Flooding, displacement of the disenfranchised, devastation of regional mom-and-pops — all against the backdrop of a beleaguering, nationwide economic depression. The introductory sequence of Jerome Hiler and Owsley Brown III’s Music Makes a City — a fascinating new film documenting the evolution of the Louisville Orchestra and, by extension, the city of Louisville itself — feels right on time, leading with a visual array of our most pressing contemporary challenges, in thoughtfully edited footage of a community struggling to manage the incursion of chaos into its urban streets, businesses and homes. Yet these opening images depict a catastrophe more than seven decades old: the 1937 flooding of the Ohio River. And the city’s solution to revitalizing its straitened community after the crisis will come as a shock to local, state and national politicians attempting to redress current fiscal deficits by constricting funding for the arts. In the throes of the Great Depression, Louisville mayor Charles Farnsley turned not to cutting cultural institutions but to cultivating them. In the wake of the ’37 flood, he founded the Louisville Orchestra.
The film’s depiction of Farnsley’s cultural- and civic-uplift experiment feels appealingly underdog from the get-go: Farnsley — an irrepressible, Confucius-following can-doer with an abiding love of music (he later went on, as a member of the Kentucky House of Representatives, to help establish the National Endowment for the Arts) — hired a similarly energetic young conductor, Robert Whitney, to lead a cobbled-together assemblage of part-time musicians-cum-wage-earners, many with limited professional experience. Undaunted, Whitney set to work preparing for the orchestra’s first season and, several years and myriad rehearsals thereafter, alit with Farnsley upon an adventurous strategy that combined seemingly relentless budget constraints with their desire to make a distinct musical mark. Specifically, the two embarked on a project to premiere the works of emerging international composers, redirecting funds earmarked for visiting soloists to commission new works from a gamut of far-flung geographies.
Astoundingly, the plan worked. Within just a couple of years, Whitney and the orchestra found themselves en route to Carnegie Hall — a trip that, for many of the musicians, required a first, tentative foray into air travel — to perform William Schuman’s score for modern-dance pioneer Martha Graham’s New York premiere of Judith. The orchestra began to count among its collaborators an increasing number of the most celebrated composers of the time, including Paul Hindemith, Darius Milhaud, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Gunther Schuller and Virgil Thomson. And in 1953, finally — after years of monetary woes — the group achieved a true financial coup: Whitney and the Louisville Orchestra unexpectedly received the Rockefeller Foundation’s first-ever grant to support an arts organization, an award of $400,000 to expand the commissioning project to a whopping fifty-two works annually over a three-year time frame. Under Farnsley’s stewardship, Whitney and the Louisville Orchestra had hit the map — and Louisville, in turn, began reaping the benefits. In the very year in which the Rockefeller Foundation bestowed its unprecedented gift, General Electric selected Louisville as the city in which to establish an enormous manufacturing site, “Appliance Park,” and, ultimately, its consumer and industrial headquarters as well.
Throughout, Music Makes a City contrasts the orchestra’s improbable rise to prominence with tragicomic details of quotidian life in Louisville. Former orchestra members tell of returning home from New York in giddy post-Judith triumph only to encounter streets swathed in snowdrifts — and, as a result, only a few intrepid audience members at their next concert. Louisville citizens, initially more accustomed to hearing the thunderous hooves of thoroughbreds than the atonalities of Elliott Carter, recount their pride at their city’s growing prestige — and their audience’s hands-clapped-on-ears perplexity at their first concerts. And composers, including Carter, discuss the act of writing for the orchestra and the opportunity the commissioning project provided them. In Carter’s words (describing his 1955 Louisville premiere of Variations for Orchestra, still among his most popular works): “I wanted, myself, to write something that had a certain character of its own, so that I did things in Variations which as far as I know had never been done before and in fact were something I never did since.” The film’s editing reinforces this strong sense of place; montages accompanying excerpts from the commissioned works tend to feature beautifully tatted-together images of Louisville and the (originally offending) Ohio River.
