The Detroit Symphony Orchestra

Changing Times, 1963–76: Sixten Ehrling and the Changing Fortunes of a City and Its Orchestra

My objective is to preserve the greatness of the Detroit Symphony as it now is, and also to have a part in its natural growth in the years to come.… Certainly I have been placed in charge of an orchestra that is so great that it would be ridiculous for me to speak of changes.

Sixten Ehrling 1

WHEN SIXTEN EHRLING TOOK OVER THE POST OF CONDUCTOR AND music director from Paul Paray in 1963, both the orchestra and the city of Detroit were full of optimism for the future: the DSO had become an outstanding ensemble with a national reputation under Paray, and the city had a strong industrial economic base and pride in its cultural institutions. Over the course of the next thirteen years, from 1963 to 1976, much of that would change. The orchestra would continue to gain distinction for its musical achievements and its new summer music festival, yet would also endure labor disputes and work stoppages, wild fluctuations in its finances, and the loss of all funding from the city that had been its home for almost a century.

During the same period, Detroit began a decline from which it has yet to recover. It suffered one of the worst race riots in the nation’s history, precipitating profound demographic changes, including a substantial loss of population and businesses, as well as a major recession, leading to the loss of one third of the city’s jobs.

Yet the seeds of these profound changes seemed almost unimaginable when Ehrling took the helm of the DSO. Praised for his youth, vigor, and dedication to modern works, he was only forty-five when he began his decade in Detroit.

SIXTEN EHRLING

Ehrling had devoted his life to music from childhood. He was born on April 3, 1918, in Malmo, Sweden, the son of a banker, who wanted his son to follow him into a job in finance. But Ehrling showed such remarkable musical gifts, especially as a pianist, that his father relented and sent him to the Royal Academy of Music in Stockholm, where he studied piano, violin, organ, composition, and conducting.

While still a student, Ehrling worked as a rehearsal pianist at the Swedish Royal Opera in Stockholm, and made his professional debut as a conductor there in 1940. The next year, 1941, he moved to Europe, where he studied conducting with Karl Boehm at the Dresden State Opera; Ehrling was able to travel to Nazi Germany during World War II because Sweden remained neutral during the conflict.2

Returning to Sweden, Ehrling was named the conductor of the Gothenburg Orchestra in 1942, and in 1943, rejoined the Swedish Royal Opera as an assistant conductor. At the Royal Opera, Ehrling became a champion of modern music, conducting a concert performance of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring in 1950 that, according to Martin Anderson of the Independent in London, “put Ehrling on the map; it was to become one of his visiting cards.”³ The work, today considered a regular part of the orchestra repertoire, was at that point still considered with “caution” by orchestras and audiences alike, according to Anderson.

Sixten Ehrling, music director of the DSO from 1963 to 1972. (Courtesy DSO Archives)

Ehrling continued to promote modern works when he was named musical director of the opera company in 1953, introducing audiences to such works as Alban Berg’s Wozzeck and Karl-Birger Blomdahl’s Aniara, an opera about space travel, which Ehrling performed in Sweden and also at the Edinburgh Festival in 1959. King Gustav VI gave him the title of Premiere Royal Court Conductor of Sweden, and, as his reputation grew, he became one of the best-known conductors in Europe.4

Ehrling also developed a reputation as an exacting and rigorous conductor, and one who prized “subtlety and efficiency over showiness,” according to Allan Kozinn of the New York Times⁵; his seven years as music director of the Swedish Royal Opera are considered by many critics to be the company’s “golden age.” In addition to new work, he presented performances of such favorites as Bizet’s Carmen and Verdi’s Un ballo en maschera, and also achieved fame for his interpretations of Wagner’s operas, and for performances that were noted for both their lyrical beauty and precision. One anecdote from the British critic Martin Anderson sums up the astonishing perfectionism of his approach:

Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnburg was among the works that [Ehrling] conducted a large number of times. Among the stage-manager’s tasks was the exact timing—minutes and seconds—of every single performance of every opera. Once I was shown the book with these entries, a kind of logbook. I could see that the difference in total playing time between Ehrling’s fastest and slowest performance of this opera was less than one minute.

Die Meistersiger is four hours long.⁶

Ehrling’s uncompromising artistic vision was also expressed in his reputation for brusque treatment of musicians under his baton, which led to his departure from Sweden in 1960, when he resigned rather than apologize for the tongue-lashing he gave to the orchestra’s musicians for what he considered subpar playing on their part.

In leaving Sweden, Ehrling claimed that he had been unjustly criticized for demanding more of the players: “At the Stockholm opera, they wanted me to apologize for the way I led the orchestra, which I refused,” he said. “I moved to America instead.”⁷

Detroit was actually the first place Ehrling visited in the United States. He came to the city for the first time in November 1961 to lead the DSO as a guest conductor, and was introduced in the program as a “noted pianist often in demand as a soloist” and as the master of a repertoire that “includes more than 500 symphonic works encompassing music from the early classics to the present day.”⁸

After his debut in Detroit, Ehrling continued to conduct in the United States and Europe, returning to the city in December of 1962 as a guest conductor once again. In January 1963, when he was named the DSO’s permanent conductor, he praised the maestro he was replacing:

Before I speak of my own plans in Detroit, I wish to pay tribute to Maestro Paray first of all. As a student I heard him conduct the Colonne Orchestra in Paris. He played works by Schumann and Ravel, and it was an exciting and thrilling occasion that I have always remembered.9

CONFLICT BETWEEN MUSICIANS AND MANAGEMENT

But before Ehrling officially took over the orchestra in the fall of 1963, a labor dispute erupted in the spring that threatened his first season. After twelve years of relative peace between the musicians and management, the orchestra members’ union, the Detroit Federation of Musicians, requested a pay raise, which the DSO’s executive board promptly refused.

At that point, Robert Semple had taken over for John B. Ford as president of the orchestra. Semple was an executive and colleague of Ford at Wyandotte Chemical, and he shared his love of music and the DSO; he was, in fact, a good amateur clarinetist. As the chairman of the Executive Board at the time, Semple first claimed that there was no money available at all for raises. Then, he offered a total of $25,000 for all musicians, to be paid over three years, which would have added to the musicians’ weekly salary of $140 an increase of about three dollars per week per musician. The union countered with a request for “the same income percentage-wise as the ratio of orchestra salaries to city workers” in the cities of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia.¹⁰

In July 1963, Semple went to the press to present management’s side of the dispute, and claimed that management did not have the money, that the three large city orchestras cited in the union’s request had “fantastic box office response, playing to full houses four or five times a week,” and that, “In Detroit, we are lucky to fill the house twice a week.” He then went on to note that “those orchestras also have lucrative recording contracts,” and that Detroit “has not established itself firmly in the recording field.”¹¹ It is hard to understand the reasoning behind that statement, given the seventy highly praised—and popular—Mercury recordings done during the ten years of Paul Paray’s conductorship, which were still producing royalties.

By July 9, the two sides had still not reached an agreement, and the Michigan Labor Mediation Board stepped in to help resolve the dispute. When that effort failed, and as the entire season hung in the balance, Detroit Mayor Jerome Cavanaugh presented a plan that saved the season. His proposal offered to increase the city’s contribution to the DSO to include payment for the school concert series and the summer concerts on Belle Isle, which they had not paid for before. The musicians and management agreed to the proposal, which meant that, in the new contract, the musicians’ base pay would increase from $140 per week, for a season of twenty-eight weeks, to $175 per week, for a season of thirty weeks.12

Ehrling onstage with the DSO. (Courtesy DSO Archives)

THE DSO UNDER EHRLING

With the labor problems resolved, DSO audiences eagerly awaited the arrival of their new conductor. As Ehrling officially took the helm in December 1963, he made clear that he would be introducing his new city to new music:

As far as the public is concerned, [my goal] is to get them to know music not played here. You can’t frighten them, but I’m not going to give them the safe stuff. I look forward to a first Detroit performance every week.¹³

Ehrling was as good as his word. In his ten years with the DSO, he conducted a total of 722 works of music, including twenty-four world premieres, a record never matched in the orchestra’s history. And in just his first months with the symphony, he led them in the American premiere of Carl Nielsen’s Symphony no. 3, the “Sinfonia Espansiva,” as well as first performances in Detroit of works by Jakov Gotovac, Bozidar Kunc, Guillaume Landré, and Francis Poulenc. He also increased the number of players, from ninety to 101, augmenting the string section in particular.¹⁴

Detroiters were mightily impressed with Ehrling, and were somewhat in awe of their charismatic new conductor. In a segment from Edith Rhetts Tilton’s “History of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra” published in 1965, DSO marketing executive Cliff Drozda describes the impression he made:

From the moment Sixten Ehrling strides out crisply from the wings to take command of his Orchestra, there is something distinctly Scandinavian about his bearing, demeanor, and conducting. But the music he makes is international.

Ehrling’s tremendous physical vitality is immediately apparent. The more subtle qualities of the man’s genius show themselves as he works. He has been called persuasive, precise, authoritative, dramatic, and inspired. A New York critic recently said of him, “Ehrling has a strong, ordered musical intuition which, backed by all of his other assets, makes him remarkably apt at his job.”15

Other critics around the country concurred. Writing in the Minneapolis Star shortly after Ehrling’s appointment in Detroit, music critic John K. Sherman wrote, “The Detroit Symphony has accomplished the musical coup of the year in signing Sixten Ehrling,” and called him “a magical interpreter, a master of orchestral expression, and particularly skillful in creating the myriad shadings and hues by which the big instrument tells its story.”¹⁶

Reviews of Ehrling’s first season with the DSO noted the breadth of the repertoire presented, and a firm conviction that his presence in Detroit was further confirmation that the symphony had reached that coveted status as “one of the country’s major orchestras,” as New York Times music critic Harold Schonberg claimed in February 1964.¹⁷

One of the highlights of the 1964 season was the DSO’s performance of the Fifth Symphony of Dmitri Shostakovitch, a modern masterpiece then relatively new to Detroit audiences. Collins George of the Free Press wrote:

The Shostakovitch Fifth … is a large musical canvas of the sort Ehrling likes to conduct. It has one of the most astonishing slow movements in musical literature, one from which Ehrling extracted every drop of meaning. It was, under his hands, a thing of great sensual beauty.¹⁸

Boris Nelson of the Toledo Blade also witnessed the performance and claimed:

In the last movement [of the Shostakovitch], we heard a great orchestra. The greatness is inherent and we look forward to watching Sixten Ehrling haul it to the surface and nail it there for future use.19

As Ehrling’s first season came to an end, another new chapter in the DSO’s history unfolded: the inauguration of a summer music festival, to rival Boston’s Tanglewood and Chicago’s Ravinia.

MEADOW BROOK MUSIC FESTIVAL

The Meadow Brook Festival debuted on July 22, 1964, at the new Baldwin Memorial Pavilion on the campus of the new Oakland University. The idea for the festival had been brewing since earlier in the year, when a group of music lovers, led by automobile executive Semon “Bunkie” Knudsen, proposed a new concept for the DSO: a summer concert series “which would provide an opportunity for everyone in the community to enjoy great music of great artistic value at low cost in a beautiful setting.”²⁰ Oakland University had recently been founded, thanks to the generosity of Matilda Dodge Wilson, who, with her husband, Alfred, had donated 1,300 acres of their 1,500-acre estate, called Meadow Brook, as well as two million dollars to build the college.

Wilson and the Kresge Foundation also funded the amphitheater that was built as the performing space for the DSO. It was designed by the architectural firm of O’Dell, Hewlett, and Luckenbach, the same firm that had designed Ford Auditorium. Mrs. Wilson served as the Festival Committee Honorary Chairman, and the pavilion was built near the bottom of a wooded ravine on the property, at her suggestion.

Designed by engineer Christopher Jaffe as a natural amphitheater, the Baldwin Pavilion was completed in just five months, and included a covered stage area, pavilion seating, and a specially designed acoustical shell that could be adjusted to the requirements of a variety of musical performances. At the time, it was considered “the finest quality acoustical setup of any outdoor system in the country,” and was clearly superior to the acoustics available at Ford Auditorium.²¹

In its first year, the Meadow Brook Festival hosted four weeks of concerts; within two years, it had been expanded to eight. There was also a music school, which was headed by celebrated conductor Robert Shaw and featured some of the finest musicians in the world, who gathered to study, teach, and perform at Meadow Brook. Members of the faculty included many DSO members, as well as such famous orchestral and choral conductors as James Levine and Roger Wagner. Students from high school and college could earn credit in applied music, ensemble, theory, and music history.²²

The famed trio of Eugene Istomin, Isaac Stern, and Leonard Rose held a chamber music residence program at Meadow Brook for several years as well. Istomin, Stern, and Rose also appeared as part of an outstanding group of international soloists who performed in the festival’s early years, including pianists Claudio Arrau, Alfred Brendel, Vladimir Ashkenazy, and Van Cliburn; violinists Henryk Szeryng, Itzhak Perlman, and Gidon Kremer; cellists Mstislav Rostopovich and Lynn Harrell; and singers Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Maureen Forrester, and Jessye Norman.23

The festival also produced several new chamber ensembles, including the Meadow Brook Wind Quintet, the Meadow Brook Chamber Orchestra, and the Meadow Brook String Quartet. These were all composed of DSO musicians, who played chamber music during the fall and winter at Oakland University.²⁴

Sixten Ehrling changed his summer schedule so that he could conduct all of the concerts in the first season, and in 1966 conducted the world premiere performances of three works commissioned specifically for the DSO and Meadow Brook. The composers had been paid in part by a $20,000 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, signaling a source of money for the DSO and other US orchestras that would become ever more significant in the years to come.

The 1964–65 season was celebrated as the fiftieth anniversary of the DSO (most published sources at the time dated the orchestra’s birth to 1914, rather than 1887), and the future looked bright under Ehrling: the orchestra numbered 101 musicians, and they visited Carnegie Hall with their new director in a concert that drew wide praise from the New York critics, including Harold Schonberg of the New York Times, who offered one of the earliest evaluations of the orchestra under their new director:

MOTOWN AND THE DSO

In the mid-1960s, amidst all the serious classical music-making in Detroit, several members of the orchestra, notably a group of string players led by assistant concertmaster Gordon Staples, were also moonlighting with a very special, very Detroit group of musicians: the Funk Brothers, the legendary Motown house band who created the inimitable “Motown Sound.”

Founded in 1959 by Berry Gordy Jr., Motown was the most successful independent record label of the twentieth century. Its musical roots were urban rhythm and blues, but Gordy wanted his music to appeal to all young people, and it became one of the most successful efforts in “crossover” music in history. With the slogan “the Sound of Young America,” Gordy launched the wildly successful careers of such stars as Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, the Temptations, Diana Ross and the Supremes, Stevie Wonder, the Four Tops, and many more.

One of the foundations of Motown’s success was the songwriting trio of Brian Holland, Lamont Dozier, and Eddie Holland, who, along with Smokey Robinson, wrote most of the Motown hits. Then, in the small studio at their headquarters on Grand Boulevard in Detroit, Hitsville USA, the composers, the Funk Brothers, and the Motown singers would work on new recordings, often accompanied by a group of DSO musicians, far into the night.

On tracks like the Temptations’s hit “Don’t Look Back,” one can hear the string section complementing the work of the Funk Brothers, creating a sound that is clear, soulful, and swinging. The DSO musicians who played for Motown included violinists Staples, Alvin Score, Beatriz Budinzky, Felix Resnick, James Waring, Lillian Downs, Linda Snedden Smith, Richard Margitza, Virginia Halfmann, and Zinovi Bistritzky; violists Anne Mischakoff, David Ireland, Edouard Kesner, Meyer Shapiro, and Nathan Gordon; cellists Italo Babini, Edward Korkigian, Marcy Schweickhardt, and Thaddeus Markiewicz; and harpists Carole Crosby and Pat Terry. The group also made a record, “Strung Out,” for Motown, as Gordon Staples and the String Thing, in 1970.

Sources: http://www.discogs.com/Gordon-Staples-And-The-String-Thing-Strung-Out/release/561823; https://www.motownmuseum.org/story/motown/.

Only last season, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra was, in a way, one of the poorer relatives in the United States symphonic family. A fine orchestra, it nevertheless was somewhat short on strings. But its new conductor, Sixten Ehrling, must be a persuasive man. The Detroit Symphony Orchestra now has a full complement of players. And it has achieved maturity in more ways than one, as indicated Thursday night in Carnegie Hall.…

There could be nothing but praise for the way he and the orchestra handled the music. Indeed, the entire program testified to the work of an orchestra of considerable technique, solid musical ideas, and complete integrity. The Detroit Symphony by now is one of the country’s superior symphonic organizations, ready to compete in any company. It is well-drilled with responsive ensemble and excellent solo playing all around. In short, it is as good an orchestra as one is likely to hear.25

Ehrling scored another triumph in the final concert of the 1964–65 season, where he presented, for the first time in Detroit, Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, a massive piece that had premiered in 1962 and that expressed the composer’s condemnation of war. The work requires multiple choirs and two orchestral ensembles, and Ehrling conducted some 350 musicians on the stage of Ford Auditorium for the event. Boris Nelson of the Toledo Blade praised the work, which he termed “a passionate denunciation of war by an adamant pacifist and conscientious objector,” as well as Ehrling’s direction, which he called a “cooperative venture of many forces” that “came off well” save for the poor acoustics of Ford Auditorium, which muffled the choirs’ sound.²⁶

MORE NEW MUSIC

Ehrling continued to champion new music, at home and on tour. In November 1966, he led the DSO in a concert at Carnegie Hall in New York, in a program that featured Witold Lutosławski’s Concerto for Orchestra. Writing in the New York Times, Harold Schonberg continued his praise of Ehrling, and also gave an insight into the quality of the sound of the orchestra under their conductor, as well as its strengths and weaknesses:

Mr. Ehrling is bringing the Detroit Symphony smartly along. Indeed, he is making a virtuoso ensemble of it.… [They play] with a great deal of finesse, sharp and clear attacks, strong solo work.

Tonally the Detroit Symphony is still somewhat on the hard side. Part of that is due to the caliber of the musicians. The strings, especially, do not have the polish of the very top international ensembles.

And part is due to the conductor. Mr. Ehrling is a very sound man with a precise beat and a good deal of spirit. But he has the kind of musical mentality more interested in movement than in color or nuance. He likes to keep things in motion, to build to climaxes, to maintain clarity. Never is there the least hint of sensuality or romanticism in his conducting.27

Ehrling programmed more modern music for the DSO at home as well, with seven world premieres in 1966–67, including works by Roger Sessions, Carlos Surinach, Natanael Broman, Donald Erb, Norman Kay, Harold Laudenslager, and Paul Creston. Creston’s work, “Chthonic Ode,” was commissioned by the DSO and was dedicated to Erhling and the orchestra.

For the more “traditional” music lover, the DSO also offered a series of pop concerts in April, with guest conductors like Arthur Fielder, which featured popular music from Broadway as well as lighter classical fare, such as opera overtures and arias. The concerts were performed at the Light Guard Armory, with seating designed to look more like a nightclub than a concert hall, featuring cocktail tables for four.

At Meadow Brook in the summer of 1966, there were world premieres of works by Kay and Surinach, classical favorites with guest artists such as Van Cliburn and Henryk Szeryng, and large choral masterworks, including the Mass in B Minor by J. S. Bach and the War Requiem by Britten.²⁸

“VIOLENCE IN THE MODEL CITY”

The following summer brought a very different spirit to Detroit. It was the summer of “Violence in the Model City,” as the title of Sydney T. Fine’s lauded study on the Detroit riot of 1967 defined it, when a city that prided itself on racial harmony descended into racial hostility, hatred, and violence that left a mark on the city and its surrounding suburbs still felt today.

The Detroit riot began on July 23, 1967, when police raided an illegal after-hours bar on Twelfth Street near Clairmont. A crowd of several hundred African Americans gathered as the men arrested in the raid were taken into custody, and began to jeer at the police. Soon, the crowd was out of control, and looting and fighting began. The police who arrived at the scene did nothing to stop what had become an unruly mob.29

The riot spread throughout the city, and Governor George Romney called in state police and the National Guard; when they could not control the fighting, looting, and arson, members of the Army’s airborne division arrived to bring order. Over the span of six days, 400 state police, 7,300 national guardsmen, and 4,700 army troops battled thousands of rioters, black and white, who had armed themselves and fought not just each other, but, according to author Arthur Woodford, pitched “a battle against authority, whatever its skin color.” At the end of the riot, there were forty-four dead and 7,331 arrested in one of the largest civil disturbances in the country’s history.³⁰

The people of Detroit, the state, and the nation were stunned by what had happened. What followed was an effort to rebuild Detroit and its institutions through a coalition of political, social, and business leaders, many of whom served on the board of the DSO. Led by Governor Romney and Mayor Cavanaugh, they met and established the “New Detroit Committee,” with the goal of developing programs to address an array of problems that affected the people of the city, especially its poor African American citizens. As Woodford explains, the focus of this first “urban coalition” in the United States was:

education, employment and economic action, housing and neighborhood stabilization, health, drug abuse, community self-determination, Minority economic development, public safety and justice, anti-racism, and the arts.³¹

Reviewing the programs and press releases of the DSO in the aftermath of the riot, one finds no immediate and official response to a piece of history that had rocked the city to its core. However, a personal account was offered by Beatriz Budinszky Staples, wife of concertmaster Gordon Staples, who recalled that her husband, who lived near the center of the uprising in 1967, was scheduled to perform the Berg violin concerto at Meadow Brook the day the riot began. She remembered that he “almost could not get out of the area as streets were cordoned off and buildings were set on fire. Finally, he arrived at Meadow Brook, quite shaken, a nerve-racking experience for him and a difficult time for all that will never be forgotten.”³²

However, the DSO did take part in an art festival sponsored by New Detroit, held a year after the riot, as part of an outreach effort to the African American community of Detroit. The orchestra moved its first five Belle Isle concerts to the steps of the Rackham Building, across the street from the Detroit Institute of Arts in downtown Detroit. There, in what a summary by New Detroit Inc. called the DSO’s “sincere and earnest [efforts] in trying to reach more city residents,” they performed concerts that included four African American soloists who had been auditioned specifically for the five-night concert series. The performances were well received by the community, and Collins George of the Free Press wrote that the DSO had “inadvertently hit upon a formula to use native talent as soloists.”33

On November 7, 1968, the DSO presented an important first, for itself and for the African American community. Conductor James Frazier, a native Detroiter, graduate of Wayne State, and a graduate student at the University of Michigan, became the first African American to lead the orchestra in a full-length program. His story was captured in a television documentary, “Milestone in D Minor,” which aired on local station WXYZ. Frazier, who won a conducting prize at the International Competition in Liverpool, England, also conducted at Interlochen and at the University Michigan. He went on to lead the Leningrad Philharmonic and guest conduct several other major orchestras.³⁴

In the late 1960s, the DSO’s regular schedule grew to include an annual concert at Carnegie Hall, where Ehrling continued to burnish the reputation of the DSO under his baton. Music critic Theodore Strongin wrote of the “well-oiled precision,” of one such performance, commenting on the coolness and clarity of the ensemble under Ehrling, and noting the conductor’s precise, almost chilly reserve. He begins by describing the DSO as

a very clean, well-kept orchestral machine. Its edges are sharp, its surfaces are shiny and it functions with the accuracy of a computer. Mr. Ehrling himself gives the impression that no complexity would be too much for him. He would get everything sorted out and shipshape in no time at all.

This kind of conducting lays bare the craftsmanship of composers so that it can be recognized and admired. But last night Mr. Ehrling did not go much deeper than that. One could appreciate the neatness.… But it was not easy to be moved.³⁵

The year 1970 marked the retirement of one of the hardest-working, longest-serving members of the DSO. Valter Poole retired from the organization, after conducting over 1,500 performances, including most of the school concerts, as well as the public concerts at the Fairgrounds and on Belle Isle. He was praised by generations of musicians and audiences for his contributions to the musical life of Detroit.

The DSO’s Paul Ganson, with Duke Ellington and Paul Freeman at an educator’s conference in Detroit, 1970. (Courtesy DSO Archives)

THE DETROIT SYMPHONY YOUTH ORCHESTRA

The year 1970 brought an important new initiative to the orchestra. That year, the Detroit Symphony Youth Orchestra was founded, sponsored by the DSO and under the guidance of DSO bassoonist Paul Ganson, to provide musical instruction to talented young musicians from the Detroit area, and also a training ground for the orchestra itself. As the first auditions got under way, some 350 young instrumentalists played for members of the DSO and local music educators; the 112 hardworking and accomplished musicians who won a place in the ensemble gathered to rehearse on Saturdays, under the baton of Sixten Ehrling, the Music Advisor to the organization, as well as other outstanding conductors.

It also marked the debut of Paul Freeman, who joined the DSO as conductor-in-residence and the first conductor of the Symphony Youth Orchestra. Freeman, who had received his bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees from the Eastman School of Music, came to Detroit after conducting with Robert Shaw in Atlanta and serving as associate conductor of the Dallas Symphony. In Detroit, he championed African American music and, during his nine years with the orchestra, was the conductor on a series of recordings with the DSO, which were featured on Columbia Record’s Black Composer Series.

Source: Paul Ganson, Civic Circle, Spring 1997.

Ehrling continued to challenge DSO audiences with new music, and to take the orchestra on annual trips to New York, where they took part in the International Festival of Visiting Orchestras at Carnegie Hall. In 1970, he led the DSO in a performance of Mahler’s Symphony no. 4 in G Major, which was praised by critic Raymond Ericson, who wrote that the orchestra was a “first-rate ensemble, clean and balanced in tone,” and its director “an honest musician who does not overdramatize the works he is dealing with.” He praised Ehrling’s “care in delineating the many complex instrumental textures of the score,” and the “fine use of rubato and those brief hesitations that set off a succeeding chord of unusual sweetness or an abrupt change in harmony.” Finally, he concluded that “The performance lacked the ultimate seamlessness and tensile strength, which might have made it sublime, but it had its moments of calm radiance.”36

It is certainly a loss to contemporary listeners that Ehrling made no studio recordings with the DSO during his tenure. The sole recording available is a collection from 1974 that includes Ehrling conducting a piece from a live concert, made at Ford Auditorium, and is one of several excerpts also featuring Gabrilowitsch, Kolar, Krueger, and Paray. Recording was clearly not a priority for Ehrling, as it was for such conductors as Paray; in fact, he made only thirteen recordings during his long career as a conductor. As such, it leaves interested listeners without a way to compare how the symphony sounded under Ehrling with his predecessors and successors; we must, at best, try to glean from the critics just what it was that made his interpretations distinctive.

The exterior of Orchestra Hall, 1970. (Courtesy Library of Congress); The interior of Orchestra Hall, indicating the degree of deterioration, 1970. (Courtesy Library of Congress)

SAVING ORCHESTRA HALL

While the musical future of the DSO was being developed in the new Detroit Symphony Youth Orchestra, a splendid artifact of the orchestra’s past was about to face the wrecking ball. On September 17, 1970, a guard at a bank across the street from Orchestra Hall, which had been boarded up after years of neglect, noticed two men working on the hall. He contacted his building’s leasing manager, Dick Magon, who discovered that the men were from the water board, and that the acoustical marvel that had served as the DSO’s first home had been sold that day and was scheduled to be demolished in two weeks.

Magon in turn contacted Paul Ganson of the DSO, and the campaign to rescue Orchestra Hall began. The group acted quickly, first securing the help of Mel Ravitz, who was then president of the Detroit Common Council, to stay the demolition order. Next, they formed the Committee to Save Orchestra Hall (SOH), made up of musicians, music lovers, architects, historical preservationists, and other concerned members of the community. The group’s first order of business was gaining time to apply for historical landmark status for the building. Orchestra Hall had just turned fifty years of age, and was therefore eligible for protection under federal law governing buildings of historic significance.

While that effort was in progress, the group contacted Gino’s Inc., the fast-food chain owned by former football great Gino Marchetti, that had bought the hall. Then, just as the Save Orchestra Hall initiative got going, Gino’s made a surprising decision. They offered to sell the hall back to SOH and also gave them time to raise the funds to do so, and only for the price they had paid, in addition to the costs associated with the sale. It granted the great old Hall a reprieve, and fundraising efforts began immediately.

Source: Stages, 61, 71, 75–76.

EHRLING DEPARTS, AND ALDO CECCATO JOINS THE DSO

In 1972, Ehrling announced that he planned to leave the DSO. He wanted to return to guest conducting and had also been hired as the head of the conducting programs at the Juilliard School in New York. Notes from the meeting of the Executive Committee of the Board of Directors of the symphony in April 1972 include comments from classical music host Karl Haas, who approached the Board and asked that Ehrling be encouraged to stay; that suggestion, however, was not followed. There was instead a motion to engage “a principal guest conductor for two years before a final determination is made.” That motion was approved.37

However, just one month later, that decision was reversed, and it was announced that thirty-eight-year-old Italian conductor Aldo Ceccato had been signed to a two-year contract as principal conductor of the DSO, beginning with the 1973–74 season. This was an unusual action by the Board because Ceccato had never been a guest conductor with the orchestra, nor had he ever appeared in Detroit.

A “President’s Report” in the concert program from the 1972–73 season notes that “A number of our Board members heard Mr. Ceccato appear as a guest conductor with several major orchestras and were deeply impressed,” claiming that he was “uniquely qualified to enhance our Orchestra’s prestige among the world’s major symphonies.”³⁸

However, unlike his predecessors, Ceccato was not given the designation of music director. When queried about that, Robert Semple, president of the Executive Board, replied that giving Ceccato the title of principal conductor would “give everyone concerned an opportunity to evaluate what is best for the orchestra’s future.”³⁹

ALDO CECCATO

As the 1973–74 season got under way, DSO audiences met their new conductor. Born in Milan on February 18, 1934, Ceccato had studied at the Verdi Conservatory in Milan from 1948 to 1955, then with Albert Wolff and Willem van Otterloo in the Netherlands, and finally at the Hochschule für Musik in Berlin. He served as the assistant to Sergiu Celibidache at the Academy of Music in Siena in 1960, whom he claimed as a major influence on his career, as was conductor Victor de Sabata, who had once been considered for the conductorship of the DSO. Ceccato was actually Sabata’s son-in-law, having married Eliana de Sabata in 1968.⁴⁰

Aldo Ceccato, conductor of the DSO from 1973 to 1976. (Courtesy DSO Archives)

Ceccato made his debut in the United States in 1969, when he led the Chicago Lyric Opera. He was a popular guest conductor in the 1970s, leading the orchestras in Chicago, Philadelphia, and Cleveland, as well as the New York Philharmonic over several seasons, where he garnered praise as a “graceful, forceful” conductor by music critic Harold Schonberg, who also noted that he lacked a strong rhythmic sense, letting things “get a little out of control,” with performances becoming “rhythmically limp.”41

Just before he took over his post in Detroit, Ceccato acknowledged that the particular way in which he was hired had created a certain distance between him and the orchestra, noting that while he was flattered to be chosen as conductor, “it made things a little more difficult” with the musicians, who had never worked with him. “I spoke out to the orchestra and said I could understand their thoughts, being unknown to them,” said Ceccato, “but now I feel we understand each other marvelously.”⁴²

Ceccato outlined his plans for the DSO: he wanted to “install a Detroit Chamber Orchestra.” He also wanted to “enlarge the repertoire,” focusing especially on Dvořák, Bartók, Bruckner, and Brahms, a curious goal after the broad sweep of music presented during Erhling’s years.

CONCERTMASTER: GORDON STAPLES (1968–88)

Gordon Staples became concertmaster of the DSO in 1968, replacing Mischa Mischakoff. A gifted musician, he was born in Los Angeles in 1929, and started playing the violin at the age of five. At fourteen, he began playing for the CBC Orchestra, and when the family moved to Vancouver, he studied with Gregori Garbovitsky. Staples attended the Philadelphia Academy of Music, and after he graduated, became concertmaster of the US Navy Symphony in Washington, DC.

From Washington, Staples moved on to the New Orleans Symphony, where he was associate concertmaster, and from there to Detroit, where he was assistant to Mischakoff. He is remembered as a warm and unpretentious man, able to relate to fellow musicians and conductors alike. His wife, DSO violinist Beatriz Budinszky Staples, recalls, “Not everybody in that chair has the people skills he had.”

Staples often performed as a soloist with the orchestra and was known for bringing distinctive styles to the wide variety of music he played. “He got to the essence of the music,” said Budinskzy. “Style, rather than technical perfection, marked his playing.”

But it was the stylings that Staples and members of the DSO string section brought to their work for Motown that brought them to the attention of an international audience. He called the sessions, “a little thing I do on the side,” but he also praised the complexity of the arrangements: “They write very involved string parts for some of these things,” he claimed. “It’s not all gutbucket rock ’n’ roll.” His work for Motown was important in other ways, too: it augmented his income by thousands of dollars per year, allowing him to buy a Stradivarius, the “Halir” Stradivari, made in 1694.

Staples performed his duties as concertmaster until 1988, when he decided to step aside from the position, but to remain part of the orchestra’s first violin section. He felt that the constant demands of the position had taken their toll on him—“It’s like being a 24-hour shrink,” he told Nancy Malitz of the Detroit News. He wanted to have the “pleasure of making music without the full measure of responsibility that rests on the concertmaster’s shoulders.”

Sadly, his respite from the demands of the role were short-lived: he was diagnosed with cancer within months and died in 1990. But the Staples name remains a part of the DSO: Gordon’s wife Beatriz played with the orchestra until her retirement in 2014, and their son Gregory joined the violin section in 1999.

Sources: Anne Mischakoff Heiles, America’s Concertmasters (Sterling Heights: Harmonie Park Press, 2007), 227–31; Detroit News, October 29, 1986; Detroit Free Press, October 29, 1986.

Detroiters got their first glimpse of Ceccato in September 1973. He was announced to concertgoers with much fanfare, with much attention paid to his background and also to dashing good looks. Ceccato impressed both audiences and the Board of Directors, who approved the renewal of his contract in May 1974, adding the title of Music Director, and securing his appointment through the 1976–77 season.43

Ceccato took the DSO to Carnegie Hall in 1975, where critic John Rockwell found the orchestra “an efficient ensemble capable of highly musical performances,” though “not of the very top rank of American orchestras,” lacking “precision” and “sonorous tone.” He faulted Ceccato for his conducting, claiming that he was most concerned with “easygoing plasticity of phrasing.” And, in a criticism raised by several commentators, Rockwell faulted Ceccato’s inability to set and keep a consistent tempo, producing music in need of “sharper rhythmic definition.”⁴⁴

Back in Detroit, the Executive Board of Directors had become disenchanted with their relatively new maestro. The notes from the Executive Committee of October 1, 1975, state that “Ceccato will not renew his contract,” although this was not made known publicly. He resigned in 1976, and the process began to find his successor.⁴⁵

THE FINANCIAL PICTURE

Ceccato directed the DSO at a turbulent time in the organization’s financial history. In fact, both he and Ehrling conducted the DSO during an era when the finances of the organization fluctuated widely, with ever-increasing budgets; ongoing, sometimes ruinous deficits; occasional surpluses; and dynamic changes in sources of revenue, especially those generated from foundations and the federal government.

When Ehrling joined the orchestra in 1963, the DSO’s budget included total costs of $970,995, income from all sources of $948,500, and a deficit of $22,500. The organization had been carrying a deficit of around $22,000 for several years at that point, but then the funding paradigm changed significantly.⁴⁶

In 1964, the Ford Foundation gave the DSO two million dollars to establish a permanent endowment, half as a gift and half as a matching grant, to be paid out over five years. It was a first for the symphony and tested the powers of the DSO to fundraise in response to what is now commonly known as a “challenge grant.” The first contributors to the matching grant were well-known supporters of the symphony: Eleanor Ford gave $750,000 and John B. Ford gave $250,000. The endowment was projected to produce $200,000 per year for the orchestra, once the fundraising goal had been met.⁴⁷

Still, the DSO continued to seek financial assistance from its established base of donors: in the programs for 1965, full-page ads noted that “Every Minute of Music Costs $90” and that “Your ticket dollar pays for only 30 seconds out of every minute,” with the other half paid for by “generous contributors.” So, even with John B. Ford’s original sponsorship program still in place and endowment funds on the horizon, the organization still continued to ask patrons for financial help.48

Yet the goal of financial stability continued to elude the organization. Throughout the mid-1960s, the total budget for the orchestra grew at an ever faster pace. From a total of $970,000 in 1963–64, expenses for the DSO grew to $1.464 million in 1965–66, to $1.890 in 1966–67, to $2 million in 1967–68, and to $3 million by the early 1970s.⁴⁹

While there were years when there was a surplus, there were also years of catastrophic losses. The president’s report of 1971–72 reports that “expenses exceeded all income by a significant margin,” leaving an operating deficit of over $1.5 million and a total loss of $210,000 for the year. In order to pay for the season, the organization had to spend all of its cash reserves, take out bank loans, and borrow against future earnings from the endowment fund to get through the end of the fiscal year.⁵⁰

These were dire financial straits indeed. The report lists several reasons for the losses, including inflation, which was running at about 3.4 percent in 1972, and would get much worse by the end of the decade. The organization had also lost a grant from the Ford Foundation of about $100,000 per year. While the notes from the Executive Committee indicate that the organization’s president, Robert Semple, was then approaching the Big Three auto companies for $75,000 each, as well as appealing to the McGregor, Kresge, and Wilson Foundations for donations, the Board continued to seek out long-time donors to increase their contributions, with a goal of $1.5 million per year for three years.⁵¹

AN OIL EMBARGO, AND A RECESSION

But even grimmer economic news was to come. In October 1973, there was an embargo on oil coming out of the Middle East. Gas and oil prices escalated immediately, with gas jumping from an average of forty-two cents per gallon to $1.30, and oil prices rising by an incredible 350 percent. There were gas shortages around the country, and prices of everything, from food to manufactured goods to raw materials, escalated dramatically, as the country confronted an economic recession fueled by a worldwide energy crisis.

In Detroit, the damage was particularly dire. In response to the gas shortages, Americans wanted small, fuel-efficient cars, and the Big Three simply couldn’t make the changes to their fleets quickly enough. Car sales plummeted to levels not seen since the late 1940s. It was also the time of the first emergence of Japanese compact cars, and the market share of companies from Japan grew to ten percent by 1978.

The recession took hold in Detroit with a vengeance. Over the span of just ten years, Detroit lost one-third of its total jobs, 208,000 in all. The population dropped as well, to 1.3 million, down twenty-eight percent from its peak in 1950.52

All these changes in the fortunes of Detroit had a significant impact on the financial health of the symphony. Summaries in the financial records for the 1973–74 season state that in income and attendance, the DSO was in “last place among [orchestras] with budgets in excess of $3 million, and only one-third of the average of the top three in dollar sales.” Ticket sales had lagged, with Detroit ranking twelfth among the major orchestras. Some long-term commitments were cut, including the DSO’s residency at the Worcester Festival, because management determined in 1974 that the fee the orchestra was paid was “not keeping up with inflation,” in the words of Robert Semple; the DSO ended their participation in the festival in 1976. Yet there were no new ideas put forward by the Board. The answer to the money woes was the same they had offered for many years:

Contributions and grants must make up any shortfall. Detroit has traditionally been the leader in support from business and industry and ranked second in total contributions in the last year (1973) for which complete data is available. Our foundations and many individuals have been most generous. But only about 2,500 individuals (1974) have been interested enough to lend their personal support. Seven other orchestras have 2 to 3½ times as many contributors—several in cities with much smaller population.⁵³