It’s hard to think of a Bay Area ensemble with any strings in it at all that doesn’t owe something to her work and her love. Robert Commanday, SF Classical Voice

On the southwest corner of Rose Street and Sacramento Avenue is a handsome, well-manicured building, The Crowden School, which offers a full academic curriculum for grades 4 through 8, starting each day with two hours of music education. The school is the culmination of Anne Crowden’s dedication to music, to her humanism, and to her love of children and commitment to their education.

Crowden was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. Childhood for Anne and her siblings revolved around school, church, and sports. Expectations of the Crowden children were high. She later demanded the same standards of excellence of her own students.

By all accounts Anne was a passionate and tempestuous teacher who could pound her fists on the floor or throw a bow across the room in fury when she thought students were not showing their best effort, yet both students and parents also attest to her compassion, deep caring nature, and lively sense of humor.

When Anne Crowden was fourteen, and German bombardments were making Edinburgh unsafe, she received a scholarship to a progressive girls’ boarding school in Fife.  There she continued childhood violin studies and thrived as both a scholar and athlete. People who knew her later in Berkeley said she could bat a ball right across Euclid Avenue from the playing field in Codornices Park.

Against her mother’s wish that she choose a practical profession like medicine, she won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music in London. There she studied with violinist Frederick Grinke and realized her dream of becoming a performing musician. Anne married violinist Robert Cooper, and together they founded the New Edinburgh String Quartet. In their sixth season both the quartet and her marriage dissolved. With a twenty-month-old baby in tow, Anne moved to Amsterdam to play with the Netherlands Chamber Orchestra under the baton of Szymon Goldberg.

After several years she found it difficult to be a touring musician and a single parent. Through Ian Hampton, who had played cello with the New Edinburgh String Quartet, she contacted cellist Colin Hampton, his father, at UC Berkeley with the hope of coming here and reorienting her life toward teaching and parenting.

In her first years here, she became part of the Bay Area chamber music scene. She played with the Oakland Symphony and the San Francisco Opera Orchestra and taught violin and chamber music at Sonoma State University and Stanford. By the mid-1970s she had a flourishing teaching studio and began thinking about starting a school. She felt that by establishing strong bonds and peer support in middle-school music education, teenage students were more likely to continue their serious music studies.  With trepidation, she took out a one-year lease on a building behind the University Christian Church on Scenic Ave. and began what became known as the Crowden School.  In 1997, the program moved to the former Jefferson School on the corner of Rose and Sacramento streets.

Ill, Anne Crowden returned to Scotland at the end of the 2002-2003 school year. She died the following year, leaving a legacy that continues to shape Bay Area musical life.