American city. It is the third-largest city in the USA, and an important musical centre.
2. Orchestras, choirs and festivals.
4. Music schools and libraries.
5. Music publishers and instrument makers.
6. Composers and writers on music.
ANNETTE FERN/JOHN VON RHEIN (1, 2, 4–6, 8; 2 with SARA VELEZ, 4 with BRUCE CARR), ROBERT C. MARSH (with ANNETTE FERN)/R (3), WILLIAM KENNEY (7), JOHN VON RHEIN (bibliography)
Chicago was established in the late 18th century as a trading post near the southern end of Lake Michigan, and in 1803 Fort Dearborn was built there. The village was incorporated in 1833 and received its city charter in 1837. Much of the city was destroyed by fire in 1871, but it was rebuilt and soon became a centre for trade and transport.
Chicago's concert activity until about 1880 was provided chiefly by touring artists and amateur music societies. The impresario P.T. Barnum brought musical attractions to Chicago as early as 1840. Later important touring artists included Adelina Patti, who made her first Chicago appearance in April 1853 with the violinist Ole Bull, and the pianist L.M. Gottschalk, who performed there several times in the 1860s. Early concert halls included Rice's Theatre and McVicker's Theatre; the first auditorium designed for concerts was Tremont Music Hall, which opened in 1850 in the Tremont Hotel. As bigger theatres were built, opera companies, orchestras and concert artists made regular visits to the city.
There were music schools and private music teachers in Chicago as early as 1835, and amateur performing groups soon followed. The Old Settlers' Harmonic Society (1835–6, sometimes called the Chicago Harmonic Society) was the first formal musical organization in the city. Other societies were the Chicago Choral Union (1846), the Mozart Society (1849), the Musical Union (1858–66), the Oratorio Society (1868–71) and the visiting Germania Musical Society. The Apollo Musical Club, still active (as the Apollo Chorus of Chicago) in the 1990s, was organized as a male chorus by Silas G. Pratt and George P. Upton in 1872; women formed an occasional auxiliary chorus from 1874 and were admitted permanently in 1885.
Chicago's first orchestra, the Philharmonic Society, performed from 1850 to 1868, conducted first by Julius Dyhrenfurth and later by Hans Balatka. Another orchestra performed under Henry Ahner from 1856 to 1858. The Chicago Orchestra was formed in 1891, with Ferdinand W. Peck as president. Theodore Thomas, who with his orchestra had visited Chicago for several seasons and was to be musical director of the World's Columbian Exposition (1893), was appointed its first conductor. The orchestra performed in the Auditorium Theatre, and moved in 1904 to the new 2566-seat Orchestra Hall (see illustration). Thomas died in 1905; from 1906 it was called the Theodore Thomas Orchestra, and in 1912 it was renamed the Chicago SO. Thomas's successors were his assistant, Frederick Stock (1905–42), Désiré Defauw (1943–7), Artur Rodziński (1947–8), Rafael Kubelík (1950–53), Fritz Reiner (1953–63), Jean Martinon (1963–9), Georg Solti (1969–91) and Daniel Barenboim (from 1991). Significant premières given by the orchestra include Prokofiev's Third Piano Concerto (1921), Stravinsky's Symphony in C (1940), Kodály's Concerto for Orchestra (1941), Roy Harris's Seventh Symphony (1952), Martinon's Fourth Symphony, Altitudes (1965), Henze's Heliogabalus Imperator (1972), Tippett's Fourth Symphony (1977), Lutosławski's Third Symphony (1983), Corigliano's First Symphony (1989), Takemitsu's Visions (1989), Carter's Partita (1994) and Birtwistle's Exody (1998). Resident composers since the 1980s have been John Corigliano, Shulamit Ran and Augusta Read Thomas. The orchestra achieved international renown through its recordings, particularly under Reiner and Solti, and overseas tours beginning in 1971. The Chicago Symphony Chorus, founded in 1957 by Margaret Hillis, has made tours and recordings both independently and with the orchestra.
The Civic Music Association of Chicago was founded in 1913 to encourage the study of music; in 1919 it helped Stock organize the Civic Orchestra of Chicago for the training of young instrumentalists. The Chicago Children's Choir was established in 1956. Music of the Baroque, a professional chorus and orchestra, was founded in 1971 to perform the oratorio repertory. In addition, a number of early music groups have been based in Chicago, including the chorus His Majestie's Clerkes, the Chicago Baroque Ensemble and the Newberry Consort.
Two major annual summer festivals have been held in Chicago. From 1906 Ravinia Park, in the northern suburb of Highland Park, has held a summer season of music, dance and theatre which was suspended only during the 1930s depression. Its music directors have included Seiji Ozawa (1964–8), István Kertész (1970–72), James Levine (1973–93) and Christoph Eschenbach (from 1995). In July 1936 the Chicago SO played for the first time at the Ravinia Festival, which then became its regular summer home. A municipally sponsored summer orchestra series has been held since 1934 in a bandshell originally erected by the Works Progress Administration in Grant Park, on the lake shore near the centre of the city. Originally Grant Park Concerts, the series was renamed the Grant Park Music Festival in 1995.
Chicago's first opera performance was of Bellini's La sonnambula in 1850. A second season was held in 1853, and from 1858 opera was a regular part of the music calendar. By 1875 more than 60 operas had been heard in the city, many of them recent works. Crosby's Opera House opened in 1865 with a stage suitable for full-scale grand opera; it was destroyed in the 1871 fire but quickly rebuilt. For the next decade light opera, operetta and musical comedy dominated the city's stages, and grand opera was not revived until the early 1880s. During the 1883–4 season the rival New York companies of Henry Abbey and James Henry Mapleson visited Chicago. In 1889 the Metropolitan Opera of New York performed Wagner's complete Ring cycle in the new 4000-seat Auditorium Theatre, which was to be the city's principal venue for opera for the next four decades.
In 1910 Chicago's first resident opera company, the Chicago Grand Opera Company, was formed with Harold McCormick, a financier, as president and Cleofonte Campanini as musical director. During its first season Mary Garden, who was to be a central figure in Chicago opera for 21 years, performed in Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande, Charpentier's Louise and Richard Strauss's Salome. A highlight of the Garden years was the première of Prokofiev's The Love for Three Oranges in 1921 during her one season as general director of the company.
Between 1910 and 1946 there were some seven opera companies in the Chicago area (several of them successive names for the same, reorganized company). All shared artists with the Metropolitan and leading European theatres, all presented a diverse repertory and all ceased operation because of financial difficulties. From 1912 to 1931 a summer season of opera was presented at Ravinia Park. In 1929 most opera performances moved to the new 3500-seat Civic Opera House.
The Lyric Theatre of Chicago, with Carol Fox as general manager, presented its first three-week season there in November 1954, during which Maria Callas made her American début in Bellini's Norma. In 1956 the company was renamed Lyric Opera of Chicago. It was essentially an Italian company (often called ‘La Scala West’), with nearly 70% of its repertory Italian. Fox and Ardis Krainik, who succeeded her in 1981, looked largely to Europe for new talent. Later, American singers and conductors made more frequent appearances, and the scope of the company's repertory widened; notable works commissioned by Lyric Opera include Penderecki's Paradise Lost (1978), Bolcom's McTeague (1992), Anthony and Thulani Davis's Amistad (1997) and Bolcom's A View from the Bridge (1999). Resident composers since the 1980s have included Bright Sheng, Bruce Saylor, Shulamit Ran and Michael John La Chiusa. Opera is also presented by numerous smaller groups, notably the Chicago Opera Theatre, founded in 1974, which performs opera in English with an emphasis on works best suited to a smaller theatre.
From the turn of the century to the outbreak of World War I Chicago was also a centre for musical comedy. Among the composers who wrote for this regional market were Reginald De Koven, whose operetta Robin Hood (1890) and opera Rip Van Winkle (1920) were first heard there; Gustav Luders (King Dodo, 1901; The Sho-Gun, 1904); Raymond Hubbell (Chow-Chow, 1902, later produced on Broadway as The Runaways); Ben Jerome (Louisiana Lou, 1911, a vehicle for Sophie Tucker; The Girl at the Gate, 1912); and the prolific Joseph E. Howard who between 1904 and 1915 wrote some 17 shows for the LaSalle Theatre. Later, musical comedy in Chicago was provided chiefly by touring companies of New York productions or revivals produced locally. An exception was the long-running Broadway musical Grease (New York opening, 1972), originally a successful Chicago production, greatly altered for New York.
Chicago's first important music conservatory was the Chicago Academy of Music, founded in 1867 by Florenz Ziegfeld; it later became the Chicago Musical College and then part of Roosevelt University. Ziegfeld was its president until 1916; among his successors were Felix Borowski (1916–25) and Rudolph Ganz (1933–54). Other conservatories were established by Hans Balatka (1879), John R. Hattstaedt (1886) and William H. Sherwood (1897). The University of Chicago has had outstanding courses in Renaissance music studies, composition and ethnomusicology; it also sponsors a professional performing group, the Contemporary Chamber Players. Northwestern University, in the northern suburb of Evanston, began to offer music instruction in 1873, and a school of music was established in 1895. Its library has a special collection of materials relating to Cage, part of the Moldenhauer Archive of 20th-century manuscripts, and extensive memorabilia, scores and correspondence of Fritz Reiner.
The Newberry Library has a rich collection of Renaissance and American music sources, and the music library of the University of Chicago has an important music history collection. The Chicago Historical Society contains documents of the city's musical history as does the Chicago Public Library. The Field Museum of Natural History has an important collection of musical instruments. Three newer repositories of source material for Chicago's musical history are the Chicago Jazz Archive at the University of Chicago, the Chicago Blues Archive at the Chicago Public Library and the Center for Black Music Research at Columbia College. The sheet music collection of Walter N.H. Harding, a valuable source of research material particularly for British and American popular song, went to the Bodleian Library, Oxford, in 1973 after its owner's death.
Chicago has had many publishers of school music books, gospel music and popular sheet music. The most important early firm was Root & Cady (1858–72); others included S.C. Griggs & Co. (1848–71), the first music publisher in Chicago; Joseph Cockcroft, the first in Chicago to print music from movable type (1853–4); Higgins Brothers, later H.M. Higgins Co. (1855–67), publishers of the popular songs of H.P. Danks and J.P. Webster; Clayton F. Summy, a leading publisher of educational music from 1888 to 1932; and the firm of Will Rossiter, founded in 1891 and the city's leading sheet music publisher in the early years of the century. After 1920 New York's domination of popular music publishing forced many Chicago firms to move east or to go out of business. The University of Chicago Press has published Monuments of Renaissance Music, a series of critical editions of 15th- and 16th-century music, and, in association with Ricordi in Milan, the critical edition of the works of Verdi.
Musical instrument manufacture, particularly of pianos and organs, was an important industry in Chicago from the mid-19th century. The W.W. Kimball Company was founded as a distributor in 1875 but began manufacturing organs in 1880 and pianos in 1887. Lyon & Healy, established as a music shop in 1864, began making musical instruments in 1885; later the firm was an innovatory manufacturer of harps. Organ builders have included Story & Clark, Wilcox & White, and Estey.
Popular songwriters who were active in Chicago in the mid-19th century include Henry Clay Work, who began as a music printer and later composed Civil War marching songs and parlour ballads; George F. Root, a partner in the firm of Root & Cady, also remembered for his patriotic songs of the Civil War; and Carrie Jacobs-Bond, also a publisher but better known for her sentimental ballads. The organist and composer Dudley Buck lived and worked in Chicago from 1869 to 1871, and P.P. Bliss, a composer of evangelist and gospel music, worked there from about 1864 until his death in 1876. Joseph E. Howard, in addition to his musical comedy scores, wrote popular songs in the ragtime style.
20th-century composers who have been associated with Chicago include John Alden Carpenter, who enjoyed critical acclaim during the 1920s while also pursuing a successful business career, and Leo Sowerby, who taught at John R. Hattstaedt's American Conservatory from 1925 to 1962 and for most of that time was choirmaster at the Episcopal Cathedral of St James. Ralph Shapey, Easley Blackwood and Shulamit Ran have all been members of the faculty of the University of Chicago, and Alan B. Stout joined that of Northwestern University in 1963. Other Chicago composers who achieved distinction in the latter part of the century include John Austin, John C. Eaton, George Flynn and Howard Sandroff.
Important among the city's writers on music are George P. Upton, who in 1863 became the first music critic on the Chicago Tribune and was a writer on opera and on individual composers; W.S.B. Mathews (1837–1912), author of books on music education and founding editor of the journal Music (1892–1902); and the composer and educator Felix Borowski (1872–1956), music editor of the Chicago Sun and programme book annotator for the Chicago SO.
Throughout the 20th century Chicago played a central role in the evolution of jazz and blues. There are several reasons for this. First, the city's industrial might attracted a massive influx of young workers from around the world during the first two-thirds of the century. Many of these people arrived at the time of the so-called Great Migration of black Americans from the southern states. Their increased numbers created a new demand for cabarets, cafés, restaurants, dance halls, amusement parks and cinemas, particularly on the South Side, while also stimulating the market for racially orientated music there and in the city's other entertainment districts. Mayor William Hale Thompson created a permissive city environment for the flouting of Prohibition as well as the enjoyment of new musical entertainment. The concentration over several generations of so many black Americans in the South Side ghetto generated an intense and culturally distinctive creative environment for both jazz and blues.
Ragtime pianists, important precursors of jazz, gravitated to the World's Colombian Exposition in 1893 where they set in motion the grand procession of 20th-century popular music styles associated with the city. Since New York's Tin Pan Alley dominated the music publishing business, Chicago tended more to attract performance artists rather than professional songwriters, and specialized in musicians who excelled at nightclub and dance hall work. New York swiftly took national control of the recording, broadcasting and booking of popular music as well, so that by comparison Chicago produced less heavily mediated music, often thought, for that reason, to be more authentic. As early as 1906, such influential performers as the pianists Tony Jackson and Jelly Roll Morton experimented with new improvisational possibilities that did much to transform ragtime into jazz. So, too, Chicagoans listened to cornettist bandleaders Freddie Keppard, Manuel Perez and, especially, King Oliver well before the 1920s. While most of the earliest Chicago pioneers were black Americans, a white group calling itself Stein's Dixie Jass Band performed at Schiller Caf in 1916. Several members of this band subsequently reorganized as the Original Dixieland Jazz Band and in 1917 played on the first jazz records ever made.
Chicago's attraction proved especially powerful for musicians from New Orleans and the Mississippi Delta. Bountiful club work and, beginning in 1923, the possibility of making records proved irresistible. From 1917 to 1923, groups like King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band, which included such powerful instrumentalists as the cornettist Louis Armstrong, the clarinettist Johnny Dodds and the drummer Baby Dodds, travelled between Chicago and Richmond, Indiana, to record for the Gennett label. But new popular labels such as Okeh, Paramount and Vocalion soon organized active recording programmes in Chicago. Louis Armstrong with his Hot Five and his Hot Seven recorded for Okeh in Chicago, as did the pianist Earl Hines and the clarinettist Jimmie Noone. The jazz and blues speciality labels worked the black American race market, and Chicago soon developed the reputation of being the nation's centre for authentic blues and jazz recording of emigrant Southern musicians.
The excitement of the city's nightlife, combined with an increased awareness of New Orleans jazz and the vaudeville blues of Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, led to the formation of many white jazz groups. Among the most influential in the 1920s were the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, who played a 17-month engagement at Friar's Inn nightclub. A variety of recording groups which often included the banjo player and tenor guitarist Eddie Condon, the cornettist Jimmy McPartland, the clarinettist Frank Teschemacher, the tenor saxophonist Bud Freeman, the pianist Joe Sullivan and the drummer Dave Tough, soon came to be known as the ‘Chicagoans’ and their music as Chicago Jazz, retrospective labels used by New York recording executives. Some of these youngsters hailed from Austin High School in Chicago’s west end and sometimes referred to themselves as the Austin High Gang. Their ties to that school were not close, however, and the city itself rather than the suburbs remained the focus of jazz activity. Several young white ‘Chicagoans’ hailed from the city. The clarinettist and orchestra leader Benny Goodman went on to become the King of Swing in the 1930s and 40s, most often with drummer Gene Krupa spurring him on. The pianist Art Hodes built a long and successful career as a blues-influenced piano stylist and the cornettist Muggsy Spanier made many important records. Many other white jazz musicians often associated with Chicago, such as Eddie Condon, Wild Bill Davison and Bix Beiderbecke, migrated in and out of the city from various locations in the Midwest.
Most of the more professionally ambitious members of the 1920s jazz scene in Chicago left for New York City late in the decade. The media and the music business increasingly centralized into national organizations run from the eastern city, a trend that the Depression accelerated. Such influential musicians as Jimmie Noone, the Dodds brothers, Art Hodes and Earl Hines continued to live and perform in Chicago, however.
The national media transformed jazz into Big Band Swing, beginning in the mid-1930s, but the blues remained a more ethnic, speciality taste that was relatively less commercialized, less nationalized, and therefore a more authentic musical style closely associated with Chicago's South Side. The Paramount, Vocalion and Bluebird labels recorded many of the leading blues singers in their Chicago studios, including Blind Lemon Jefferson from Texas, Big Bill Broonzy and Sonny Boy Williamson from Mississippi, Blind Blake from Florida and Thomas A. Dorsey and Tampa Red, both of whom had emigrated from Georgia. Such record producers as J. Mayo Williams, Lester Melrose and the Chess brothers shaped performances that created urban musical memories of the rural south. A Chicago school of emigrant blues pianists that included Cripple Clarence Lofton, Jimmy Yancey, Meade ‘Lux’ Lewis, Albert Ammons and Pine Top Smith performed at South Side rent parties and led a national craze for boogie-woogie piano stylings during the Depression.
During World War II a new and more urbanized blues style emerged in Chicago through the work of such performers as Willie Dixon, Elmore James, Little Walter, Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Otis Spann, Otis Rush, Memphis Minnie, Jimmy Reed, Sonny Boy Williamson and Bo Diddley. The 1920s sound of the solitary male vocalist singing in a Southern rural manner while accompanying himself on the guitar melded with the jazz rhythm section, electrified instruments and a more commercial pronunciation of the lyrics. As recorded by the Chess label in Chicago, this style, variously termed urban blues, city blues and northern blues, strongly influenced Berry Gordy, the first African American owner of a successful record company, who founded Tamla Records in Detroit in 1959 which became Motown two years later. Berry further extended blues crossovers into popular song formulae.
The post-World War II years on Chicago's South Side brought a revolution in jazz. In the 1950s the South Side avant-garde pianist/bandleader Sun Ra organized a jazz collective to promote performances and recordings of his Solar Arkestra. In 1961, responding to the decline of Chicago's jazz clubs, the history of racial exploitation in the music business and heightened interest in African-inspired cultural nationalism, a group of young, innovative hard bop and free jazz musicians further developed this idea of a musician-operated performance organization by forming the Experimental Band. Reorganizing themselves into the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, such musicians as Anthony Braxton, Malachi Favors, Joseph Jarman, Roscoe Mitchell, Leroy Jenkins, Don Moye and many others challenged the musical traditions and political parameters of jazz. The AACM advocated free, atonal music arranged into multi-sectional units and minimized the role of the individual soloist. The AACM's flagship ensemble the Art Ensemble of Chicago further defied the isolation of jazz from other art forms in its blends of experimental music with costumes, make-up, dance, pantomime, comedy, dialogue and playlets. These musicians performed regularly across the USA and in Europe throughout the 1980s.
Today one can find venues in Chicago for many different jazz styles. The city continues to attract emigrants and tourists for whom jazz remains a vital expression of urban excitement and cultural diversity. From the turn of the 20th century to the present, Chicago musicians have pioneered in both the commercial promotion of jazz and in musical rebellions against the highly unequal distribution of fame in the media.
The population of Chicago is ethnically and racially diverse, and most groups strive to retain their own musical traditions. Black musicians contributed significantly to the development of jazz and blues in Chicago (see §7). The gospel music tradition in the city's black churches has also produced music and musicians of more than local importance, among whom the best known was Mahalia Jackson. The tradition of street evangelists, in which blind musicians were important, was curtailed by vagrancy laws after World War II but continued to the 1960s. Chicago has served since the beginning of the 20th century as a centre for recording, publishing, broadcasting and distributing Polish music, as well as being the home of numerous well-known performers and performing groups. Irish music has a long tradition in Chicago; much of it was gathered by Francis O'Neill (b 1849), compiler of Music of Ireland (1903) and other collections of traditional Irish tunes, who settled in Chicago in 1871. Germans were influential in the early development of mainstream musical institutions in Chicago, and have also been enthusiastic supporters of amateur choral singing.
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