Minneapolis and St Paul.

Cities in Minnesota, USA, identified as the Twin Cities. They are located on the Upper Mississippi River. A spirit of rivalry and enterprise, along with the shared conviction that communities in harsh northern climates require tempering by the arts, has triggered an abundance of music, theatre and museums in these hub cities of Minnesota. In the 1980s and 90s a vigorous popular music scene developed, notably in Minneapolis.

1. Art music.

In the westward expansion of the 1850s, Minneapolis and St Paul attracted immigrants to the fertile lands of the Upper Midwest. They came in large numbers from Scandinavia and the German-speaking countries, bringing with them both a folk-based culture, rooted in such activities as hardanger fiddle-playing and choral singing, as well as an understanding that a civilized place will have an orchestra. Apart from appearances by the Hutchinson family in 1855 and by Ole Bull with the 13-year-old Adelina Patti the following year, home entertainment and singing schools – the start of a robust local choral tradition – marked the decade in which the state was founded. By 1863 the St Paul Symphony Society had played the first symphony heard in the state, and three years later the capital city of St Paul built an opera house to accommodate burgeoning local events and the stream of European artists drawn westward while making lucrative American tours.

Spurred by the example of St Paul, Minneapolis inaugurated in 1867 the Pence Opera House, boasting the only grand piano in the city. With the founding of instrumental and choral groups the building soon proved inadequate, and a new Academy of Music was opened in 1871; at its opening concert the St Paul Symphony Society played the first symphonic music heard in Minneapolis. This exchange between the cities’ instrumental ensembles gradually expanded, especially in the second half of the 20th century, as the Minneapolis-based Minnesota Orchestra (known as the Minneapolis SO until 1968) and the St Paul Chamber Orchestra regularly performed concerts, even entire series, in each other’s cities.

With expanded facilities and the growing population (particularly German and Austrian musicians eager to teach and perform), the range of musical activities grew more diversified after 1870, partly through the pioneering work of the Hamburg musician Ludwig Harmsen. The first conductor and full-time professional musician in Minneapolis, Harmsen conducted the Minneapolis Musical Society and its successor, the Orchestral Union. In the 1880s, when both St Paul and Minneapolis had become major commercial cities, opera, choral societies and festivals flourished in the competitive atmosphere. In 1881 Minneapolis engaged Franz Danz, a German immigrant musician, to form an instrumental ensemble to match the Great Western Band and Orchestra in St Paul. Two years later Danz’s son, Frank Danz jr, came from the Theodore Thomas Orchestra to become Director of Professor Danz’s Orchestra, which formed the nucleus of the Minneapolis SO on its foundation in 1903. Emil Oberhoffer was appointed musical director, with Frank Danz becoming leader. The inaugural concert was given on 5 November 1903, and two years later the orchestra moved into a new auditorium, the site of which was used in 1974 for its new hall.

In its fifth season (1907) the orchestra embarked on the first of several tours that soon took it to both coasts, and later to Canada, Mexico, Cuba and the Middle East. As early as 1914 a St Paul series was added, but it was abandoned during most of the orchestra’s 43 years (1931–74) at the University of Minnesota’s Northrop Auditorium (cap. 4832). The St Paul series was reinstated in 1970 on the opening of the I.A. O’Shaughnessy Auditorium (cap. 1800) at the College of St Catherine, and continued in the Ordway Centre for the Performing Arts (opened as the Ordway Music Theatre, cap. 1800, 1985).

After a season of guest conductors, including Walter Damrosch and Bruno Walter, in 1922–3, Henri Verbrugghen (1922–31) succeeded Oberhoffer and added to the repertory works by Bach as well as introducing Delius, Elgar and Vaughan Williams. The long history of the orchestra’s recordings began in 1923. With the recordings issued during the conductorship of Eugene Ormandy (1931–6), the orchestra acquired an international reputation that Dimitri Mitropoulos (1937–49) brought to fruition; he risked his popularity by championing the works of Schoenberg, Berg, Krenek (resident in St Paul 1942–7) and Shostakovich, and by giving the premières of such works as Hindemith’s Symphony in E (1941). Mitropoulos created a climate for new music that was expanded by his successors: Antal Dorati (1949–60), who introduced works by Bartók, and the Polish-born Stanisław Skrowaczewski, whose extended tenure (1960–79) witnessed not only the growth of the orchestra season to year round but featured several USA premières, including Penderecki’s St Luke Passion (1967), and saw the opening of Orchestra Hall (cap. 2460). In 1968 the Minneapolis SO changed its name to the Minnesota Orchestra as a sign of its expanded activities, and for the next three decades struggled with the problem of name recognition.

Under Neville Marriner (1979–86) the orchestra expanded its conducting roster to include principal guest conductors Klaus Tennstedt and Charles Dutoit, and fostered the concept of festivals. Principal guest conductor Leonard Slatkin became the founding director of the annual Viennese Sommerfest in 1980; he was succeeded by Michael Steinberg (1990), David Zinman (1993) and Jeffrey Tate (1996). Under Edo de Waart (1986–95) the Minnesota Orchestra advanced artistically and stablized at 95 members. The Japanese Eiji Oue, a Bernstein protégé, was named music director in 1995 and in 1998 led the orchestra on its first tours of Europe and Japan. In 1997 Pulitzer Prize winner (1975) Dominick Argento was named the orchestra’s Composer Laureate, and the following year the 1998 Pulitzer winner Aaron Jay Kernis was appointed New Music Advisor.

Since the founding of the St Paul Chamber Orchestra in 1959, which soon developed into a full-time professional group, the Twin Cities have supported two world-class orchestras along with numerous civic and student ensembles. The St Paul Chamber Orchestra’s founding director, Leopold Sipe, was succeeded by Dennis Russell Davies (1972–80), who programmed much 20th-century music and cultivated younger audiences. As the only full-time professional chamber orchestra in the USA from 1968 to 1978, the St Paul Chamber Orchestra undertook extensive touring, which continued under Davies’s successors, Pinchas Zukerman (1980–87), Skrowaczewski (1987) and a tripartite artistic commission initially consisting of Hugh Wolff (named principal conductor in 1988, music director in 1992), Christopher Hogwood and composer John Adams (1988–90), the latter followed by composers John Harbison and Aaron Jay Kernis. Reflecting the ‘crossover’ current of the 1990s, composer/vocalist/conductor Bobby McFerrin was named Creative Chair in 1994.

Opera in the Twin Cities is dominated by the Minnesota Opera, which mounts its productions at the Ordway Center for the Performing Arts in St Paul. The company was founded in 1963 as the Center Opera at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis; its first production was The Masque of Angels, commissioned from the noted Minneapolis composer Dominick Argento. In the following years the company produced more American and world premières than any other company in the US, winning accolades for its adventurous spirit in design as well as in musical programming. In 1969 it severed its ties with the museum, and in 1971 it changed its name to the Minnesota Opera. It continued to complement the Metropolitan Opera on tour, which had been performing annually at Northrop Auditorium since 1945. But with the end of the Metropolitan’s national touring in 1986 Minnesota Opera focussed increasingly on traditional repertory performed in the original language. In contrast with its early years, commissioning became a low priority, though the company occasionally produces unusual works such as George Antheil’s Transatlantic, given its American première in 1998.

The venerable Schubert Club of St Paul, founded in 1882, sponsors some 70 musical events a year, including the Twin Cities’ most prestigious recital series, commissions new musical works (including several by Argento), organizes master classes, educational projects and an annual scholarship competition, and maintains a distinguished Museum of Musical Instruments.

Other recital and chamber music events are presented at venues throughout the Twin Cities, especially the University of Minnesota School of Music’s Ted Mann Music Theater. That new works appear frequently on these programmes is partly due to the influence of the American Composers Forum, founded in 1973 as the Minnesota Composers Forum by Libby Larsen and Stephen Paulus. By the late 1990s its membership numbered more than 1000 composers, performers and music presenters, who participate in an expanding network of activities that includes a visiting composers programme, the Sonic Circuits Electronic Music Festival, recordings and several new music series.

The choral tradition established by the earliest settlers continues to flourish in the Twin Cities, which support several outstanding organizations. Chief among them are the Dale Warland Singers and Symphonic Chorus (founded 1972), which consists of a renowned a cappella choir that regularly commissions new works and a large chorus that participates in performances of major choral works; the Minnesota Chorale, also founded in 1972, which was the official chorus of the St Paul Chamber Orchestra under Joel Revzen from 1983 to 1992, and continues to perform and record under Kathy Saltzman Romey; and the Plymouth Music Series of Minnesota, which was founded in 1969 by Philip Brunelle and has subsequently given the premières of over 60 new works. Based at Plymouth Congregational Church in Minneapolis, the Plymouth Singers have given the Midwest premières of nearly all the Handel oratorios, collaborated with Copland in a concert at which he conducted his own choral works, and commissioned numerous large-scale pieces, including Argento’s Te Deum and oratorio Jonah and the Whale.

The University of Minnesota, Minneapolis (founded 1851), has been an important centre of musical activity since 1919. In addition to events at the Ted Mann Music Theater, the School of Music (founded 1903) and its opera workshop offer a variety of undergraduate and graduate degree programmes in music. Music degrees are also offered at Augsburg College in Minneapolis, Hamline University and Bethel College in St Paul, and other local schools. The music library of the Minneapolis Public Library is one of the largest collections in the country.

2. Popular music.

To followers of popular music, the so-called Minneapolis sound evokes two disparate notions: the synthesized funk of Prince and producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, and the post-punk rock of the influential and critically acclaimed Replacements and Husker Du.

Those 1980s sounds may be the ones identified with Minneapolis but the city’s popular music traditions are more diverse, from the long-lived polka of Six Fat Dutchmen through the 1960s folk-blues of Koerner, Ray and Glover to three decades of the fancy finger-picking of guitarist Leo Kottke and the contemporary gospel of the choir Sounds of Blackness. Since Minnesota-born Bob Dylan left for New York City in 1960, more than 100 songs either recorded in Minneapolis or made by artists based there have reached the Top 40 on Billboard’s pop chart.

Prince emerged in 1979 as a one-man band who composed, arranged and produced his recordings on which he played all the instruments. Combining rock, funk and soul, Prince became the most prolific recording artist of his generation and one of the most widely respected musicians, songwriters and producers. The rock underground also flourished in Minneapolis in the 1980s. The chaotic Replacements became the link between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and the 1990s grunge explosion. Husker Du, a Minneapolis power trio, merged punk and pop into a post-punk noise pop that also laid the groundwork for much of the alternative rock of the 1990s. In the 1980s and 90s more than 75 venues regularly presented live music in Minneapolis. At the same time, the city became a major centre for recording, both at Prince’s Paisley Park Studios and at Pachyderm Studio, 45 miles away in Cannon Falls.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J.K. Sherman: Music and Maestros: the Story of the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra (Minneapolis, 1952)

G. Seltzer: The Professional Symphony Orchestra in the United States (Metuchen, NJ, 1975)

J.T. Dunn: Saint Paul’s Schubert Club: a Century of Music (1882–1982) (St Paul, 1983)

B.S. Lamb: Thursday Musical in the Musical Life of Minneapolis (diss., U. of Minnesota, 1983)

J. Bream: ‘Three Decades of Minnesota Recording: Land of 10,000 Grooves’, Star Tribune (7 May 1989)

MARY ANN FELDMAN (1), JON BREAM (2)