Biographical Information

 

Robert Commanday was born on June 18, 1922 in Yonkers, NY. Commanday was educated at the Juilliard School of Music, Harvard University, and the University of California, Berekley; he conducted and taught at Ithaca (NY) College, the University of Illinois, and at UC Berkeley. Following his graduation from Harvard, Commanday enlisted in the Army in early 1943, trained as a cryptanalytic translator of encoded Japanese and served in that capacity. After the war, he started his career as a choral conductor working with the of Univeristy of California Glee Club, a role he held for almost 14 years. In 1964, he became the music and dance critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, a position he held until 1993. During that time, Commanday twice served as president of the Music Critics Association of North America; received the Deems Taylor Award for Music Criticism, the John Swett Award, and was honored as citizen of the year by the Il Cenacolo society and the Harvard Club of San Francisco. Following his retirement from the San Francisco Chronicle, out of concern about local newspapers' lack of addressing various musical activity in the San Francisco Bay Area, he founded the San Francisco Classical Voice (SFCV) in 1998. Funded by Gordon Getty, SFCV was a pioneering online resource for its time that would serve as a model for similar sites across the United States. Commanday also had a direct link to the Museum of Performance + Design as he served as a strong advocate for Russell Hartley and the Museum (then known as the Archives of the Performing Arts) since the 1970s. He also served on the Board of Trustees from 1982 to 2001. Commanday passed away on September 3, 2015 in his home in Oakland, California.

 

Information for this biography was obtained from the following sources:

 

Gereben, Janos. "Saying Farewell to Robert P. Commanday." San Francisco Classical Voice, 4 Septempter 2015. Web. 4 March 2017.

 

Kosman, Joshua. "Robert Commanday, Longtime Chronicle Music Critic, Dies." San Francisco Chronicle, 5 September 2015. Web. 4 March 2017.