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    The Mississippi River Festival
    The Mississippi River Festival
    The Mississippi River Festival
    Ebook194 pages54 minutes

    The Mississippi River Festival

    By Amanda Bahr-Evola and Stephen Kerber

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    In 1969, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville initiated a remarkable performing arts series called the Mississippi River Festival. Over 12 summer seasons, between 1969 and 1980, the festival presented 353 events showcasing performers in a variety of musical genres, including classical, chamber, vocal, ragtime, blues, folk, bluegrass, barbershop, country, and rock, as well as dance and theater. During those years, more than one million visitors flocked to the spacious Gyo Obata-designed campus in the countryside near St. Louis. The Mississippi River Festival began as a partnership promoting regional cooperation in the realm of the performing arts. Southern Illinois University Edwardsville invited the St. Louis Symphony to establish residence on campus and to offer a summer season. To host the symphony, the university created an outdoor concert venue within a natural amphitheater by installing a large circus tent, a stage and acoustic shell, and a sophisticated sound system. To appeal to the widest possible audience, the university included contemporary popular musicians in the series. The audacity of the undertaking, the charm of the venue, the popularity of the artists, the excellence of the performances, and the nostalgic memory of warm summer evenings have combined to endow the festival with legendary status among those who attended.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcadia Publishing
    Release dateSep 18, 2012
    ISBN9781439633229
    The Mississippi River Festival
    Author

    Amanda Bahr-Evola

    Historian Stephen Kerber is university archivist and special collections librarian at Lovejoy Library, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. Historian Amanda Bahr-Evola is archives specialist at Lovejoy Library and a lecturer in the Department of Historical Studies at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. Their desire to make accessible an accurate and comprehensive account of the Mississippi River Festival is embodied in this fascinating pictorial history.

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      Book preview

      The Mississippi River Festival - Amanda Bahr-Evola

      behind.

      INTRODUCTION

      In 1969, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville initiated a remarkable performing arts series called the Mississippi River Festival. Over 12 summer seasons, between 1969 and 1980, the festival presented 353 events showcasing performers in a variety of musical genres, including classical, chamber, vocal, ragtime, blues, folk, bluegrass, barbershop, country, and rock, as well as dance and theater. During those years, more than one million visitors flocked to the spacious Gyo Obata–designed campus in the countryside near St. Louis.

      The Mississippi River Festival began as a partnership promoting regional cooperation in the realm of the performing arts. Southern Illinois University Edwardsville invited the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra to establish residence on campus and to offer a summer season. To host the symphony, the university created an outdoor concert venue within a natural amphitheater by installing a large circus tent, a stage and acoustic shell, and a sophisticated sound system. To appeal to the widest possible audience, the university included contemporary popular musicians in the series. The audacity of the undertaking, the charm of the venue, the popularity of the artists, the excellence of the performances, and the nostalgic memory of warm summer evenings have combined to endow the festival with legendary status among those who attended.

      The history of the Mississippi River Festival may be considered in three phases. The first phase, 1967–1970, involved the planning and implementation of the original concept of a cultural partnership. The second phase, 1971–1977, covered the evolution of the festival beyond the original concept with increasing participation by popular musicians. The third phase, 1978–1980, involved an attempt to outsource the operation of the festival in a futile effort to save it from financial difficulties.

      The St. Louis Symphony Society embraced the concept of a cultural partnership with another institution primarily for financial reasons. Handicapped by insufficient revenue, the symphony management desired to provide the additional employment for its artists that would come with a summer season. For its part, the young university coveted the publicity and prestige that it hoped would be generated by the presence on its brand-new campus of a cultural arts festival built around one of the finest symphony orchestras in the nation.

      By the late 1960s, Pres. Delyte W. Morris had reached the pinnacle of his career as a university administrator. During two decades of significant public support for higher education, with the assistance of talented but frequently overlooked academic colleagues and with the support of influential business and political leaders, Morris had overseen the meteoric growth of one major educational institution and the establishment of another. His reputation as a powerful leader who had access to the substantial resources necessary to implement his vision convinced the leaders of the St. Louis Symphony Society to partner with the university in the audacious festival endeavor.

      As a part of the agreement negotiated between the university and the St. Louis Symphony Society and signed on October 8, 1968, the university committed itself to construct both a temporary site for the upcoming 1969 season and also a permanent venue to house the symphony for the 1970, 1971, and subsequent seasons. The agreement envisioned a permanent outdoor music venue comparable to existing facilities such as Tanglewood (home of the Boston Symphony and Boston Pops), Meadow Brook (home of the Detroit Symphony), Blossum Center (home of the Cleveland Orchestra), and Saratoga (home of the Philadelphia Orchestra), including a stage and acoustic shell, some covered area for part of the audience, and space on the lawn for more than 10,000 listeners. The university’s trustees approved the agreement on November 20, 1968.

      Unfortunately when personal errors of judgment and forces of revolutionary societal change beyond his comprehension and control drove Morris out of office in 1970, the conditions that had promised well for the financial stability and success of the festival changed abruptly. The circumstances of Morris’s sudden departure contributed to enhanced scrutiny of individual campus resource management decisions throughout the state of Illinois both by boards of trustees and by a more centralized resource allocation and oversight system for higher education. Of equal or greater significance, partly because of concern over campus activism, disorders, and opposition to the controversial war in Vietnam, public officials showed less inclination to support higher education financially throughout the decade of the 1970s than they had during the 1950s and 1960s.

      Thus when the removal of Morris essentially cancelled the university’s ability to create and maintain a permanent venue to house the symphony, everything changed. The festival struggled from year to year at the temporary site to generate sufficient revenue for operation. The university vigorously sought and obtained individual, philanthropic, and government subsidies to bolster ticket sales, but the symphony performances never proved self-supporting. As early as the 1971 season, the symphony made a decision to start cutting back its appearances from the projected 18 per year during 1969 and 1970 to only 12 per year during 1971 through 1974. The symphony appeared just six times in 1975 and five times in 1976. In addition, the symphony began to compete with itself by scheduling outdoor summer concerts back across the river in Missouri.

      As the symphony reduced its involvement, the university increased the number of popular music events on the festival schedule. Although artistic excellence remained the criteria for scheduling choices and the hallmark of actual performances, financial success remained consistently elusive. Variables such as weather fluctuations, evolving musical trends and tastes, and increasing competition from other venues made it difficult for the festival

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