A Conservatory Stresses the Music and Eliminates the Bills

IT is no accident that the picture window in the office of Miguel Angel Corzo, president of the Colburn School, perfectly frames the Walt Disney Concert Hall. The distinctive, steel-clad auditorium, home to the Los Angeles Philharmonic, is almost directly across Grand Avenue from the school, which opened a new wing in August to house its conservatory, established in 2003.

“Richard Colburn really wanted to have the school close to the Music Center,” Mr. Corzo said last month, referring to the benefactor of both the new structure and the adjacent Colburn community school, completed in 1998. “He wanted it to be part of the downtown area.”

Like Mr. Corzo, the conservatory’s students — 96 at present — have their eyes on Disney Hall, literally and metaphorically. They are among the finest young musicians in the world, hailing not just from the United States but also from Asia, Europe and Australia. (Curiously, given the location, none yet come from Latin America.)

“We are a performance school,” said Robert Lipsett, who teaches violin and helped map the conservatory’s evolution. “If you want to be a musicologist, Colburn is not the place. It’s for musicians who are going to make their livelihood as performers, at one level or another.”

The conservatory building — 12 stories with teaching space, practice rooms, an orchestra rehearsal hall, a recital hall, a cafeteria and housing for up to 130 students — is the latest addition to the redevelopment of Bunker Hill, this city’s woefully sterile acropolis on which stand, in addition to Disney Hall, the Mark Taper Forum, the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, the Ahmanson Theater and the Museum of Contemporary Art. It is also the most significant upgrade to the area since Disney Hall opened in late 2003.

Disney Hall’s arrival placed an architectural and acoustic gem in the heart of downtown, but it did nothing to foster street life or diversity on the hill. People drive in for cultural excursions and leave soon afterward. Colburn’s new brick complex looks unremarkable from the outside; it could easily be mistaken for an office building or low-income housing. But for an area awash in white-collar workers who desert at dusk, it promises a young resident population.

The conservatory offers one bachelor’s degree, in music performance, and two graduate programs: an artist’s diploma for students seeking to broaden their repertory and the less structured professional studies certificate for those on the verge of a career.

Colburn’s history is complicated. The school comprises the longstanding School of Performing Arts, sometimes called the community school, and the newly formed conservatory. The school was founded in 1950 as the preparatory division of the University of Southern California’s music school; later it broadened its mission and changed its name to the Community School of Performing Arts. Formal ties with U.S.C. were severed in 1980, and five years later the school was renamed in honor of Mr. Colburn.

He died in 2004 at 92, after plotting the community school’s move to Bunker Hill and ensuring the conservatory’s creation and construction. Though he did not live to see the expansion, which reportedly cost $120 million, his vision permeates the enterprise.

“Part of Mr. Colburn’s dream,” said Deborah L. Berman, dean of the entire Colburn School, “was for gifted students to study at a high level without having to work to put themselves through school or going into further student debt. So it was agreed that this would be a tuition-free program and that room and board would also be provided.”

To cover those costs Mr. Colburn provided an endowment that is now roughly $200 million. The largess allows Colburn conservatory students, selected through a rigorous audition process, an education largely devoid of money worries. (Those enrolled in the community division, primarily children and adolescents who attend after school, still pay for classes.)

The endowment gives Colburn a rare edge in courting prospective students. Only the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, arguably the country’s most elite conservatory, offers financial incentives to rival Colburn’s, and even those pale in comparison.

Colburn students sleep in private rooms, though they share bathrooms. Their suites come with coffee makers and microwave ovens. They are fed, free, in the school’s cafeteria, which is open to the public and has become something of a neighborhood gathering place.

“When we came to Colburn, we had earthly concerns taken away,” said Andrew Bulbrook, a former graduate student now on the faculty as second violinist of the resident Calder Quartet. “We could focus just on music.”

Yet like another impressively endowed Los Angeles arts institution, the Getty Trust, the Colburn has found that riches alone do not bestow unlimited influence.