The Eastman School of Music, Philanthropy and the Sound of a City

George Eastman did not love music in any deep personal way. He attended concerts, maintained a house musician at his East Avenue mansion, and was known to sit very still in the concert hall and count the beats. But he had a clear-eyed sense that a city with great cultural institutions attracted better employees, held onto talent, and generated the kind of civic pride that made a company easier to run.

In nineteen twenty-one, he founded the Eastman School of Music as the first professional school of the University of Rochester. He funded it generously and personally recruited Alf Klingenberg from Norway as its first director, then Howard Hanson, who would become one of the most influential American composers of the twentieth century, as its long-running director from nineteen twenty-four onward.

Today the Eastman School consistently ranks among the top music conservatories in the world. Its graduates have held principal positions in virtually every major American orchestra. Its doctoral program in musicology and composition sends researchers and composers to universities and ensembles on every continent. The school's Kilbourn Hall and Eastman Theatre anchor a performing-arts district in downtown Rochester that draws audiences year-round.

Eastman never heard his conservatory reach its full height. He died in nineteen thirty-two, when the school was only eleven years old. But the institution he funded has now outlasted Kodak's dominance, the subway, and the flour mills, and it is still producing musicians every May.