SSU music center gets another $2.5 million

<p>Sonoma State University has received a $2.5 million challenge grant toward construction of its music center, bringing it to within $20 million of being fully funded, officials said Wednesday.</p><p>With the grant, the university has now raised $90 million in donations and public funding to complete the $110 million Green Music Center.</p><p>“People are interested, they want to be part of the project and we are opening the first piece of the complex, the music education hall, to faculty and students next month,” said Susan Kashack, an SSU associate vice president.</p><p>It is enough funding to complete construction, but the university still needs to raise $20 million for such things as concert hall chairs, restrooms and to finish the performers’ rooms.</p><p>The $2.5 million is a matching donation from an anonymous Sonoma County donor that will be used to buy the rights to name the concert hall Innovation Hall, in honor of Sonoma County’s telecommunications industry, Kashack said.</p><p>It will bring to $50 million the amount of donations that have been raised, and $44 million in bonds and state funding.</p><p>The music center is a complex that will include an education building, concert hall, recital hall and hospitality center and restaurant.</p><p>It is named for telecom pioneer Donald Green, who started the project with a $10 million donation in 1997.</p><p>Green and others in the telecommunications industry have donated $5 million toward the $7 million cost of naming the concert hall Innovation Hall. The match will complete that name purchase.</p><p>The concert hall, scheduled to open in 2010, will be the heart of the music center, patterned after the Seiji Osawa Hall at Tanglewood, the world-famous Lennox, Mass., music center.</p><p>It will seat 1,400, have two 52-foot high doors that open onto a terraced lawn for 3,000, and have an interior made of maple, beech and Douglas fir woods.</p><p>As part of the fund-raising, SSU is selling naming rights to the various buildings, lobbies, courtyards and rooms.</p><p>The recital hall, also scheduled to open in 2010, was named Schroeder’s Recital Hall by Jean Schulz, widow of “Peanuts” creator Charles Schulz, after the Beethoven-loving pianist in the cartoon strip, at a cost of $4 million.</p><p>The former owners of The Press Democrat, Evert and Norma Person, paid $3 million to put their name on the concert hall lobby, and the Trione Foundation paid $1 million to name the courtyard.</p><p>The education building naming rights are available for $5 million.</p><p>That building, which has classrooms, rehearsal rooms and offices for faculty and staff, is nearly complete. Faculty and staff will be moving in in July and the first classes offered in August.</p><p>The new donation will have $2 million toward the naming rights of Innovation Hall.</p><p>Kashack said that the university still has to raise $16 million to complete construction and equip the concert hall, recital hall and hospital center.</p><p>The complex is scheduled to open in 2010.</p>