This paper explores the earliest attempts to create a professional orchestra in Chicago. It proposes a system of six organizational types distilled from these early efforts to suggest both that today's non-profit orchestras are built from...
moreThis paper explores the earliest attempts to create a professional orchestra in Chicago. It proposes a system of six organizational types distilled from these early efforts to suggest both that today's non-profit orchestras are built from these earliest experiments and that today's orchestras carry the burdens and insights of these early structures into the present day in such effects as the exclusion of musicians from most organizational decision making. This essay is ch. 1 in the book American Orchestras in the Nineteenth Century, edited by John Spitzer (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2012).
