Changing Skyline: Building's sale could bring down curtain on music salon

Andrea Clearfield's Center City living room is part Swiss chalet, part Craftsman-style attic, an impossible cone-shaped space held up with dark timber beams and accented with a Mercer tile fireplace. It's nothing for the successful composer to invite a hundred or so strangers up to her third-floor lair to listen to musicians perform, from willowy pianists fresh from Carnegie Hall to grizzled folkies singing boxcar blues. All she asks is that guests remove their shoes before plopping down on her beige carpet.

It's not only that she wants to keep people from tracking in dirt, although the no-shoes policy helps. Her real motivation is to give audiences the experience of listening to music in the most relaxed, unprocessed venue possible. When everyone is sitting around in socks, "it just creates a mood," she says.

Clearfield, who is crowned by a froth of raven curls, runs one of the best-known music salons in the country, an eclectic gathering that is modeled on the great Parisian salons of the 19th century, where the likes of Liszt and Chopin tried out their compositions. She's been welcoming people into her living room nine times a year, for close to a quarter century, and was planning to hold a 25th anniversary concert there in September - until she learned the landlord was putting the house up for sale.

Clearfield has been populating her unusual apartment with musicians and music lovers for so long that the possible loss of the venue feels as momentous as the closing of any cherished city institution. While the salon had its beginnings in an earlier apartment, a one-bedroom unit on Spruce Street, it evolved into something magical when she moved into the high-ceilinged attic of a rundown house a block from the Kimmel Center in 2003. It was the perfect union of space and use.

The salon, Clearfield explains, was always meant as a sort of anti-Kimmel, and the garret apartment is as far from the polished grandeur of a concert hall as one can get.

First there is the matter of finding it. Clearfield's house is tucked away on an alley off an alley, a street so removed from the beaten path that even lifelong Philadelphians may be unaware of its existence; it appears almost like the street of magic supply stores in the Harry Potter books. (Best to visit andreaclearfield.com for directions.)