Barbara Faulkner:
Inquiring Mind, Pioneering Spirit

Story by Denice Breaux

What a perfect place is the Mendocino Coast for a Midwest girl to realize her Westward Ho! dreams of California. Barbara Faulkner, who was raised in Indiana but has lived on the coast for over thirty years, was “constantly reading covered-wagon books,” the musician, teacher, and landscape designer recalls from her Albion home. “Even as a little kid I always knew I was going to California, (a desire) that took the form of countless covered wagons made of four chairs and a quilt.”

The musically precocious Barbara showed talent early, and at age three enjoyed hanging around the drum and bugle corps her trumpeter father played with casually. A “guy who loved jazz,” he encouraged her musically and “really gave me that bodily feeling of what it is to listen to music,” she says. “I would sit next to him and could sense him relaxing into the music as his body moved and he tapped his foot.”

Despite her love of music, Barbara “perfectly hated” the piano lessons her parents urged upon her at age nine. “I didn’t take easily to reading right away nor could I ‘get’ that it was fun, and after two frustrating years, they allowed me to quit.”
Some time later, she happened to pick up a hymn book and, realizing that she could indeed read the music, thought,
“Wow-I can actually figure out how to play some of this. This is real music, something I recognize.” Things had completely turned around and “I just loved it!” Inspired, she returned to her piano teacher whose approach still influences Barbara’s own teaching today, and stayed with her through high school. “I understand when my students don’t take to reading right away, so I tell them, ‘I know that right now using your ear makes playing so much easier for you than reading does—why would you want to read?—but now it’s my job to encourage you to read.’” She continues,
“I play for them music of their choosing, a bit too complex to learn by rote or ear, to help them understand the eventual joy of reading music. Sometimes a student can seem uninterested for a year, then suddenly something clicks.”

Because she “just had to sing,” at age ten Barbara was the only kid in the adult church choir. A first-year chorus director’s enthusiasm inspired seventh-grader Barbara to sing in the school chorus that would go on to win many competitions throughout the Midwest in spite of the school’s small student body. In high school she also played saxophone, which held little appeal for her, but her proficiency at the piano led her to become the accompanist for the school choir through high school and later in college.

Since she was twelve years old Barbara Faulkner had planned to become a public school chorus director and so got a “very elaborate” music education degree (Bachelor of Science: Vocal and Instrumental Music, grades K–12) from Manchester College in northern Indiana. When she did her student teaching at the local high school, however, she discovered that she couldn’t get the hang of regarding the classroom as a group, wanting instead to teach them as individuals. Even though Manchester College was known to be a good teaching school at the time, Barbara did not have a good mentor teacher nor did she know how to ask the right kinds of questions to help her be effective.

Deciding not to teach, Barbara paid off her college loan doing macramé piecework for friends who wholesaled their wares throughout the Midwest. In those friends’ North Manchester bookshop she encountered a book about hand-made houses, one of which she would end up living in by coincidence when she later reached Mendocino County.
She still wanted to voyage west, now lured more by “the open-minded culture of curiosity” than by the pioneer spirit of her girlhood covered wagons. Ready for a change and an adventure, Barbara headed to the Bay Area where an Indiana friend now lived. Blue Samsonite in hand, she landed in Oakland via the Greyhound bus, undaunted but knowing nothing about where she would work or live.

Soon enough Barbara got a job working in a dry-cleaning plant, rented a piano and “went to as many Indian music and Keith Jarrett concerts as I could,” recalls Barbara who then got into improvising at the keyboard for the first time. But city life did not suit her, and after visiting another college friend then living in Mendocino County, she ended up house-sitting locally, eventually settling into her own place. Immediately piano gigs came her way, and when one of the pianists playing Carmina Burana for the Mendocino Chorus performance became ill, Barbara filled in. She went on to play harpsichord in a baroque ensemble and became rehearsal accompanist for an early Gloriana Opera Company (now Gloriana Musical Theater) production and later their music director, all the while playing in a number of other venues and configurations. The tipping point came when she was both instrumental director and vocal director for Gloriana’s production of The Music Man and realized “it was way too much—I needed a phase of not doing so much music.”

Approaching age thirty, Barbara, who had been supporting herself with the typical assortment of Mendocino service jobs, finally yielded to several families’ requests to offer kids’ piano lessons. “At first, I didn’t think I was a good teacher and worried that the kids weren’t learning enough, but the parents saw that they were and so must have thought I was good enough,” recalls Barbara. “I didn’t know anything about what kids were capable of or interested in, nor how to talk to different ages of kids. I learned to teach as I went along, and I’m still learning.”

The trick for Barbara was to figure out “how to lead just enough while leaving room for the student’s curiosity and finding those little openings where you can insert something. That all takes experience.” But it’s more than teaching music. “It’s a lot about how to take on a project,” Barbara continues. “I began to understand that (learning) couldn’t be imposed on them or they would just quit as soon as their parents stopped making them take lessons. They have to make their own connection with it, which sometimes takes a while, but the change can happen from one lesson to the next.” The most profound thing for Barbara as a teacher is seeing that shift in a student, and suddenly she “can tell that the music is connected with their emotions, and they realize that it is a way of saying something, that it represents something. That’s the hook; then their playing sounds completely different.”

Discovering each student’s learning style is another pleasure for Barbara, who teaches each one differently. Her best recommendation came from a parent who noted that Barbara taught each of her three kids in three different ways. And it’s not just with kids that Barbara finds success and gratification. Claire Ellis of Little River took piano lessons as a child and again for a while in her mid forties. Now in her third year of study with Barbara, Claire says that for the adult student, “More than anything else, Barbara starts wherever the adult is. It’s not a prescribed program. She listens and is there to help you do whatever it takes to reach your goals,” which in Claire’s case is “to be as musical as possible, to play a range of music, and to play Bach in a way that would not embarrass him.”

When Barbara married her first husband at age thirty-six, she quit the last of the restaurant jobs that had supplemented her teaching income and embarked on the altogether new quest of gardening. Her innate curiosity and ever-present keen sense of wonder were struck by a simple rhizome given her by an adult student. “I just stuck it in the middle of blackberry brambles and it grew into a beautiful white flower,” she says, “and I became obsessed with the calla lily,” she says. “I realized that gardening wasn’t just growing vegetables, but was also about design and all sorts of shapes and colors.” In her typical style, she started reading profusely on the topic, “stuffing my head with plant names,” experimenting on her own place and taking a few classes.

Barbara was soon designing gardens for clients, helping them to figure out and install their dream gardens, “and then the rest was up to them. It was very satisfying,” and after taking over a vacationing friend’s gardening jobs at local inns, she found more work through word of mouth. Landscaping the 1916 Harbor House in Elk was especially fun and gratifying because she and the owner shared the same aesthetics and concepts. The inn’s gardens, Barbara’s work manifest, were featured as a cover story in the esteemed trade publication Horticulture. With the success and satisfaction of the Harbor House Inn gig, she quit the other landscaping jobs, continuing to care for the inn’s gardens half time while teaching piano the other half. After six years, she let the job go about eighteen months ago when the inn changed hands and its vision was reshaped.

By now Barbara was married to Steve Acker whom she had met when they both worked at Harbor House. Together they had joined the College of the Redwoods Community Chorus, inspired by the possibility of singing Verdi’s Requiem the following summer in the Mendocino Music Festival. In 2006 she was asked to sit on the festival’s board of directors, an invitation she saw as an opportunity “to give back” to the festival that she had loved and attended since its 1987 opening. “I’d seen the quality go up and up over the years, but knew nothing about the inner workings of it,” explains Barbara. “It had never occurred to me that being on a board could be creative and meaningful. I’d always been the one to create the artistic stuff, not the one who made it possible for others to participate.” Not unusual of that ilk, the festival was having difficulty staying in the black, so board member Barbara began to explore new ways of raising money. “This became my next course of study,” says Barbara. “I went from gardening books to fund development.”

Barbara’s piano student Claire Ellis, a Community Foundation board member and Organizational Development Behavior specialist, recommended that a couple of solicitation letters and a few dinners weren’t enough, that the board needed to make much more direct donor contact. “She was very instrumental in helping me come up with the right questions to ask,” says Barbara appreciatively of Claire. “It’s one-on-one work where you have to meet people and tell them with passion what is so wonderful about the festival,” she says. “You really have to know and keep track of your donors—the actual individuals—and meet them face to face,” including them as the active participants they are. To this end, artistic director Allan Pollack and by now President of the Board Barbara personally meet with folks who have purchased festival tickets or have otherwise indicated interest, actually going to their homes to chat about music and the festival. “Most people are delighted to meet Allan and talk music, and are happy to have us listen to their thoughts about the festival,” Barbara enthuses. “Of course money enters the conversation, but we’re really connecting through the shared passion. They love music, we love music—what could be better?” Of Barbara, Claire Ellis says, “She has invested the community back into the festival.”

It must be a winning formula, because for the first time in years, the festival is now operating in the black. “Every board of directors has brought to the festival whatever it needed at the time,” Barbara muses. “When I got on board, it was time for the festival to learn how to fund itself in a bigger, more personal way.” The current board includes former denizens of the corporate world who, besides sharing a love of music, collectively offer a wealth of fund development, organizational development, and marketing skills. “That is the kind of growth the festival is in now,” avers Barbara.

In spite of the gratifying success of the festival’s turnaround, Barbara cautions that there is still a lot more work to do.
“With no corporations in the area to sponsor the festival, it’s really a matter of getting the word out that the festival simply costs more than people might think. If they want it to exist, even those with moderate incomes must direct some money to the festival. It is our festival, and we must all have a sense of owning it together.” Barbara hastens to add that the festival can endure only because of the huge pool of volunteers, as vital as “the great board of directors, a staff who is willing to be underpaid, musicians who all work at the bottom of the pay scale, and the people who house those musicians during the festival.”

Barbara Faulkner may not have arrived on the California coast in the covered wagon of her Indiana daydreams, but a bit of the pioneering spirit prevails at the Mendocino Music Festival in its great canvas tent perched at land’s end each July. “There is something so touching and amazing about hearing music in this specific place. When I first heard Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony in the tent on the edge of the continent with the flaps open and the birds singing, it was a revelation,” she muses. “The Festival is a little gem, and there’s nothing else like it in the world.”