The journey that turned CSUN into a mecca for guitar students and the home of one of the world's most important guitar archives began in a split-level house in the Hollywood Hills.
It was there, in 1955, that Ron Purcell began studying with one of America's great classical guitarists. Not that he knew it at the time.
Purcell, who heads the Northridge guitar program, recalled his first encounter with Vahdah Olcott-Bickford in a recent issue of the journal Guitar Review.
"I was unaware of Vahdah's international prominence in halcyon days gone by. She was simply the guitar teacher assigned to me by the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music and Arts. Vahdah was not a braggart by any means, but little by little, I began to realize that I was studying the guitar with someone important and not just with a little old lady (she was 70 at the time) who taught the pad school (without nails) of right-hand technique, with the little finger resting on the sound board.
"Olcott-Bickford gave lessons at her home, but her students, myself included, were prohibited from wandering through the house. We would climb the 2 1/2 flights to the front door, continue through to the foyer and enter the living room, where we would take a seat and wait to be called into the music room."
Today, a handsome oil painting of Olcott-Bickford hangs in Purcell's office on CSUN's campus.
"She's a very important lady," he says of his former teacher, who helped found the country's first guitar society, the forerunner of today's American Guitar Society, in Los Angeles in 1923.
Born Ethel Lucretia Olcott in 1885, she was given the exotic name Vahdah by a prominent astrologer whom she assisted for many years. She died in 1980.
Today, Purcell is the esteemed teacher of acoustic guitar, but Olcott-Bickford is still a force on campus. She was a visionary collector of guitar music, guitar journals, letters from important musicians and other materials relating to the guitar and other plucked instruments.
During her lifetime, her precious collection filled her house. Stacks of journals and other items stood 5 feet high in some rooms.
Passionate about preserving and disseminating guitar music, she had hoped the material would become an important research library focusing on the guitar. And in 1987, it finally did. Today her materials form the core of the CSUN-based International Guitar Research Archive, which includes more than 15,000 pieces of guitar music, thousands of letters and other items.
