One of the most storied members of SFCM's faculty is having his legacy at the Conservatory preserved. 

The SFCM library is digitally archiving its collection of tape recordings from when John Adams, one of the modern fixtures of San Francisco's musical lineage, was on faculty at SFCM and helming its New Music Ensemble. 

John Adams in his SFCM studio.

SFCM looms large in this era of Adams' life, as explored by piano faculty Sarah Cahill's biography of Adams at Grove Music Online. Adams began teaching at the Conservatory in 1972 after moving to San Francisco in 1971, and the Conservatory afforded him the opportunity to experiment with synthesizers and hone his trademark compositional style blending electronic and acoustic elements. As director of the New Music Ensemble, Adams commissioned and premiered new works by contemporary composers, and as Cahill writes, he "quickly became involved in the Bay Area’s thriving new music scene and began to forge associations with local composers and musicians." Adams promoted now-iconic composers like Steve Reich and Terry Riley while also making room for some of John Cage's experimental works.

Several of Adams' notable early works were recorded through the Conservatory during his 10-year tenure. American Standard was recorded in March 1973 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art by an SFCM ensemble and was released on Brian Eno’s Obscure Records label in 1975, while one of his defining pieces, Shaker Loops, premiered in December 1978 with Adams conducting SFCM's New Music Ensemble. It was a momentous period for Adams: In 1978, he was appointed the San Francisco Symphony's advisor on new music, and he finished his first orchestral work, Common Tones in Simple Time, in 1979, which would be premiered by the San Francisco Conservatory of Music Orchestra in March of 1980. The SFS commissioned and premiered another of Adams' most famous works, Harmonium, to celebrate the inaugural season of the Louise M. Davies Hall, in 1981, which, Cahill writes, "was the first performance of Adams’s music by a major mainstream organization [establishing] him as a major figure in American music."

Adams received an honorary doctorate from SFCM in 2019, and spoke at that year's Commencement. “The years I spent teaching at the Conservatory were some of my most formative for my early career," Adams said, "and the opportunity to share a little bit of my experience with this new generation of SFCM graduates is something that elicits both a sense of nostalgia and aspiration."

SFCM's Library and Recording departments hope to make the digitized collection publicly available in the future.