Holy Names University - Our New Venue

President’s Corner August 2008

Let me introduce you to the venue where we’ll be holding our October 2008 workshop: Holy Names University, or HNU for short.  This is a small Catholic college in Oakland with a beautiful campus high in the hills.  Because they have a significant interest in music and music education, there is a sufficiency of piano rooms and performance spaces for our needs.  HNU is known as a center for the Kodály school of early music education -- see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodály_Method

Driving to HNU involves getting on CA Highway 13 and exiting at Redwood Road, then following the street signs to the campus entrance. For more information, please view the HNU web site, www.hnu.edu.  The campus entrance is a brick guard station and gate, and our main building is the large white Valley Center for the Performing Arts (VCPA) located immediately after the gate.  Parking is free, and is right by the VCPA.

All the buildings we’ll use are on a sloping spiral path that leads from the VCPA upward.  We’ll provide campus maps in your workshop handouts that will guide you.

When I first visited the campus with Elizabeth Morrison (our workshop director) and Susan Wilson (our new CMNC board member) in April, we were struck by three things:  the beauty of the campus, the spaciousness of the classrooms, and the warm and helpful welcome we were given by the Campus Services office. On our tour we learned that meals on campus would be provided by the college dining facility, where our participants will have the same menu choices as all the students and faculty, for a fixed price per person, included in the workshop fee. This carries the benefits of easy budgeting for CMNC and a wide choice of menu items for everyone. We also learned that the campus has a limited number of residence hall rooms available for visitors who wish to stay overnight on campus!

We are delighted to be trying this new venue, and think that you will greatly enjoy the location.  Our home base will be the VCPA building, where we have instrument storage as usual, break refreshments, an opening meeting in the Studio Theater, and several playing rooms.  We will have room for 28 groups on Saturday and 20 groups on Sunday. The campus will provide a self-contained facility that meets all of our normal needs and allows the established CMNC workshop schedule to be followed as usual.

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