CHICAGO — For the entire Labor Day weekend, festival-goers young and old danced from dusk to dawn around Chicago courtesy of ARC Music Festival.
From Thursday night to the late hours of Tuesday morning, ARC Music Festival hosted a weekend celebration of house music and the city itself.
“You can find house music seven days a week here and you can’t say that about many places,” Chicago house music legend Mike Dunn said. “There’s always going to be some house in the city. Somewhere, in some nook or cranny in the city.”
While now a mainstream genre, some may be unaware that a small community in Chicago laid the foundation for house music that’s enjoyed around the world.
“The ashes of Disco’s black and queer culture in the late 70s laid the foundation for a new genre of dance music that was conceptualized in the clubs of Chicago, and thus house music was born,” SPIN magazine wrote in 2021.
It still thrives decades later, with the proof coming at the ARC Music Festival, which was filled with house music for three days at Union Park.
“Even in other places where they love house music, it’s not as pervasive. I just feel like the city couldn’t shake it if it tried,” Smartbar resident DJ and Bay Area-native, Madeline, said. “It’s so deeply embedded in the culture here. You hear it on the radio, you hear people driving by playing classic house tracks, and you have people of all generations engaging in it.”
What’s fitting is that this weekend-long celebration of this type of music was just under two miles from where it all started.
“Without The Warehouse, there would literally be no house music,” Max Chavez, Director of Research & Special Projects with Preservation Chicago said.
Located at 206 South Jefferson Street in Chicago’s West Loop, “The Warehouse” is considered sacred ground for house music as it “influenced and shaped the rich culture that was pioneered and purveyed.”
“The Warehouse opened in 1977 with DJ Frankie Knuckles and a state-of-the-art sound system per the vision of owner Robert Williams to convert an old industrial building into a vibrant nightclub creating dancefloor freedom for Chicago’s Black gay community,” Preservation Chicago stated.
But in 1982, The Warehouse was deemed unsafe by the city and Williams was forced to close the nightclub. While other establishments and music festivals have come and gone, house music remains constant in and around Chicagoland.
“It wasn’t until I moved (to Chicago) that I really started to learn that house music came from here and dig into the history of Chicago house music specifically,” Madeline said. “I know people who have grown up here often say they’ve heard house music on the radio for their whole life and that was not my experience at all.”
But hosting a house and techno specific music festival didn’t seem possible to many, including some Chicago artists.
“In Chicago before this festival, everything was very much about EDM and really selling to a younger market,” Chicagoland-native and techno DJ Hiroko Yamamura said. “How to move tickets on a house music specific festival seemed unimaginable ten years ago.”
With the right instrument and the right music, you can actually hear history
The beautiful notes of Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadé Mozart filled the Miller House parlor last weekend as Daniel Adam Maltz, a fortepianist based in Vienna, Austria, performed for the Washington County Historical Society.
Maltz played on a modern replica of a historical 1792 fortepiano, which travels with him for his more than 50 performances a year.
“It’s a joy when I have the opportunity to play in historic places like here at the Miller House because this is how music was experienced,” he said during an interview with the society.
Hearing Maltz play a fortepiano in the Miller House parlor was a chance to experience music as it was heard in the past. Maltz’s performances demonstrated how live music sounded at the time William Price originally built the Miller House in 1825.
Fortepianist Daniel Adam Maltz performs at the Miller House in downtown Hagerstown.
While there are no records of William Price owning a fortepiano, Washington County’s wealthy could afford such an instrument in the 1820s. Hagerstown merchants such as Parker Blood (1800-1832) sold fortepianos and other musical instruments from their shops along West Washington Street. In 1823, a music teacher named John Krauth advertised piano forte lessons in Hagerstown’s Torch Light & Public Advertiser for interested ladies and gentlemen.
One wonders how many party guests William Price invited to the Miller House to listen to pianists perform the same works by Haydn and Mozart that Maltz plays today.
Made by Paul McNulty, Maltz’s fortepiano is historically accurate, constructed of wood from the same forests where original Viennese piano makers got theirs. The leathers used for the fortepiano’s hammers came from a sheep farm in Germany that hasn’t crossbred its flock since the 18th century.
These details bring modern listeners close to hearing what Mozart’s instruments sounded like when they were built. “I’m so thankful that people are out there who care that deeply about historical accuracy,” Maltz said, “because it allows someone like me to come in and paint that picture.”
Maltz was born in a small town in South Carolina. His parents, both musicians, instilled in him a love for music from a young age. He began playing music and studying composition at age 5. Beethoven’s symphonies were the first pieces that influenced him to pursue music.
Maltz specializes in Classical-era keyboard music, specifically Viennese Classicism. His interest in the genre was always strong, but his journey to becoming a concert pianist was “a long and bumpy road,” filled with the experiences, mistakes and surprises of a young musician.