Elinor Armer’s legacy in the Bay Area is as deeply rooted as Oakland’s famous trees, and to honor her 56 years at the Conservatory, the New Music Ensemble will be playing selections of her work at its concert on Nov. 9.

Born in Oakland, Armer actually grew up in Davis, outside Sacramento. Her grandparents were both born in California, where Armer has lived all her life, and she can trace her lineage in the area back to the era of the San Francisco Gold Rush. She came to SFCM as part of what was then called the Prep Department (now Pre-College) and went to work teaching in 1969.

Quickly though, Armer began teaching “anything I wanted,” as she notes in her oral history for the SFCM Library. “[Then-Conservatory President] Milton Salkind was all behind this,” Armer said. “Milton did more than any other administrator in my life to make a teacher out of me. He could spot teaching ability ... and [would] send me celebrity students. I was supposed to teach Janis Joplin, but she kept not showing up. I taught [famed San Francisco Chronicle columnist] Herb Caen’s son. Recently there was a crossword puzzle and the clue was ‘GRAMMY winner Downes.’ I said to myself, well, the only Downes I can think of is Lara Downes; I gave her piano and theory lessons when she was six. And that that was the right answer. I thought, ‘Well, I'll be damned, little Lara. I do really enjoy looking back and seeing how many of those people have gone on.” (Armer also taught SFCM faculty Sarah Cahill, who frequently performs Armer’s compositions.)

Two of Armer’s students have won the prestigious Grawemeyer Award for Composition: Aleksandra Vrebalov and Olga Neuwirth. “When Olga came to me,” Armer says now, “we didn't even have a composition department, but Milton Salkind just sent her to me and said, ‘There's this kid that showed up from Austria, and she just wants to see what we have to teach her. Why don't you take her and make a class around her or something?’” Armer continues, “Well, we went through every note of [Alban Berg’s] Wozzeck, every note and word of it, backwards and forwards.”

SFCM’s Composition Department came about by necessity, Armer recalled. Negotiating for an extra hour in her course load so she could be employed full-time at SFCM, then-Dean Richard E. Howe said, “Well, of course if composition were a department and you were a department chair that would give you an extra hour on your course load.” Armer replied, “then make it a department. And make me the chair.”

 
“That was the sort of inglorious way that it all began,” Armer recalled. “But it’s part of the same self-made, self-styled, self-appointed career that I’ve had all along.  We took on David Conte and Alden Jenks was also teaching composition, and electronic stuff. And me. So we had a small enrollment of comp majors, but in those first few years it grew, and half of them one year were women. I was so happy about that.”

Armer is also a widely celebrated Bay Area composer, having written frequently for SFCM cello professor Bonnie Hampton as well as for pianist Lois Brandwynne. One of her longest collaborations was with famed science-fiction author Ursula K. Le Guin: Armer’s father grew up in the house next to Ursula’s childhood home in Berkeley, and Le Guin’s daughter was among the students in Armer’s first counterpoint class. Le Guin and Armer finally met at that daughter’s wedding and became fast friends, a relationship that culminated in Lockerbones/Airbones, a cycle set to Le Guin’s poems. Other works of Armer’s, like Uses of Music in Uttermost Parts and Sacred Forest, were produced in collaboration with the author.  

Elinor Armer onstage in 2019.

Armer says her philosophy towards teaching has remained the same throughout her impressive 56-year tenure at the Conservatory. “I have always loved teaching. Not because I was telling people how to do something, but because I was trying to learn what it is they wanted to say or do and then I could help them, show them some things that I had done or that other composers had.”

“The only right way to be a composer is to find your own voice,” she adds. “And the younger kids are, the more voices they think they have but the less they know which ones are theirs.” Composition professor David Garner says, "The most important advice Elly ever gave me about composition was to take more risks."

With such a long and influential career, it’s hard to think that Armer’s work—as a teacher and composer—will be forgotten. But she looks back on it all from an affectionate distance. “I can't be too possessive of anything that I've loved in my life because its time came,” she says, “and its time will go, same as mine.”

Selections from Armer’s “The Book of Songs” will open the Conservatory New Music Ensemble’s Saturday, November 9 concert. Guests can reserve tickets here.