City in Kentucky, USA. At the time of its settlement on Corn Island (1778) settlers danced to fiddle tunes played by Cato Watts (a slave on George Rogers Clark’s founding expedition). The earliest musical organization was possibly the St Cecilia Society, an orchestra whose repertory, dated 1820, is preserved in the Anderson Music Library of the University of Louisville. Singing societies established by German immigrants in the 1840s, including the Liederkranz society (1848–77) and the Louisville Sozialer Maennerchor (renamed the Social Male Chorus), built such venues as the Weisiger Hall and the Mozart Hall (1851–66), where, among distinguished visiting performers, the Mozart Musical Society's orchestra and chorus performed large choral works. In this hall the Germania Musical Society, an orchestra of 25 members, performed in 1854 just before it disbanded. The Liederkranz gave two seasons of German opera in 1873–4.
The Louisville Philharmonic Society was founded in 1866 by Louis Hast (1823–90); the Louisville Civic SO organized 50 years later by Morris Simon evolved into the Young Men’s Hebrew Association orchestra. The Louisville Orchestra (known as the Louisville Philharmonic Society, 1942–77) was founded in 1937 by the Louisville Civic Arts Association. Robert Whitney, its first conductor, encouraged the mayor, Charles P. Farnsley, to initiate the Louisville Orchestra Commissioning project in 1948 to fund new works. Whitney was succeeded by Jorge Mester (1967), Akira Endo (1980), Lawrence Leighton Smith (1983), Max Bragado-Darman (1995) and Uriel Segal as guest conductor in 1995 and conductor in 1999. Together with the University of Louisville School of Music, the orchestra organized Sound Celebration, an international contemporary music festival, in 1987 and 1992. The Greater Louisville Fund for the Arts (established 1949) supports the orchestra and 12 other organizations, including the Louisville Bach Society (founded in 1964).
The Kentucky Opera Association had its origins in an amateur group linked in the 1940s with the University of Louisville School of Music. The company became professional in 1952, with Moritz von Bomhard as artistic director, and commissioned works including Peggy Glanville-Hicks’s The Transposed Heads (1954), Richard Mohaupt’s Double Trouble (1954) and Rolf Liebermann’s The School for Wives (1955). In 1981 Thomas Smillie succeeded Bomhard, and Deborah S. Sandler assumed the position of general director in 1998. Kentucky Opera, like the Louisville Orchestra and the Louisville Ballet, perform in the Kentucky Center for the Arts (opened in 1983), which has two halls, the Robert S. Whitney Hall (cap. 2400) and the Moritz von Bomhard Theater (cap. 620).
Since 1939, after the founding by Dwight Anderson and Gerhard Herz of the Louisville Chamber Music Society, which regularly brought the Budapest and later the Juillard Quartet to the city, chamber music has flourished. Ensembles include the Kentucky Center Chamber Players (founded in 1983), which also has premièred and/or commissioned new works, Ceruti Players (founded in 1986), and Ars Femina (1987), which has uncovered over 1400 works by 300 women composers. The Speed Art Museum, University of Louisville, Indiana University Southeast and Southern Baptist Seminary also maintain chamber series.
Choral music has been prominent in the musical life of the city. In 1939, Father Joseph Emrich founded the Louisville Chorus. The Louisville Bach Society Chorus and Orchestra, founded in 1964 by Melvin and Margaret Dickinson has been responsible for the local premières of many choral masterworks including several by Bach, Beethoven's Missa solemnis, and masses by Mozart and Bruckner, as well as national premières of works by lesser known composers; it has also commissioned new works. A third choral organization presenting a regular concert season is the Choral Arts Society, founded in 1987.
Music publishing firms and music stores flourished from the 1840s, among them William C. Peters, Henry J. Peters, David P. Faulds, Tripp & Cragg and G.W. Brainard. Macauley’s Theatre, which opened in 1873, was used for performances by visiting opera troupes; it was demolished in 1925. The Speed Music Room served from 1914 to 1952 as a studio and concert hall and a concert series at the J.B. Speed Art Museum continues this tradition.
The University of Louisville School of Music was established in 1932 after the demise of the Louisville Conservatory of Music (founded in 1915). The first dean, Jacques Jolas, was succeeded in 1935 by Dwight Anderson, who helped found the Chamber Music Society (1938) and the Kentucky Opera Association. The school offers the BM and BME degrees, an MA in historical musicology and an MM in history and literature, music education, performance, and theory and composition. The University of Kentucky grants a PhD in musicology with residence at the University of Louisville. In 1977 the Isidore Philipp Archive and Memorial Library was established at the university under the aegis of the American Liszt Society. The Ricasoli Collection comprises 400 manuscripts and editions from the 18th century and the early 19th.
Music degrees are also offered by the School of Church Music at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (founded in 1944). The Louisville Academy of Music (1954) is a preparatory music school. Louisville was one of the first cities in the USA to include music as part of its public school curriculum (1853). A Youth Performing Arts School was completed in 1979. Witold Lutosławski was the first winner of the annual University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition, established in 1984 by the philanthropist H. Charles Grawemeyer.
The Henry Pilcher & Sons organ company was based in Louisville from 1872 until the 1940s. Steiner-Reck, founded in Louisville as the Steiner Organ Company, built the tracker organ in the recital hall at the School of Music, which is among the largest with mechanical action in the USA.
An annual bluegrass music festival initiated by the city in 1977 is the largest event of its kind in the USA.
J.S. Johnston: Memorial History of Louisville from its First Settlement to the Year 1896 (Chicago and New York, 1896)
J.J. Weisert: Mozart Hall 1851–1866 (Louisville, 1962)
P. Hart: ‘Louisville Orchestra’, Orpheus in the New World: the Symphony Orchestra as an American Cultural Institution (New York, 1973), 192
M.G. Money: A History of the Louisville Conservatory of Music and Music at the University of Louisville, 1907–1935 (diss., U. of Louisville, 1976)
C.C. Birkhead: The History of the Orchestra in Louisville (diss., U. of Louisville, 1977)
E. Barret: ‘Louisville, 1853’, Essays on the Music of J.S. Bach and other Divers Subjects, ed. R.L. Weaver (Louisville, 1981), 255
J. Belfy: The Louisville Orchestra New Music Project: an American Experiment in the Patronage of International Contemporary Music (Louisville, 1983) [incl. selected letters of the composers]
MARION KORDA