Nationally-known music journalists, college students from around the country and devotees of classical music descended on SFCM for a week in November to discuss and practice the art of music criticism. The Stephen and Cynthia Rubin Institute for Music Criticism, first held at Oberlin College in 2012, invited select students from SFCM, Berkeley, Stanford, Oberlin and Yale to work with professional journalists including Anne Midgette of The Washington Post; Tim Page of the University of Southern California; writer and arts critic John Rockwell; Alex Ross of The New Yorker and Heidi Waleson of The Wall Street Journal.

Rubin Institute benefactor Stephen Rubin, President and Publisher of Henry Holt & Co., joined the writers for public panel discussions and private mentoring sessions with students. Anthony Tommasini, Chief Classical Music Critic of The New York Times, delivered the keynote address and San Francisco Chronicle music critic Joshua Kosman served as the Institute’s Critic-in-Residence.

Student fellows had the task of reviewing performances by the San Francisco Symphony, San Francisco Opera, Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra and Cal Performances. Audience members attended pre-concert lectures by Midgette, Ross, Rockwell and Waleson, and were invited to write and file their own performance critiques in a public competition.

Zoë Madonna (center left), a student fellow from Oberlin College, won the Institute’s top award, the $10,000 Rubin Prize in Music Criticism. Concert goer Karen Baumer, a San Francisco-based technical writer, won the $1,000 Everyone's A Critic Audience Review Prize for her critique of a Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra performance.

In conjunction with the Rubin Institute’s move to San Francisco, the Bay Area online journal San Francisco Classical Voice offered a six-month paid internship to eight of the Institute’s student fellows, including SFCM student Patrick Galvin, giving them the opportunity to publish their work under the continued mentorship of some of the most accomplished writers in the field.

The Rubin Institute returns to SFCM in the fall of 2016. See more photos from the 2014 Institute.