Grant boosts Green Center

Sonoma State University has received a $2.5 million challenge grant for the construction of its music center, bringing the project to within $20 million of being fully funded.

The university now has raised more than $90 million in donations and public funding to complete the $110 million Green Music Center.

"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.

The university has enough funding to complete construction, but still needs to raise $20 million for such things as concert hall chairs and the performers' rooms.

The $2.5 million grant 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 the local telecom industry, Kashack said.

Officials said $50 million in donations has been raised, and $44 million in bonds and state funding has been secured.

The music center complex will include an education building, concert hall, recital hall and hospitality center and restaurant.

The center is named for telecommunications pioneer Donald Green, who started the project with a $10 million donation in 1997. Green and others in the telecom industry have donated $5 million toward the $7 million cost of naming the concert hall Innovation Hall. The match will complete that name purchase.

The concert hall is scheduled to open in 2010 and will be the heart of the music center, patterned after Seiji Osawa Hall at Tanglewood, the world-famous Lennox, Mass., music center. It will seat 1,400, have two 52-foot-high doors that open onto a terraced lawn and an interior made of maple, beech and Douglas fir.

As part of the fund raising, SSU is selling naming rights to the various buildings, lobbies, courtyards and rooms.

The recital hall, also scheduled to open in 2010, was named Schroeder's Recital Hall by Jean Schulz, widow of "Peanuts" creator Charles M. Schulz, after the Beethoven-loving pianist in the cartoon strip, at a cost of $4 million.

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.

The education building naming rights are available for $5 million. That building, which has classrooms, rehearsal rooms and offices for faculty and staff, is nearly complete. Faculty and staff will move in in July, and the first classes will be offered in August.