Circle City Clarinerd

This morning, my boss Jessica gave me the keys to the ISO’s archive room and told me to “have at it.” As I stepped into the tiny room tucked away in the middle of the Marketing and Communications floor and caught a glimpse of the treasure trove of old ISO photographs, music scores and random artifacts – including a cornet with the baseball stuffed in the bell about which I am quite curious and thus plan to explore in a future blog post – my history-dork senses were awakened.

As a lifelong bibliophile, I was of course particularly drawn to the shelf of old program books. I pulled the oldest book (1937-38) off the shelf, relishing its musty smell and thumbing its delicate pages. (A brief historical interjection: marked the first year of the tenure of the ISO’s second conductor Fabien Sevitzky, who conducted the Orchestra until 1955. The founding conductor was Ferdinand Schaefer, who in 1930 established the Orchestra as we know it today).

Program books

At first, I saw the book merely as a historical artifact, musing on the old advertisements and trying to picture what downtown Indy and the Hilbert Circle Theatre looked like over a half century ago. Below are some of the program book ads I thought truly reflected the era in which they were created:

 
Electrotype Company ad

Indiana Bell Telephone Company ad

"Have you ever driven a 12-Cylinder car?"

Yet, as continued to peruse the book, I came across the program for a concert on Sunday, March 27, 1938, on which the ISO performed second movement from Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5. I shivered slightly when I read this, pondering how I had just finished writing a press release for the ISO’s performance of the same symphony on October 28 and 29, 2011. My goose bumps multiplied as I considered how Tchaikovsky’s same haunting clarinet introduction and same beautiful horn solo in the second movement was heard in the Circle City over 70 years ago.

 
1938 program

2011 Tchaikovsky 5 program

I kept examining the book and continued to find these chilling parallels. On Friday, February 4 and Saturday, February 5, 1938 the ISO performed Humperdinck’s Overture to “Hansel and Gretel,” which the ISO is also performing this year on October 21 and 22. Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7, which the ISO performed on November 18 and 19, 1938, will be heard again in Indianapolis on November 22, 2011.

Humperdinck's "Hansel and Gretel" at the ISO in 1938

Beethoven 7 at the ISO in 1938

Although the ISO did not perform at the Circle Theatre until the early 1980s and was obviously composed of completely different members in 1937-8, paging through the program book truly impressed upon me, as cliché as it sounds, the timelessness of classical music. Seeing the same programs slated for concerts that occurred decades upon decades ago brought to life for me the powerful nature of orchestral concerts. While many pop songs eventually disappear from the radio waves, the works of Beethoven and Tchaikovsky are still heard around the world. While the popularity of Top 40 artists eventually fades, the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra is still thriving. I know that in three weeks, when I hear the opening clarinet duet in Tchaikovsky’s Fifth, I will once again shiver as I think back to my treasure hunt in the archives and  imagine the clarinetists from the ISO in 1938 performing the same lines in the same city.