Catching up with the Green Music Center's founding father

Seated at a patio table overlooking the pool at his estate, nestled in the hills east of Windsor in a classic patchwork of grass and woods, Donald Green had no cause to apologize. Still, the former singer said he's sorry that it is difficult for others to hear him speak.

'My voice has left me,' said the 83-year-old Telecom Valley pioneer and father of the Green Music Center at Sonoma State University, his head involuntarily bowed. Green's upper body and neck are bent forward by Parkinson's disease, which has forced the British transplant out of the choir rehearsals and performances he so long cherished.

His voice has lost its wind, but lean in a bit and he's perfectly easy to hear. Green is still eloquent, passionate and funny as he speaks over lunch of his westward migration, of the memoir he's writing, of the pride he feels in the Donald and Maureen Green Music Center, of his worry about the performance center honoring its mission as an educational resource, and of loss.

Maureen, his wife of 63 years, wasn't with him at the table. They fell in love and married young after meeting as teens in their native England. Now, she sat quietly in the kitchen, charmed by her two little dogs and tended by a daughter-like assistant. Alzheimer's disease has, for close to four years, stolen the person Maureen used to be.

Don Green sat with that for a moment. 'Life goes on,' he said.

He was unstoppable through all the years that he hatched telecommunications startup businesses, most notably the successful Advanced Fibre Communications in Petaluma. He and Maureen raised four children, who in turn brought them seven grandchildren, and the couple found time — made time — to sing.

He cultivated a studious devotion to choral music fairly late in life. Music was largely absent from his childhood in the grimy port city of Liverpool. His was a lean existence disrupted early on by World War II bombing raids that targeted the strategically valuable city.

'The war started for me in September of 1939,' Green recalled. 'The British government evacuated 800,000 children from the target areas of the German bombers. I was one of the 800,000 children.'

For more than two years, he hunkered in the countryside with no school to attend and taught himself with encyclopedias. Drawn to engineering, he apprenticed at the telephone-service branch of the U.K. Post Office. He'd found his work passion.

Green's initial job with the phone service, a predecessor of British Telecom, was quaintly low-tech. 'I delivered distilled water to the (48-volt) telephone batteries in each home,' he recalled.

He and Maureen left England for Montreal in 1956. They stayed four years, and Don worked in the engineering lab of the Canadian branch of RCA. In the early 1960s, they were living in San Francisco, where Don had taken a job as a telephone-system design engineer. By 1968, he was hatching plans for his first telecommunications firm, Digital Telephone Systems, which would be located in Novato, and he and Maureen sang from the pews at San Francisco's All Saints' Episcopal Church. The Bach and other Baroque music resonated with him.

'I was 37 years old in church and, as Maureen called it, bellowing the hymns,' he said. 'The woman behind us tapped me on the shoulder and said, 'You've got a nice voice. What don't you join the choir?' '

He and Maureen joined the All Saints' choir, and choral music became their creative outlet and chief shared avocation.

'I missed surprisingly few rehearsals,' Green said, considering that through the 1970s and '80s, he led the burgeoning North Bay telecommunications industry that connects homes and businesses to high-speed networks.

The Greens left Tiburon for Santa Rosa in 1987. They found the community chorale they wanted in the Sonoma State University Concert Choir, created by the small music faculty's Bob Worth.

'Maureen had a very, very pure soprano voice, a very good memory. Wicked smart,' Worth said. And Don: 'A nice, natural baritone.'

By 1987, Green had co-founded his second company, Optilink Corp. in Petaluma. Worth remembered asking Green why, with all he had going on, he invested so much time and effort in the choir.

Green replied, 'I really like to do it because it's so different from what I do, and I'm not the leader.' Still, leadership came naturally, and when the Greens, Worth and other members of the SSU chorale founded a Bach Choir, Don Green served as its founding president.

The Bach Choir made do on a campus with no hall truly suited to vocal music. Green knew that what they sang would sound better in a hall built for the purpose.

'We were always going off campus to find decent acoustics,' Worth said.

In 1992, Green and business partners launched Advanced Fibre Communications. Four strong years later, they prepared to go public. Green saw in the 1996 public offering a great prospect not only for his company, but for the Bach Choir and other vocal classes and groups at SSU. He told Worth that if the IPO went well, he and Maureen would make a sizable donation to the construction of a campus music hall.

The AFC stock sale netted the company more than $118 million, and within a day the initial price per share almost doubled. Green sought out choral director Worth and vowed he and Maureen would put up $5 million for a Sonoma State choral and orchestral music hall.

SSU President Ruben Armiñana and his wife, Marne, took the Greens to Massachusetts in 1997 to visit the Tanglewood Music Center, summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Tanglewood's 1,200-seat Seiji Ozawa Hall is a great wooden shoebox, inspired by Vienna's famed 1870 Musikvereinssaal, and its space extends outdoors to a lawn. The acoustics astounded them through five evenings of concerts.

'To my ear, they were outstanding,' Green said. He was struck as well by the culture of music that Tanglewood and Ozawa Hall seemed to nourish.

'People come from New York and Boston because they know they can enjoy outstanding music any day of the week,' Green said in a public statement shortly after the trip. 'I'm not saying we should duplicate Tanglewood, but it has allowed Maureen and me to fantasize about how a high standard of performance can be achieved in such a place.'

After seeing and hearing Ozawa Hall, Green upped his offer to SSU from $5 million to $10 million — the largest single contribution to a California State University at the time. He didn't pull that figure from a hat; the concert hall at Tanglewood cost approximately $10 million.

The quest to build a similar music center at SSU gained traction. Chosen as the building site was a university-owned parcel at the campus' northeast corner, where Rohnert Park Expressway and Petaluma Hill Road meet at a 'T.'

The Santa Rosa Symphony agreed in 1998 to vacate Santa Rosa's Wells Fargo Center and to make the envisioned hall at SSU its new home. Corrick Brown, the orchestra's former director, and Green teamed up as co-chairmen of a campaign to raise the rest of the money from private sources.

A ceremonial groundbreaking was held for the Donald and Maureen Green Music Center in October 2000. Armiñana projected that the campus asset would cost $41 million and would open in 2003.

But cost estimates ballooned, largely because steel prices were pushed through the roof by demand stemming from a building boom in China. In 2003, the building site sat bare and SSU put the center on hold because of skyrocketing costs. The following year, Armiñana announced a new, private/public funding strategy to include paying for the center's academic wing with state education facility bonds.

Building began at last in 2006. The clamor of construction, music to the ears of supporters, was a supreme annoyance to campus critics who protested that a performing-arts project was consuming too much of the university's money, energy and focus. In mid-2007 — even before the furloughs, fee increases and class eliminations wrought by the recession — 73 percent of SSU faculty members approved a vote of no-confidence in Armiñana, largely because of the diversion of resources to the music center.

Green observed, at his table on the patio, that the military employs the phrase 'mission creep' to describe the unintended growth in the scope and complexity of a mission. 'This was a case of mission gallop,' he said.

He believes that the obstacles to the construction of such an ambitious performance venue in a suburban county with fewer than 500,000 residents became virtually insurmountable. The Green Music Center 'shouldn't have happened,' he said. 'It was too big a task.'

But he remained steadfast in his advocacy and support for the project.

'Part of my contribution to the program,' he said, 'is a belief that it could happen.' He added dryly, 'There is a saying that if you keep your head when everyone else is losing theirs, you probably don't know what's going on.'

Some significant elements of the hall still were missing, including permanent chairs, when SSU music students presented their first performances in the fall of 2010. The musical dream the Greens had begun to make real was an unfinished work, and ideas were scarce for coming up with the millions needed to complete it.

Enter Sanford Weill, the enormously wealthy, well-connected New Yorker and former chairman of Citigroup. He and his wife, Joan, bought a Sonoma Valley estate as a second home in 2010. Early in 2011, they toured the unfinished music center and ultimately donated $12 million to get it finished.

Sandy Weill, who chairs the Board of Trustees of New York's Carnegie Hall, even arranged for friend and world-acclaimed pianist Lang Lang to perform at the grand opening of Weill Hall, centerpiece of the Donald and Maureen Green Music Center, in September 2012.

By then, the advance of Parkinson's disease had taken a serious toll on Green's vitality, gait and voice. Introduced to the guests at a VIP inaugural reception, he confided that he'd been given five minutes to speak.

'Good luck,' he said into the microphone. 'It takes me five minutes to clear my voice.'

Then and now, Green beams at the sight and sound of the place he conceived for great music.

'It's an amazing accomplishment,' he said. 'Every time I go into the hall, I question, how did we, the Sonoma County people, build this place?'

Sir Clive Gillinson, the former managing director of the London Symphony Orchestra and since 2004 the artistic and executive director of Carnegie Hall, first experienced the Green Music Center with the Weills in 2011 and has returned several times.

'I think the hall's terrific,' he said from New York, 'and I think the long-term implications for Sonoma are huge.'

Familiar with the musical quality of Seiji Ozawa Hall, Gillinson said the acoustics at Weill 'are definitely as good' as those at Tanglewood. He finds it exciting that Green Music Center is on a state university campus and creates the opportunity to introduce music as 'part of the life of every student.' 'One has no idea what the potential is,' he said, adding that the Green Center may well redefine the future of the university.

Longtime Bay Area classical music critic Robert Commanday is equally impressed with Weill Hall, calling the aesthetic appeal of its wooden interior and its acoustics 'extraordinary.'

'When an orchestra is playing, if you put your hand on the floor, you feel the vibrations; the whole hall is responding as an instrument,' said the founding editor of the San Francisco Classical Voice website. 'There is nothing in New York City of that quality.'

Still able to walk, though hunched and unsteady, Green visits often to hear the Santa Rosa Symphony and a good many of the performers, many nationally acclaimed, attracted by the Weills and the hall itself. He savors the acoustics and beauty of Weill Hall, but worries about its use.

Green believes that amid the big-name performances — Diana Ross appeared in late September — it is essential that the hall forever be available to serve students.

'We have a facility that on the surface is going well,' he said. 'But the underlying objective of the building is to increase access to education. It's important that we maintain and increase the education time. There are lots of opportunities because of the tie-in with the music program (at Carnegie Hall) in New York.'

Green would like to see the SSU music department and the Youth Orchestra of the Santa Rosa Symphony have a stronger presence there, and would add a program to fund more music scholarships.

'It's early days yet,' he said. 'But I've seen gaps that can be filled in.'

He believes that the voice of the university music department isn't being sufficiently heard along with those of the Green Music Center and the symphony. At any rate, he said, 'I don't hear it.'

Green is clear that he celebrates the music center, now in its third season, but wants to see signs that it acknowledges its founding vision, that of an excellent college choral hall.

'Institutions like this need to keep reminding themselves what they're in business for,' he said. The Green Center 'has changed the university significantly, but its full potential isn't understood by enough people yet.'

That potential, Green said, was advanced this year with the dedication of Schroeder Hall, which SSU officials say brought the total current cost of the center's development to $132 million. He regards the smaller recital hall as an educational asset to students and music groups such as Bob Worth's Sonoma Bach Choir.

The Greens have their own small 'choir' of children living fairly close by: David Green is a photographer, Duncan Green a financial adviser, Victoria Green a chef and cookbook author, and Rebecca Green Birdsall a winemaker.

Birdsall started Black Kite Cellars after her parents bought 40 acres in Anderson Valley in 1995 and planted grapes there. Don, an avid bird watcher, came up with the winery's name. His favorite bird is the white-tailed kite, formerly called the black-shouldered kite.

Green appreciates having a winery in the family. 'It's enjoyable,' he said, 'because I'm not doing any of the work.' That's not to say that at 83, he doesn't work. For nearly a year, he's put a vast effort into his memoir.

'I dictate the text to a young woman who types faster than I can talk,' he said. A writer helps to transform his monologue into a story that mines the epochs of his life. Green will donate book-sale proceeds to the Santa Rosa Symphony Youth Orchestra.

'Where I don't remember, I make it up,' he said with his wry, dry smile. 'It's roughly accurate.'

When he started the book a year ago, he worried that he wouldn't find enough to say. His head nodded slightly and he looked up.

'I found I've got a lot to say.'

Republished from Sonoma Magazine. For more Sonoma Magazine articles, go to www.sonomamag.com.