Chicago's Musical Scenes

In February 1922, the Chicago Civic Opera Association's "Friends of Opera" approached the leadership of the city's eminent Fortnightly Club for a financial contribution, to which the club's board replied: "though interested, the Fortnightly as a Society was unable to act in the matter." Indeed, the Fortnightly's policy was to support the educational and cultural wellness of its wealthy clubwomen with lectures, recitals, and occasional operatic concerts from members of the Civic Opera itself, and not to directly "solicit contributions for charitable or civic causes." Nevertheless, throughout the 1910s and 1920s, its individual members routinely contributed organizing efforts and vast sums of money to the often-unstable opera company via this selfsame "Friends of Opera" organization. Philanthropic clubwomen such as heiress Edith Rockefeller McCormick, composer Eleanor Everest Freer, and socialite Grace Murray Meeker utilized publicly recognized leadership positions within the organization to further their interests and, in doing so, achieved forms of social and financial agency within the larger social web of Chicago.
Using contemporaneous press coverage, extant boxholder and subscriber records, and the Fortnightly Club's institutional documents, this paper assesses the ways in which some of Chicago's wealthiest women worked to maintain a permanent operatic institution in their city. Often dominated by narratives of male impresarios, financiers, and governing boards, American operatic histories fail to adequately highlight the density of female civic engagement with operatic life and the financial processes associated with it, from private donations and benefits to public advocacy and promotion. This research contextualizes opera as a public genre that was deeply ingrained in the Chicago's social consciousness and reconsiders the ways in which women's organizations maintained social influence over prominent cultural institutions. To be sure, with season deficits of upwards of five hundred thousand dollars, the Chicago Civic Opera Association had to rely on the work of its Fortnightly benefactors for continued existence, and the operatic advocacy of these elite clubwomen makes an important case study of the significant role of women's clubs in American opera production and promotion writ large.

On December 6, 1942, the German-American Anti-Axis League held a rally at Chicago's St. Michael's Catholic High School in an effort to formally decry Nazism among German-Americans and declare their fealty to the United States. Three musical groups performed: the Anti-Axis Singers, the St. Michael's High School Band, and the Veterans of Foreign War Post 3582's Drum & Bugle Corps. Local newspapers like the _Northtown Economist_ commended the band and drum & bugle corps for providing a patriotic and inspiring backdrop for the rally. Although this was the first large-scale rally of its type, it was but the latest instance wherein bands aided in legitimizing a political movement and helped to garner support from Chicago's German-American community since Adolf Hitler had come into power. On the opposite end of the political spectrum, the Chicago's chapter of the German American Bund, an American Nazi organization, maintained a marching band. Perhaps most notably, the German American Bund Band donned their Sturmabteilung [Stormtrooper] uniforms for a performance during Chicago's 1937 German Day Celebrations at Soldier Field. Despite the frequency with which bands have performed at political events within Chicago's German-American community, scholars have yet to chronicle the activities of these ensembles, much less explore how they could bridge, or create, political and cultural divides. 


In this paper, I examine how the bands and drum & bugle corps of two disparate movements served as cultural brokers (Geertz 1960) whose prevalence in both German and American cultures allowed them to appropriate sonic space in a familiar way and draw immediate attention to their group's messages. Applying theories of sonic mediation (Revill 2015) and cultural brokerage to the archival materials I obtained from the United States National Archives, as well as eight Chicago libraries, archives, German cultural associations, and churches, I reveal how Chicagoans were embroiled in a sonic battle over German-American's political allegiances. I ultimately call for further investigation into how amateur bands and drum & bugle corps have shaped sonic, social, and political landscapes during moments of intra- and intergroup conflict.  

The history of modern music in America is often told from the perspective of New York City. Carol J. Oja's monograph _Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920s_ (2000), for instance, unpacks the network of composers and ideologies at the heart of the city's budding modern music scene. Similarly, dance scholars rarely look beyond New York, the country's undisputed dance capital, when considering American ballet. Yet Chicago, a metropolis better recognized for its bootlegging gangsters, Union Stockyards, and soulless skyscrapers, experienced a burst of modern music-making during the jazz age – and it came by way of ballet.


This paper examines the Chicago Allied Arts, a ballet organization active from 1924 to 1927, as a nexus for modern music. Unlike New York's composer-driven modern music societies, the Chicago company was directed by a dancer, the Russian émigré Adolph Bolm, who asserted that America's musical enlightenment was best served through dance. Their intermedial productions offered an eclectic variety of contemporary music mediated by choreography, pantomime, and _mise en scène_. I highlight three productions: _The Flapper and the Quarterback_, set to a jazzy score by local composer Clarence Loomis; a semi-staged version of Arnold Schoenberg's melodrama _Pierrot lunaire_; and a ballet parody for anthropomorphic instruments called _Tragedy of the Cello_ by Polish composer Alexandre Tansman. Despite the diverse musical and choreographic styles represented by these works, they share the underlying principles of institutional cooperation, internationalism, and championing Chicago composers over their east-coast counterparts.


I also explicate how the Chicago Allied Arts found its unlikely home in the Midwest. Its organizers, which included local businessman-composer John Alden Carpenter, employed Chicago's infamous booster rhetoric to inspire local cultural philanthropists to invest in the "cultural progress" of their so-called second city. Moreover, influenced by Progressive-era ideals, the enterprise was conceived in the image of a civic institution; an aspiration, I argue, it failed to fulfill. Nevertheless, the Chicago Allied Arts' short but impactful existence ultimately recalibrates our understanding of the locales of musical modernism, giving ballet and its actors agency in the shaping of a city's musical landscape.