“We were teaching in walk-in closets and a woodshed,” Johnson said. “It’s very exciting (to move). It’s a major change.”

Since April, the guild has been located at two portables at the Island School on Day Road, while guild music teachers opened their homes to share space with competing instructors.

But soon the group will come together in the new space.

Johnson said the guild owes much to landlord Mark Julian, who is donating materials, design work and doing the construction to convert what was essentially a shell into acoustically separate spaces on two floors.

The magnitude of his generosity wasn’t clear, Johnson says, until construction began.

“At first I thought we were renting an empty space,” he said. “As we talked and he saw what dreams and plans we had, he said he’d finish it for us if we’d sign a 10-year lease.”

Guild members wanted to name the space for Julian, an Eagledale resident, but the self-effacing landlord wouldn’t give the name the nod.

The IMC will feature walls and ceiling with triple layers of insulation to make each studio soundproof. Julian is cutting skylights above each space. The floor will have a special super-dense layer of press-board on top of the standard flooring to cut sound and contain hot-water heating elements to warm the space.

Other technologies will be state of the art as well.

Scheduling will take place online, so teachers can book off-site and see what’s available. Each studio will be hooked to the Internet, with a computer in each booth, enabling students to do instant research, download or even write music.

“Let’s say I’m a student interested in Fats Waller,” Strange said. “I can download the iTunes (digital music files), and the sheet music is instantly available and I can do in-depth research. I can even write my own music. All in the studio.”

Every studio will be wired to a central sound studio, so that recordings can be made from any or all.

“The fact is that the entire facility is a recording studio,” Strange said. “I didn’t have this when I was teaching college at San Jose State. The University of Washington doesn’t have this.”

With a teaching corps that’s already regional – musicians come from as far away as Kingston and Seattle to give lessons on the island – Johnson and Strange expect that the state-of-the-art teaching space will attract still more.

But, as Johnson points out, with the larger classroom teaching spaces, and the capacity to offer adult classes for college credit, the teachers might wind up paying less than they did at their last venue.

For Johnson, a non-musician volunteer president who has tuned the Island Music Guild to a higher key, the challenges continue to be the reward.

“It’s fun for me because I get to do the interesting projects I want to do,” he said. “If I got paid I’d have to answer to someone else.”

For Strange, who came out of retirement to work for the IMG, the building’s allure is self-explanatory.

“This is my dream project,” said Strange, who is a noted authority on analogue electronic music. “What makes it so special is the public access. We offer rehearsal space, performance spaces. And I can’t think of another teaching space with Internet access.”