Music Makes a City

Music Makes a City begins with news reports of the near-total devastation of Louisville, Kentucky, in the winter of 1937, when the Ohio River flooded 70 percent of the city. In an effort to rebuild the city’s spirit, visionary Mayor Charles Farnsley and conductor Robert Whitney established the Louisville Orchestra, which would become a renowned international center for commissioning and recording works by living composers (Elliot Carter, Chou Wen-chung, and Lukas Foss among them). With its beautiful location cinematography by Marcel Cabrera and its careful attention to sound and orchestration, this film, like the others in Brown’s music trilogy, deserves be seen—and heard—in BAMPFA’s Barbro Osher Theater.