When the doors of the Birmingham Conservatoire open this summer, and music students walk into their new home, a key jigsaw piece in a fresh cultural quarter for the city will slot into place. But the arrival of this £57m building will mean more than just a substantial investment in the artistic life of Birmingham. For Julian Lloyd Webber, the conservatoire’s principal, it will mark a challenge to the dominance of London’s established musical education colleges.

“Access to a career in making music really should have nothing to do with your background, as it all too often does,” he told the Observer during an exclusive tour of the site in the new east side zone of the city centre. “Birmingham already has a fantastic musical heritage, with its two world-class concert halls – the symphony hall and the town hall. And the conservatoire is already known for its open attitude. We want to build on that.”

Despite the highbrow title “conservatoire”, and all the hi-tech digital equipment being installed, Lloyd Webber promises that the institution, which has recently produced successful musicians such as singer-songwriter Laura Mvula, concert pianist Duncan Honeybourne and conductor Michael Seal, will stay connected to the people living and working around it. He sees the conservatoire as an architectural champion of the people’s music, becoming a venue for all kinds of public performance and academic experimentation.

“It is quite a moment for the country, let alone the city, because this conservatoire, the first to be newly built in Britain since 1987, may well be the last because of the reduction in funding for music,” he said.

The internationally renowned cellist, younger brother of the composer of Evita and The Phantom of the Opera, Lord Lloyd-Webber, suspects music education is “in his blood”. His father, the composer and organist William Lloyd Webber, was director of the London College of Music, and as a child he overheard many discussions about teaching methods and funding negotiations.

“I feel as if I have inherited the interest,” Lloyd Webber said. “And I needed the demands of a big job like this to help me adjust from a performing career.”

In April 2014 the cellist announced his early retirement from the concert hall due to a painful neck condition that limited movement in his right arm. A year later he was appointed principal in Birmingham.

Lloyd Webber’s performing experience had helped him at Birmingham, he said, where he had to present the public face of the conservatoire, as well as teaching cello: “I can handle speaking in public. Let me tell you nothing is as scary as having to go out in front of an audience and play a Britten symphony.”

Staff and students have had to leave the old conservatoire, along with the former Adrian Boult Hall, because of the redevelopment of the Paradise Circus area of the city. The new pale brick structure sits next to the city’s Millennium Point building and between the Birmingham City University campus, the Thinktank science museum, and Birmingham Ormiston Academy for creative, digital and performing arts, known as “the Brummie fame academy”.

The conductor Sir Simon Rattle, who is shortly to return to Britain from the Berlin Philharmonic to conduct the London Symphony Orchestra, is president of the conservatoire and has a close association with the city in which he made his name in the 80s and 90s with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. Another supporter is Prince Edward, who is the conservatoire’s patron and is expected to visit when the building is finished.

By then the foyer will be covered with ash floorboards and the main concert hall and the smaller recital room will be oak-panelled. There will be three other performances spaces, each built as separate “boxes” to prevent sound or vibrations from leaking out. A “lab” venue will stage experimental work, while an organ recital room will sit above a dark-panelled jazz club. “We have modelled it on Ronnie Scott’s in London and we’re calling it East Side Jazz,” said Lloyd Webber, 65, adding that, while he enjoyed jazz, he found the idea of improvising difficult. “I played with Stéphane Grappelli once, and the others were happy to play something different each night. I had never learned and I certainly was not going to try it out on Grappelli.”

Above the public areas and venues will be rooms for practising and then the technical control rooms.

During the wait for the new building, the conservatoire has made use of a wide range of public spaces. Lloyd Webber believes this period of risk-taking has been instructional. This weekend saw a typically adventurous bit of programming. The conservatoire staged an all-night “pianothon” inspired by the all-night jazz sessions at Birmingham’s town hall in the 1950s and 60s. Using three Steinway concert grands, period pianos and harpsichords and for a ticket price of one pound, audiences on Friday night and Saturday morning listened to more than 20 pianists.

These included the award-winning Hungarian pianist Gergely Bogányi and the impressionist Alistair McGowan, who played music by Satie and Grieg. Simon Callow recited Tennyson’s poem Enoch Arden to the music of Richard Strauss, and, in the finale, the “Olympianist” Anthony Hewitt cycled up from London through the night, live-streamed to the foyer, arriving at dawn to play Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit. Primed for such tricks, the new building will be wired not only to cope with emerging sound technologies, but also with the standard analogue sound recording equipment still favoured by some artists, such as violinist Nigel Kennedy.

The conservatoire’s technical team jumped at the chance to equip a building from scratch, future-proofing it as much as possible and fitting it with lighting and recording facilities of broadcast standard. This will also allow teachers and students to interact with musicians across the country and even abroad. (The conservatoire already has a teaching project working with children in Soweto, South Africa.)

Improving access to music is the key aim. In 2009 Lloyd Webber launched the In Harmony social development scheme in Lambeth, south London, inspired by the work of the Simón Bolívar Orchestra and the Sistema scheme in Venezuela, as a way of introducing orchestral music to young children who cannot afford private tuition.

The conservatoire already works with In Harmony Telford and also reaches thousands of other young people across Britain each year. The new building will become an official hub for the wider music education sector and will sponsor selected schools in the Birmingham area.

“It is our job to plug the gaps, as the government continues to pull back on providing music education in schools,” said Lloyd Webber, as he headed off to visit a nearby school.