Pillsbury Foundation School records

The Pillsbury Foundation for Advancement of Music Education was created in 1934 through an endowment by San Francisco lawyer Evans Searle Pillsbury (1840–1934) upon his death, and was intended to found a school for music and literature for young students at the Pillsbury family estate near Santa Barbara, CA. Determining that the endowment was inadequate for such a venture, the trustees turned to famed conductor Leopold Stokowski (1882–1977), who was a part-time Santa Barbara resident and an acquaintance of trustee Florence Fernald, for his advice on the use of the arts endowment. Stokowski suggested studying the natural music-making of young children, which he felt was unnecessarily stifled in Western society. The Foundation’s trustees approved Stokowski’s suggestion and decided to establish a nursery school for the purpose of undertaking such a study, and Stokowski recommended Gladys Evelyn Moorhead (1893–1976), a prominent Los Angeles educator, as Director of the School and Harry Donald Pond (1906–1983), an English composer and researcher at the experimental Dalton School in New York City, as Music Director.

The Pillsbury Foundation School was established in February 1937 in a former kindergarten school building at 1611 Anacapa Street in Santa Barbara, CA, by the Pillsbury Foundation, and still stands as the only known study of spontaneous expressions of music-making of preschool children over an extended period of observation (1937–1945). The school included considerable outdoor play space and equipment, a collection of Oriental musical instruments loaned by Henry Eichheim (1870–1942), a composer and resident of Santa Barbara, and a phonograph with a selection of recordings, all for the children’s unrestricted use. Enrollment varied, with the students numbering between twelve and twenty-seven and ranging in age from one and a half to eight and a half years. School days occurred under the supervision of both directors but with minimal routine, leaving the children to pursue their own creative pursuits, indoors or out. The teachers facilitated a constant flow of activity and sometimes participated in it, but always they observed the children and noted their observations on five-by-eight cards. The School operated under the Pillsbury Foundation’s auspices until June 1948, and Moorhead was the Director for the entire period except for the school year 1938–1939, when she fulfilled an obligation to the Los Angeles City Schools and Florence Stewart served as Acting Director. Donald Pond remained Music Director until 1944, after which the position was filled by Geraldine Browning, Florence Sandvik, Donald Wright, and briefly by Robert Heger-Goetzl.

In 1948, the school building was sold and the Pillsbury School did not relocate, as student tuitions had never met the costs of maintaining the school and the search for a new building was too expensive. Moorhead, who had maintained all the files associated with the School, continued to use them for research and writing about the School on behalf of the Foundation after its closure. She operated her own independent Children Studio School from 1950 to 1957, which she modeled after the Pillsbury School. There, Moorhead continued the practice of daily noting her observations on five-by-eight cards and these cards were added to her previous collection. Her professional writing and correspondence also became a mixture of her experiences in the two schools, and they are included along with the documents of both schools as part of the Pillsbury Foundation School records. The Pillsbury Foundation continued to operate after the closure of the School as a provider of scholarships for young musicians, and eventually dissolved in 1979.