A Special Presentation by Scott Schwartz and Nolan Vallier
From spacious concert halls to packed bars, people’s homes, sidewalks, and local churches, the Champaign-Urbana community has been filled with the sound of music. For the last one hundred years, all these performance spaces have helped shape our community’s music tastes—each venue speaking in its own unique way.
C-U’s diverse performance spaces—Mabels, Huff Gym, the Red Lion, Nature’s Table, the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts, Chances R, Parkland College, the Red Herring, Foellinger Auditorium, the Iron Post, Memorial Stadium, Smith Music Hall, the Rose Bowl, Altgeld Hall, the Canopy Club, the State Farm Center, and the Virginia Theatre—have played and continue to play a vital role defining who we are as a community.
With every artistic event, these spaces have been continually re-shaped by the performances given in them. While it is impossible to discuss every performance venue that has been used by artists to create and express their craft, our current exhibition, “Spaces Speak: The Sounds of CU’s Music Venues,” explores many of Champaign-Urbana’s well remembered venues through the lenses of the audiences and performers who performed in these unique spaces.
Our noon-time presentation will explore through photographs and audio-visual recordings the music and performers that played in many of these unique venues including Dan Fogelberg, Guido Sinclair, Adrian Belew, Marching Illini, the University of Illinois Black Chorus, Billy Joel, Willie Nelson, and many others. We will also discuss Fogelberg’s 1976 performance at the Virginia Theater and his 1981 and 1993 performances at the Assembly Hall as well as the Farm Aid concerts held at Memorial Stadium in 1985.
For more information about Director and Archivist for Music and Fine Arts for the Sousa Archives and Center for American Music Scott Schwartz and Dr. Nolan Vallier, lecturer in the School of Music and an assistant at the Sousa Archives and Center for American Music, please contact Scott Schwartz and Nolan Vallier at 217-333-4577 or sousa@illinois.edu.
Scott W Schwartz is the Director and Archivist for Music and Fine Arts for the Sousa Archives and Center for American Music at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Prior to his arrival to Illinois in September 2003 he worked as an archivist for the Duke Ellington and American music collections at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History. His college degrees are in music education, performance, and music history. His primary areas of research focus on preserving America’s music heritage, American popular music, and American wind bands and the 19th- and 20th-century school band movement. He is also Associate Professor of Library Administration and teaches courses in archives administration and archival arrangement and description through the University’s Graduate School for Library and Information Science. Since his arrival at the University of Illinois he has played the lead role in the development of a research center for America’s music and has been responsible for the re-energizing of a national celebration, American Music Month, which recognizes the contributions made by musicians, educators, archivists, librarians, and curators to preserve America’s diverse musical heritage. In 2022 he was recognized by the American Bandmasters Association with the Edwin Franko Goldman Citation award for his contributions to the preservation of America’s wind band traditions. Previous recipients of the Goldman citation include Composer Meredith Willson of The Music Man (1964), leading Sousa scholar Paul Bierley (1974) and John Philip Sousa III (1989), President William Jefferson Clinton (1994), University of Illinois alumnus John Haynie (2007), and composer John Williams (2020).
Dr. Nolan Vallier serves as a lecturer in the School of Music and an assistant at the Sousa Archives and Center for American Music. Passionate about regional music and architecture, Nolan’s research explores site-specific music communities that regularly perform within buildings and landscapes designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and his followers. A father of two beautiful girls--Luna and Mavin--, Nolan loves attending regional festivals and discovering micro-urban communities around the US with his family. This summer Nolan’s family are headed to the Great Smoky Mountains and Dollywood.
