Overture Magazine - 2015-2016 Season September-October 2015 | Page 12

SYMPHONY

TALES

A NEW BOOK BY
BSO MUSICIAN
MICHAEL LISICKY
CAPTURES 100 YEARS
OF BSO HISTORY

BSO

PIONEERS

Wilmer Wise

First AfricanAmerican
BSO musician,
trumpeter,
1965.

Gustav Strube,
The BSO’s
first conductor,
1916.

Sarah Feldman

One of the first
five female BSO
musicians, violist,

10

O v ertur e

I

By Christianna McCausland

n 1916, 53 musicians gathered as the Baltimore
Symphony Orchestra to play a season that consisted of three concerts. Ticket prices ranged
from 25 cents to one dollar. When it performed
on stage, the Symphony was breaking unprecedented ground, the first U.S. orchestra ever to be
formed using public funds. As a municipal agency,
the early Symphony was very much for the people of
the city, a mission largely unchanged today.
A new history of the BSO, by oboist and nonfiction author Michael Lisicky, sheds new light on the
pioneering history of the orchestra in this, its 100th
year of existence. Though like many things in history,
even the anniversary could be debated. As Lisicky’s
research reveals, there has been contention since the
Symphony’s earliest days over when to mark the
BSO’s founding. Was it in 1914 when then-Mayor
Preston first formed a municipal band that would
grow into the symphony? Or perhaps in 1915 when
the city provided $6,000 to create the country’s firstever city-supported symphony? Or, more complicated
still, does one need to hark back to the 1890s when
the precursor of the BSO was in operation?
It’s an important point for Lisicky who, through his
history books about the nation’s bygone department
stores, has become a stickler for accuracy. Since 1916 is
widely acknowledged as the first season, that is where
Lisicky’s story begins. Shortly after its creation, the
Symphony gained its first conductor, Gustav Strube,
the head of the harmony department at Peabody. There
was plenty of competition for concert-goers at this time;
the Philadelphia, New York and Boston orchestras all
took the train down to perform for the upper crust at
the Lyric, Lisicky explains.
“The higher end people in town didn’t go to
the BSO,” he states. “At a time before television,
the BSO was entertainment for the masses. They
did mostly traveling concerts and occasionally
rented space in the Lyric.”
The book follows the chronology of the Symphony
by decade. The BSO’s early concerts in the ’20s were
often patriotic in theme, as the nation after World
War I demanded America develop its own culture

| WWW. BSOMUSIC .ORG

(Clockwise from right):
BSO Concert Series print
during Gustav Strube’s tenure;
Joseph Meyerhoff; BSO in
1918; Print highlighting thenfuture music director Sergiu
Comissiona; Marvin Hamlisch
and the BSO SuperPops.

rather than relying on Europe for its arts identity.
During this decade it continued to show its pioneering spunk when the BSO became the first symphony
to perform children’s concerts (with separate performances for caucasian and African-American schools).
The 1930s were marked by a revolving door of music
directors as the symphony tried to find its feet, and by
the addition of one of the first five female musicians,
a violist named Sarah Feldman.
“By the 1930s the community knew the quality [of
the Symphony] needed to be better and as a fixed line
item in the city budget; the Symphony was too hamstrung to grow,” says Lisicky. In 1942, the municipal
symphony disbanded and the BSO reorganized as
a private institution under music director Reginald
Stewart, who led it for the next decade. Lisicky says
Stewart is a bit of an unsung hero, noting that he was
the conductor who took the BSO to Carnegie Hall for
the first time and kept performances going through
the war years when music was important for home
front morale.
In 1959, Peter Herman Adler became conductor,
and Lisicky points out that his greatest contribution
The BSO on a return flight from Tallahassee, Florida in 1964.