City in Missouri, USA. It is on the eastern border of the state, on the Mississippi river just below its confluence with the Missouri river, and was founded in 1764 by French-Canadians; Anglo-American settlers arrived in 1803, Germans after 1830. The Saint Louis SO, whose origins date back to 1880, has become internationally renowned. From the 1890s ragtime and blues underwent considerable development in the city.
An orchestra, the Philharmonic, was founded in 1838, the same year that the St Louis Musical Fund Society was organized. It was succeeded by the St Louis Musical Society Polyhymnia (active 1845–52) and then by the St Louis Philharmonic Society (founded 1860), which gave 62 concerts in its ten seasons.
In 1881 the St Louis Choral Society (founded in 1880) gave concerts with orchestra, conducted by Joseph Otten. That year the St Louis Musical Union gave its first concert with August Waldauer as conductor. It was absorbed by the Choral Society in 1890, adopting the name Saint Louis Choral Symphony Society. Otten was succeeded by Alfred Ernst in 1894 and Max Zach in 1907. Under Zach the name was changed to the Saint Louis Symphony Society; he improved and enlarged the orchestra and introduced many American and contemporary works. After Zach’s death in 1921, Rudolf Ganz was conductor until 1927. Guest conductors led the orchestra until 1931, when Vladimir Golschmann began his tenure. Subsequent conductors have been Edouard Van Remoortel (1958–62), Eleazar Carvalho (1963–8), Walter Susskind (1968–75), Jerzy Semkow (1975–9), Leonard Slatkin (1979–96) and Hans Vonk (from 1996). Raymond Leppard was principal guest conductor from 1984 to 1987. The orchestra has had its own auditorium, Powell Symphony Hall (cap. 2689), since 1968. In 1973 the season was expanded to 52 weeks. Nationwide radio broadcasts began in 1975 and the following year the St Louis Symphony Chorus was organized with Thomas Peck as director; Amy Kaiser succeeded him in 1995. Besides touring the eastern USA annually, the orchestra toured Europe in 1978, 1985, 1993 and 1998, and the Far East in 1986, 1990 and 1995. The orchestra’s recordings have received international critical acclaim, and it has commissioned numerous compositions (especially American); composers-in-residence have included Joseph Schwantner, Joan Tower and Claude Baker.
The St Louis Amateur Orchestra was organized at the Beethoven Conservatory of Music in 1893. In 1909 it became the St Louis Orchestra Club, then adopted the name Philharmonic Society of St Louis (the third orchestra to use the name). The St Louis Youth SO was founded in 1970 by the Women’s Association of the Saint Louis Symphony.
Chamber music was introduced to St Louis as early as 1807 through the arrival of Joseph Philipson from Philadelphia. Charles Balmer, an organist and conductor and later a music publisher, settled in the city in 1839 and brought many chamber music scores that he had copied in Germany; his performance of Beethoven’s Piano Trio op.70 no.1 with John Fallon (violin) and William Robyn (cello) is thought to be among the earliest performances of chamber music by Beethoven in the USA. Formal chamber music activity was given impetus through the Balatka Quintet Club (1877–8), the Philharmonic Quintet Club (1878–97) and the Mendelssohn Quintette Club (1882–99). Numerous local and visiting quartets perform in auditoriums at the Ethical Society and the Sheldon, a concert hall used primarily for chamber music and solo recitals.
In 1840 the St Louis Sacred Music Society was founded, probably due to the encouragement of Johann Heinrich Weber, who arrived in 1834 with an extensive collection of choral music. Other choral organizations flourished: the St Louis Oratorio Society (founded by Charles Balmer in 1846), St Louis Choral Society (1880–1907), Pageant Choral Society (an offshoot of the Pageant and Masque of 1914; see below), Choral Art Society, St Louis A Cappella Choir (1929) and Bach Society of St Louis (from 1942).
The ballad opera The Agreeable Surprise (1781, including music by Samuel Arnold), given in 1817, was the first musical play performed in St Louis; the production by a local stock company of Auber’s Masaniello (La muette de Portici, 1828) in 1830 was the first grand opera. Visiting companies presented French, German and Italian opera throughout the 19th century. Among the venues used were the Varieties Theatre, DeBar Opera House, Guy Golterman’s Municipal Theater, his Garden Theater and the Municipal Auditorium Opera House (renamed Kiel Opera House and later Kiel Auditorium). The German Grand Opera Company presented the complete Ring cycle, conducted by Anton Seidl, at the Exposition Building in 1889. In addition to the Metropolitan from New York, opera companies from Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia and elsewhere visited during the early 20th century.
The Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904 (also known as St Louis World’s Fair), which lasted 185 days, featured many musical activities. Because of the poor reception accorded orchestral concerts and Wagner’s operas at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, it was decided to emphasize concerts by bands. Besides daily concerts by local and internationally known bands (those of Sousa and Innes and the Garde Républicaine, among others), there were numerous choral and orchestral concerts. An organ, probably the largest in the world at that time, was installed in Festival Hall (cap. 3000), where daily recitals were given by Alexandre Guilmant and others. Although ragtime was flourishing (see §2 below), performances of it were allowed only outside the principal exposition area.
In 1914 the Pageant and Masque of St Louis, celebrating the 150th anniversary of the founding of the city, was produced in Forest Park with a cast of 7000 and an audience estimated at 500,000. This led to the formation of the St Louis Municipal Opera Association (MUNY), which has given summer seasons of operettas, musical comedies and (occasionally) opera performances since 1919, when the outdoor St Louis Municipal Opera Theatre (cap. 11,475) opened. It has also given some winter productions at the Fox Theater (cap. 4503), designed by C. Howard Crane and built in 1929, which closed in 1978 and after renovation was reopened in 1982. The Opera Theatre of Saint Louis was founded in 1976 with Richard Gaddes as general director; in 1978 Colin Graham became artistic director and in 1985 Charles MacKay succeeded Gaddes as general director. After using various small theatres and college halls, the company took the Loretto-Hilton Auditorium at Webster University as its permanent venue. Since 1976 the Saint Louis SO has served as its orchestra. Notable performances have included Britten’s Albert Herring (1976; televised in 1979), Martín y Soler’s L’arbore di Diana (in English as Tree of Chastity, 1978) and Weber-Mahler’s Die drei Pintos (in English, 1979), and the premières of Stephen Paulus’s The Village Singer (1979), The Postman always Rings Twice (1982) and The Woodlanders (1985), and Minoru Miki’s Jōruri (1985), all of which were commissioned. In 1983 the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis was the first American opera company to appear at the Edinburgh International Festival.
Composers born in St Louis include Alfred G. Robyn (1860–1935), Ernest Richard Kroeger (1862–1934), Albert Stoessel (1894–1943) and Ben Weber (1916–79).
The city’s position at the confluence of routes from New Orleans to Chicago or Minneapolis and St Paul, and from Kansas City to the East, meant that a wide range of vernacular traditions converged there. Most of the great ragtime pianists and composers were active there after about 1890. Although ragtime was excluded from the Louisiana Purchase Exposition (1904), several ragtime composers were attracted to St Louis at this time for contests in the tenderloin district. This gave rise to such compositions as Scott Joplin’s The Cascades. Other important figures were James Scott, Tom Turpin (who owned the Rosebud Club), Charlie Turpin, Arthur Marshall, Artie Matthews, Louis Chauvin, Scott Hayden, Charley Thompson, Robert Hampton, Joe Jordan, Charlie Warfield, Sam Patterson, Charles Hunter and Willie Anderson. Many of their compositions were published by John Stark & Son. The pianist and ragtime historian Trebor Jay Tichenor and the St Louis Ragtimers continue this local heritage. In 1965 the annual National Ragtime Festival was initiated in St Louis.
Blues, particularly the boogie-woogie style of piano playing, flourished and developed in St Louis. W.C. Handy had heard the blues performed on the riverfront in 1892, and composed his famous St. Louis Blues (see illustration) in 1914. Hundreds of blues performers from nearby states settled in St Louis, including the pianists ‘Blackmouth’, Son Long and Joe Cross, and the guitarists Dudlow Joe, Son Ryan and David Perchfield. The blues tradition has continued with such performers as Henry Spaulding, ‘Speckled Red’ Perryman, Robert Nighthawk, J.B. Hutto, Leroy Pierson and Henry Townsend.
Although St Louis did not develop an individual jazz style, it became the home of many important jazzmen. It was the organizational centre for the influential orchestras employed by the Streckfus Line aboard the riverboats SS Capitol and SS St Paul, for which Fate Marable recruited many of the most talented players from New Orleans and Chicago, including Louis Armstrong and Henry ‘Red’ Allen. Other early leaders were the trumpeters Charles Creath, Dewey Jackson and Oliver Cobb, and the pianist Eddie Johnson. Notable among the many venues have been Jazzland (from 1919), the Plantation Club, the Humming Bird Club and Tune Town, as well as the Castle and Arcadia ballrooms. The principal early bands included the St Louis Peacock Charleston Orchestra and the Original St Louis Crackerjacks, followed by the Jeter-Pillars Band (1930s) and George Hudson’s Big Band (from 1942). Leading jazz musicians from the area include the clarinettist PeeWee Russell and the trumpeters Clark Terry and Miles Davis.
Music publishers active in St Louis, important both in the Midwest and nationally, have included Nathaniel Phillips (1839), the Balmer & Weber Music House (1848–1907), Kunkel Brothers (Charles and Jacob; 1868–1934), Adam and Oliver Shattinger (1876–1958), John Stark & Sons (c1900–10), the Art Publication Society (from 1912), Magna Music and the Concordia Publishing House.
Several colleges and conservatories of music were founded in St Louis in the 19th century and the early 20th, notably the Beethoven Conservatory of Music (1871–1936), Strassberger’s Conservatory of Music (1891–1938), the Kroeger School of Music (1904–61) and the St Louis Institute of Music (1924–70). Those that have remained active include Washington University (Gaylord Music Library holds the Ernst C. Krohn Collection), St Louis University (established 1818), Webster University, Fontbonne College, the University of Missouri, St Louis, and the St Louis Conservatory and School of the Arts (CASA; founded 1872 by Charles Kunkel; closed 1993; taken over as the School of the Saint Louis SO).
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T.J. Tichenor: ‘Missouri’s Role in the Ragtime Revolution’, Bulletin of the Missouri Historical Society, xvii (1961), 239–44
A.J. McCarthy: Big Band Jazz (London, 1963/R), 113ff
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T.J. Tichenor: Introduction to Ragtime Rarities, ed. T.J. Tichenor (New York, 1975), pp.v–x
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S.J. Goodman: The Story of Powell Symphony Hall (St Louis, 1992)
JAMES M. BURK