Civic Orchestra History

The Foundation of the Civic Orchestra of Chicago

by Phillip Huscher

It began over a hundred years ago, with twelve double-spaced typewritten pages from Frederick Stock, the second music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, about the pressing need for a new direction in American orchestras. “Times have changed,” he wrote, meaning that the musical world was a different place after the end of World War I, “and we must change our methods with them.” What Stock outlined was nothing less than revolutionary — the founding of a new American school of orchestral musicians, “the first of its kind to be organized on the Western continent,” as he wrote, without overstatement.

When the new Civic Music Student Orchestra, as it was called at the time, was announced in mid-December 1919, the Chicago Tribune ran an editorial entitled “For American Musicians.” With the war, it said, America discovered it was dependent on Germany not only for drugs and dyes, but also for orchestral players. “We had been filling our orchestras with Germans and Austrians and neglecting the development of American talent.” Now the future looked very different. “The new orchestra,” the Tribune continued, “will be a training school from which every American community that has reached the orchestra stage of development can draw its players.” That first year, five hundred men and women applied for a place in the orchestra; eighty-six were accepted.

From the first rehearsal, on January 29, 1920, and in rehearsals held four times each week over the next two months, the original Civic Orchestra began to lay the groundwork for a different kind of symphony orchestra in the United States. The morning after the first rehearsal, the Tribune printed a photograph of Stock surrounded by six of his young new players, three of them women — a bracing and welcome sight at a time when the Chicago Symphony was made up entirely of men. The future was already looking brighter.

“Orchestra Hall has not held so many smiles in a long, long time,” W.L. Hubbard wrote in the Tribune after the Civic Orchestra’s opening concert on March 29. Following the performance of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony, the biggest work on the program, John Wessling, the concertmaster, presented Stock with a baton, in appreciation for what they had accomplished together. With his new baton, Stock concluded the concert with Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance March. Afterward, the Tribune reported, the capacity audience, sharing the musicians’ happiness but also sensing the importance of the occasion, rose and “cheered the young players and their director, Frederick Stock, to the echo.”

From the beginning — and to a certain degree, to this day — the Civic Orchestra has suffered from certain misapprehensions. “Many people believe it to be a student’s orchestra, which it is not at all,” the Tribune critic Edward Moore wrote in 1921. “Instead of being a means of teaching young people how to play, it is a means for teaching young artists how to play together,” he said, echoing Stock’s expressed intent to develop orchestral players, not just musicians. It was an orchestra, in other words, about the building of orchestras. “It is the opening of the door to the utilization of the abundance of splendid material we possess in our young musicians — a material which until now has been left virtually untouched and wasted,” he said. But the Civic was also already an impressive orchestra in its own right.

Within the first two years — giving concerts in Orchestra Hall and other performances scattered around the city — the Civic Orchestra was doing precisely what it set out to do. After six months, four of its members were graduated into the symphony orchestras of Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Cleveland and into the Chicago Symphony itself, as Wessling moved into the violin section of Chicago’s big orchestra. The second season sent three members off, all of them to the Cleveland Orchestra. Today, hundreds of former Civic Orchestra members have taken positions in orchestras all over the country — in Nashville and Kansas City, San Francisco and Tulsa, Des Moines and Honolulu, at the Metropolitan Opera and the Houston Ballet and, closer to home, at Lyric Opera of Chicago and the Grant Park Orchestra. And over the past century, 160 Civic players have become members of the Chicago Symphony, winning spots in every section of the orchestra.

Over a century after Stock’s revolution began, and you will doubtless see many musicians who will end up in major American orchestras around the country. Then look again and listen, and what you will see — and hear — is an orchestra that can afford to be judged “only by the most uncompromising critical yardstick,” as one critic predicted nearly a century ago. That is the true measure of its success and the mark of Stock’s accomplishment — the creation of an orchestra that was in fact “the first of its kind,” as he claimed over one hundred years ago, and remains one-of-a-kind to this day.

Phillip Huscher is the scholar-in-residence and program annotator for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

Adapted from an essay originally published for the Civic Orchestra of Chicago’s centennial celebration on March 1, 2020