College of Fine Arts School of Music Director Andr’eacute; de Quadros announced he will step down from his position at the end of the academic year to concentrate on teaching and completing other projects, according to a CFA press release.

De Quadros, conductor, music scholar and human rights activist, said he will remain at Boston University as a music professor.

“Being the director of a school, you have very, very, very little time for anything else,” de Quadros said. “Something had to give, so I guess I could have stopped doing the musical work and the other things, but I decided to stop being the director of the school.”

“It wasn’t like I was going to give up being the director of the school to sit on the back porch and be sipping martinis,” he said.

De Quadros, who has held the position since 2001, said he would not be able to do justice to the position and his other pursuits had he remained as director.

“I love to teach,” he said. “I love to make music. I love to write. And those are the three things that I haven’t been doing as much of. I very much look forward to remembering what it was like to teach a lot, and remembering what it was like to be a musician, and remembering what is was like to write.”

De Quadros has contributed much to the school as director, CFA spokeswoman Jean Connaughton said in an email.

“During his tenure, professor de Quadros helped develop and implement an extremely successful music education program, offering Masters and Doctorate degrees online,” she said. “He was a key figure in the Tanglewood II Symposium, a forum for brainstorming new philosophies and approaches to music learning in the 21st century.”

CFA will assemble a search committee over the next few weeks before launching an official search for de Quadros’ replacement, the press release stated.