The lunch that built a competition: Fischoff, 1973

1973 - 2023

The founding: In 1973 Joseph E. Fischoff and his fellow members of the South Bend Chamber Music Society sat down to lunch at the former Summit Club and founded a chamber music competition. Six ensembles played the first year. Notre Dame now describes the Fischoff as the largest and longest-running chamber music competition in the United States, drawing about 125 to 135 ensembles a year, and its education programmes have served more than 95,000 children since 1995, many of them from Title 1 South Bend schools. Fischoff himself belongs in this section's ethnic thread as much as its musical one: he was born in Hungary, came to South Bend as a child, and graduated from South Bend High School in 1925, a Hungarian immigrant schoolboy who grew up to give his factory city the nation's chamber music championship.

The move and the fiftieth: The competition sat at Indiana University South Bend until 2002, when it moved across the river's gravity well to Notre Dame's new DeBartolo Performing Arts Center, the subject of the Notre Dame article below. The 50th competition ran from 12 to 14 May 2023, and its gala was held at the Palais Royale, the Morris's ballroom of 1922: the city's newest cultural institution celebrating its half century in its oldest surviving ballroom, under the roof Ella Morris saved. The joins in this section are not decoration. South Bend's culture is a small enough world that its institutions keep meeting in each other's rooms, and the Fischoff's whole history, a chamber society's lunch, a public university's hall, a great university's concert hall, a rescued ballroom, is that world in one organisation.

Sources:

1. Notre Dame Public Affairs and Arts ND, January 2023 (the founding of 1973 by Joseph E. Fischoff and the South Bend Chamber Music Society at the former Summit Club; six ensembles the first year; the largest and longest-running chamber music competition in the United States; 125 to 135 ensembles a year; Fischoff born in Hungary, a South Bend childhood, South Bend High School 1925; Indiana University South Bend until 2002, then DeBartolo; the education programmes' 95,000 children since 1995).
2. The Violin Channel, Fischoff Competition interview (the competition's history and education work).
3. Fischoff anniversary programmes, in Michiana Memory, St. Joseph County Public Library (the 50th competition of 12 to 14 May 2023; the gala at the Palais Royale).