Frederic Ingersoll and the road to an orchestra

1894 — 1932

One violinist built the road: Orchestral music in South Bend begins, in the Symphony's own published history, fourteen years before the Symphony: "Orchestral music in South Bend began 14 years before the inception of the South Bend Symphony Orchestra." The man who began it was Frederic Ingersoll, a violinist from Cleveland who had spent four years studying in Berlin and Switzerland and came to South Bend in 1894. He taught privately for twelve years. In 1906 Milton B. Griffith established the South Bend Conservatory and hired him, and Ingersoll rose to direct it. By 1918, as the conservatory's director, he formed what the orchestra's history calls the first professional symphony in South Bend, drawn from his own pupils together with local musicians. It played until the Depression forced it to fold in 1932. The conservatory orchestra was not the only orchestral music in the city in those years — the St. Cecilia Society's concert with a South Bend Orchestra at the Auditorium in 1913, carried in the entry above, shows an orchestral body under that name five years earlier — but Ingersoll's is the line the city's orchestral institution itself claims, and the claim is printed as the institution states it: the professional line starts with his pupils in 1918, and it ends, for its first chapter, with the Depression in 1932 — the same year the present orchestra was founded out of another teacher's students. The city's nineteenth-century orchestral life before Ingersoll — theater orchestras, the Auditorium's bills — stands in the Theaters record; no earlier permanent orchestra is documented in the record reached.

Sources:

1. South Bend Symphony Orchestra, published history (southbendsymphony.org, "About"), read first-hand — Ingersoll's 1894 arrival, Berlin and Switzerland study, private teaching to 1906, the South Bend Conservatory under Milton B. Griffith, the 1918 first professional symphony formed from his pupils and local musicians, and its folding in the Depression in 1932.
2. St. Joseph County immigrant societies record — the 1913 South Bend Orchestra datum carried in the St. Cecilia Society entry above.