Music now and then: Cincinnati

By Andrew Chrisanthus

At the heart of Cincinnati’s music culture, and it’s historic Over the Rhine Neighborhood, is Cincinnati Music Hall. Sitting just over a mile from the Ohio River, Music Hall is the jewel of Cincinnati’s Over the Rhine, and its blocks of intact 19th-century architecture. Constructed in 1878, designated as a National Historic Landmark in 1975, Cincinnati’s Music Hall and its Victorian-gothic architecture, has been and will continue to be a part of Cincinnatians’ and the cities visitors’ DNA for generations.

Home to the Cincinnati Opera (the nation’s second-oldest opera company), Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra (the nation’s sixth-oldest symphony orchestra), May Festival (the longest-running choral festival in the Western hemisphere), and Cincinnati Ballet; Music Hall has a global reputation for being a premier venue for classical music, but is so much more. This famed hall served as the city’s first convention center helping to establish it as more than just a home for classics. Industrial exhibits, political conventions & presidential visits, sporting events, trade shows, and everything in between, even the circus, has been held in the three buildings which make up the hall’s recognizable façade, but it’s called Music Hall for a reason. Frank Sinatra, Miles Davis, Bruce Springsteen, Prince, Elton John, Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan, The White Stripes, Phish, and Cincinnati’s own The National, have performed on the Hall’s stage; making it a premier venue for all music, new and old.

Cincinnati’s Washington Park sits footsteps from Music Hall’s grand entryway, providing a beautiful green space to accompany the hall. The park received a $48 million renovation and expansion in 2012, which was followed by a $143 million renovation to Music Hall proper in 2016. After all the renovations to it and the surrounding area were complete the glorious hall reopened in the fall of 2017 and is now primed to continue to provide a world-class musical and community space for Cincinnati and all its visitors for years to come. Continuing in its legacy as being a venue for classics and cutting-edge material Cincinnati Music Hall will present the U.S. debut of Another Brick in the Wall, Roger Water’s opera based on Pink Floyd’s iconic The Wall album, this July 20 – 31, 2018.

After 140 years this hall and what it still provides helps show us how a facility built for music can be so much more to a city, now and then.