City in Washington State, USA. It is the largest metropolis in the Pacific north-west and a major port. It was named after a chief of the local native Squamish and Duwanish peoples, Sealth (1786–1866), a singer who was baptized (1841) and led his people in morning and evening prayers. The town in its present location was laid out in 1853. In the 1860s touring groups – Excelsior's Minstrels, Stars Minstrels, Congo Minstrels and the USS Pensacola Band – performed in Henry Yesler's Mill Cook House (also called Hall or Pavilion). Squire's Opera House (1879–83), Frye's Opera House (cap. 1300; 1884–9), the Seattle Opera House (1890–93) and the Seattle Theater (1892–1915) hosted a constant stream of entertainers. The first locally formed troupe was the Seattle Minstrels (1880). Callender's Colored Georgia Minstrels (1882) headed a long list of touring all-black troupes that gave 13 Seattle seasons between 1889 and 1911.
Operas and operettas given in the 1870s and 80s by visiting companies included Offenbach's La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein, Wallace's Maritana, Balfe's The Bohemian Girl, Flotow's Martha, Donizetti's La fille du régiment and Gounod's Faust, as well as La sonnambula, Il trovatore and Le nozze di Figaro. Touring soloists visited the city in the same period, including the violinist Ede Reményi, the pianist Julie Rivé-King and the sopranos Adelina Patti, Nellie Melba and Emma Calvé. Scandinavian, Swiss and German immigrants fostered a strong choral tradition; the Norwegian Male Chorus was founded in 1889.
The Seattle SO gave its first concert in 1903 in the ballroom of the Arcade Building, conducted by the violinist Harry F. West. Most of its members also played for musical theatre performances in the Madison Street auditorium (1400 seats) and later the Moore Theater (1650 seats). The 1904–5 symphony season in John Cort's Grand Opera House concluded with John Hamilton Howe's chorus of 200 joining the orchestra for the Creation. Michael Kegrize conducted the orchestra from 1907 to 1909 and brought such soloists as Maud Powell, Mischa Elman and Lillian Nordica. During the Alaska–Yukon Exposition at the University of Washington in the summer of 1909, the soloists at the Sunday concerts conducted by Henry Hadley included Fritz Kreisler, Josef Hofmann, Teresa Carreño and Johanna Gadski, the latter singing some of Hadley's own songs. Hadley, who conducted the orchestra until 1911, composed his North, East, South, and West symphony in Seattle. His successor John Spargur conducted an orchestra of 85 that disbanded before the close of the 1919–20 season. In the hiatus from 1921 to 1926 the violin teacher Mme Davenport Engberg organized and conducted the Seattle Civic Orchestra. Karl Krueger conducted the revived symphony orchestra from 1927. After he resigned in 1931 the conductors were Basil Cameron (1932–8), Nicolai Sokoloff (1938–40) and Sir Thomas Beecham. Beecham gave frequent performances of Delius and Sibelius interspersed with Mozart concertos played by Betty Humby, whom he married after divorce proceedings in 1943. Virulent personal attacks in the Post-Intelligencer, whose critic of the time rarely published a kind word, hastened Beecham's mid-season departure in 1942; his successor Carl Bricken continued until the 1947–8 season. Later conductors included Eugene Linden, Milton Katims (1954–76) and Gerard Schwarz (from 1984), whose tenure brought the orchestra international acclaim.
After one year with the Seattle SO, Linden became conductor for the Pacific Northwest Grand Opera Company (1950–55), which brought Bidú Sayão and Regina Resnik to Seattle for La bohème and Carmen. Linden also engaged Glynn Ross, director of the San Francisco summer opera, as stage director. Returning in 1964 as general director of the newly formed Seattle Opera Company, a post that he retained until 1983, Ross gave a complete Ring in 1975, with cycles in both German and English. Premières during his tenure included Carlisle Floyd's Of Mice and Men (1970) and Thomas Pasatieri's Black Widow (1972). His successor Speight Jenkins maintained the tradition of Ring cycles with a new production in 1986, repeated in 1991. Under him productions such as Pelléas et Mélisande in 1993, with Gerard Schwarz conducting, marked a new peak in cooperation between orchestra and opera. The 1995–6 season included La Cenerentola, Elektra and Andrea Chénier. The Seattle Center Opera House (cap. 3100), converted in 1962 from the former Civic Auditorium, was shared until 1998 by the opera and the symphony orchestra.
Vocal instruction was offered at the newly established University of Washington beginning in 1861, and piano in 1862; in 1889 when Washington became a state, Julia Chamberlain, a graduate of New England Conservatory, headed a music faculty teaching the mandolin and the guitar as well as the violin. A school of music was established in 1891. On the eve of the move in 1894 from the city centre to a new campus, music was listed first among three ‘special’ departments in the university catalogue drafted by the registrar, Edmond S. Meaney. For him is named the 1200-seat Meaney Hall for the Performing Arts, the chief university concert venue; in the same building is a 270-seat theatre. The present music building (occupied 1950) houses the Brechemin recital hall (cap. 225) and a library of 60,000 volumes (1996). The department head from 1994 was the pianist Robin McCabe. The department's ethnomusicology programme attracts students from Africa and Asia. William Bolcom and Alan Stout were both pupils of John Verrall (at the university 1948–73). The visiting professor of conducting in 1995–6 was Milton Katims.
The Cornish Institute of the Performing and Visual Arts (previously the Cornish School of Allied Arts) was founded in 1914 by Nellie Centennial Cornish. Teaching music, theatre, broadcasting, dance and the visual arts, it was the acknowledged centre of arts instruction in the north-western USA when in 1938 it hired John Cage. During his two years there Cage began giving recitals using prepared pianos and initiated his association with the school's leading student dancer Merce Cunningham. Cage worked occasionally with the leading University of Washington faculty composer (1941–68), George Frederick McKay (1899–1970), whose pupils included Earl Robinson.
The rock guitarist Jimi Hendrix grew up in Seattle. Kurt Cobain (1967–94) headed the group Nirvana, which made Seattle grunge rock a world phenomenon. Soundgarden (formed in 1984), Alice in Chains (1987), Pearl Jam (1990) and the Presidents of the United States of America (1994) confirmed Seattle as the epicentre of creative rock in the decade of their emergence.
Maxine Cushing Gray, who settled in Seattle in 1946, served as art and music critic for the weekly Argus and then founded and edited the fortnightly Northwest Arts (1975–87). She had earlier powerfully endorsed the Seattle residency (1965–70) of the ballet company gathered by the Seattle native Robert Joffrey (b 1930). Joffrey's ballet Astarte, with rock music credited to Crome Cyrcus, had its première in Seattle and went on to New York, achieving national renown.
The early 1990s saw the flourishing of the Seattle Classical Guitar Society, the Seattle Consortium of Harpers, the Seattle Girls' Choir, the Seattle Women’s Ensemble and the Seattle Youth SO. By the end of the decade the wealth attracted to the area by the aircraft and computer industries had enabled financiers to underwrite notable arts projects. Symphonic music found a new home in the S. Mark Taper Auditorium, rated as ‘one of the ten best in the world’ by acoustician Cyril M. Harris, and smaller-scale performances were accomodated in the Illsley Ball Nordstrom recital room (cap. 541). This wealth elevated the Seattle SO to second in the nation in terms of its private charitable support and close to the first in terms of adventurous programming. Equally adventurous in another direction were the 23 and 24 June 2000 concerts that inaugurated Experience Museum Project Seattle, founded and financed by Microsoft partner Paul Allen. At the Memorial stadium the first concert intergrated among other headliners Metallica, Dr Dre with with Eminem and Snoop Doggy Dogg, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Kid Rock and Filter. The second concert included the more recently emerged Matchbox Twenty, No Doubt, Alanis Morissette, Beck and the Eurythmics. These events further strengthened Seattle's already established reputation as a milieu geared to the musical interests of youth.
GroveA (M.C. Gray)
C.W. Austin and H.S. Scott: The Great Seattle Fire of June 6th 1889 (Tacoma, WA, 1889/R)
H.F. Grant: The Story of Seattle's Early Theatres (Seattle, 1934)
E.G. Anderson: Chief Seattle (Caldwell, ID, 1943)
E. Sheppard and E. Johnson: ‘Forty Years of Symphony in Seattle 1903–1943’, Pacific Northwest Quarterly, xxxv (1944), 19–28
M.K. Rohrer: History of Seattle Stock Companies from their Beginnings to 1934 (Seattle, 1945)
N.C. Cornish: Miss Aunt Nellie: the Autobiography of Nellie C. Cornish, ed. E. van V. Browne and E.N. Beck (Seattle, 1964)
J. Burks: ‘Opera is Alive and Well in Seattle’, ON, xxxiii/13 (1968–9), 14–16
M. Salem: Organizational Survival in the Performing Arts: the Making of Seattle Opera (New York, 1976)
E.H. Mumford: Seattle's Black Victorians, 1852–1901 (Seattle, 1980)
R. Stevenson: John Cage on his 70th Birthday: West Coast Background, Inter-American Music Reviews, v/1 (1982–3), 10–17
R. Downey: ‘Seattle: towards the Ring’, Opera (1985), festival issue, 119–22
D.M. Buerge: ‘The Man we Call Seattle (1786–1866)’, Washingtonians: a Biographical Portrait of the State, ed. D. Brewster and D.M. Buerge (Seattle, 1988), 97–103
H. and T. Lehmann: Out of the Cultural Dustbin: Sentimental Musings on Art and Music in Seattle from 1936 to 1992 (Seattle, 1993)
ROBERT STEVENSON