Conference Agenda

In 1863, the 22-year-old Florenz Ziegfeld left the Leipzig Conservatory to teach piano in Chicago. Seeing opportunity in the burgeoning metropolis, he founded the Chicago Musical College (CMC) on Leipzig’s model. CMC grew rapidly, soon enrolling more than a thousand students annually. Today, it is the nation’s fourth oldest conservatory in continuous operation, now as the Chicago College of Performing Arts at Roosevelt University. Yet despite its longevity and impact, CMC has received little scholarly attention. This paper investigates CMC’s initial sixty years using primary sources housed in the Newberry Library’s Rudolph Ganz Papers and Roosevelt University’s archives. I examine these sources in terms of the methodological framework developed in Liesl Olson’s Chicago Renaissance: The Midwest and Modernism.
Ziegfeld had quickly established himself in Chicago through concertizing, publishing his piano and vocal compositions, operating a music store, and opening CMC. Drawing on contemporary accounts, I assess the school’s role in Chicago’s meteoric expansion after the devastating 1871 Fire. The conservatory benefitted from the 1893 Columbian Exposition, a close relationship with the new Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and an influx of modernists like the pianist, composer, and conductor Rudolph Ganz, who Ziegfeld recruited in 1900. Analysis of CMC’s detailed annual Commencement Programmes and College Catalogues from the 1880s through the 1920s makes it possible to chart the school’s growth in terms of faculty, graduates, areas of study, musical goals, and social mission.
My research indicates that CMC pioneered married women’s access to higher education in the late 19th century and African Americans’ access during the early 20th-century Great Migration. In addition, the activities of Danish socialist Augusta Pio exemplify how immigrant communities traversed the distance between Chicago’s industrial neighborhoods and downtown cultural institutions, a pattern theorized by Derek Valliant in Sounds of Reform. The city’s first major Black-owned newspaper, the Chicago Defender, began featuring CMC students in 1911. Graduates would soon include Antoinette Garnes, Florence Cole Talbert, Nora Holt (co-founder of NANM), and (later) Florence Price. CMC’s cultivation of performance, pedagogy, and composition across gendered, racial, and economic lines opens new vistas on musical modernism, Chicago-style.

Chicago's Bloodshot Records’ first release, For a Life of Sin: A Compilation of Insurgent Chicago Country (1994), featured local bands performing various styles of country music, and the record label’s co-founders Rob Miller and Nan Warshaw insisted that Bloodshot would not have existed in any other city. Further, they claimed that Bloodshot owed much of its success to various attributes of the city, such as an established infrastructure, collaboration among musicians, and supportive musical communities.

A "Chicago sound" was recognizable in the punk and indie rock scenes in the 1990s, and was attributed to musician and engineer Steve Albini (Faris, 2009). The Chicago sound is both discursive and sonic, characterized by a workingman persona, unconventional song structures, an emphasis on rhythm, and lo-fi recording practices. Although Albini made his name with alternative and indie rock bands, such as Nirvana and his own bands Big Black and Shellac, he recorded traditional country tracks with Robbie Fulks, and one of these appeared on Bloodshot's first album. In 1996, Albini produced Fulks' first full-length Bloodshot album, Country Love Songs.

This paper considers constructions of identity within musical institutions in light of Miller and Warshaw’s claims of Chicago exceptionalism by considering Bloodshot Records vis-à-vis the "Chicago sound." Bloodshot identified discursively with Albini and his musical practices, yet the sonic connections are less clear. An analysis of Fulks and Albini’s collaborations reveals traces of the Chicago sound, but I argue that genre conventions and the record label's musical persona take priority in interpreting these recordings in the context of 1990s alt.country.

By the time the first wave of the Great Migration lulled in the 1930s, over 80% of Chicago’s residents were transplants from other states. This unprecedented shift in the city’s demographics affected every industry differently, but widely changed the ways musicians in particular related to one another. My paper, “Gigging in the Great Migration: How Chicago Musicians Built New Careers on the South Side, 1940-1950” demands that an analysis of Chicago’s musical nightlife during this period places social networks at the center. Whether the connections were more concrete through family or industry, or more abstract like ties to the same southern city, networks drove the south side’s entertainment industry for first half of the twentieth century. While it may seem obvious to consider the entertainment business as an intricate network of connected actors, the renown of specific Chicago musicians, particularly within the blues and jazz scenes, often outshines the ways the everyman moved throughout the city’s music scene. An analysis like this not only shines a light on how the era’s most famous musicians circulated through the city, but additionally attempts to give a voice to unrecognized actors of Chicago music history.

“Gigging in the Great Migration” specifically thinks about the ways musicians built, maintained, and reorganized professional networks in Chicago’s nightclubs. This paper will focus on some of the most well-known clubs of the 1940s — including the Club DeLisa and the Rhumboogie Café ­— to highlight how music remained lucrative during a period of turbulence, change, and constant turnover. Who did musicians rely on to find work? How did genre contribute to the success or failure of certain venues? How did the city’s Black newspaper, the Chicago Defender, reinforce industry expectations and standards? This paper will use methods such as digital mapping, archival newspaper research, and musician interviews to encourage lines of inquiry that deemphasize genre in favor of relational understandings of Chicago.