As Mark Russell Smith – music director and conductor of the Quad City Symphony Orchestra (QCSO) -- is artistic director of orchestral studies at University of Minnesota, one of his influential predecessors was a fixture at the University of Iowa, which now hosts an exhibit in his honor.
James Dixon (1928-2007) was the longest-serving conductor in QCSO history – leading the ensemble 29 years. He earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the Iowa City Big Ten school, and led the UI Symphony Orchestra for 40 years.
In celebration of Dixon’s tenure heading the QCSO (1965-1994) and the current exhibition Orchestrating Community: The Public Service of Iowa Conductor James Dixon, on display in the UI Main Library Gallery, the university and QCSO held a virtual panel discussion Thursday, April 2 on what makes great orchestra programs and the towering legacy of Dixon.
Held one day before the 19th anniversary of his death, the panel was moderated by Sarah Suhadolnik, exhibition co-curator and assistant professor for instruction at the UI School of Music, and featured Smith (in his 18th season as QCSO conductor and music director); Hisham Bravo Groover, QCSO assistant conductor and music director for the QC Youth Ensembles; past QCSO musician Dennis Loftin, who played under Dixon’s baton; and present QCSO bassoonist Ben Coelho.
Smith (who lives in Minneapolis) said his programming philosophy is very similar to Dixon.
“It's about balance. It's about being bringing the tried and true and the beloved cornerstone pieces of our repertoire,” he said of combining them with newer or more unfamiliar works.
“We very strongly, like Dixon, continue to believe in fostering new works, in commissioning, in supporting new composers, supporting new works,” Smith said. “But you can't have just that on the program. You need the balance.
"And so balancing the tried and true with the new within a program and also within the whole. For us, the whole six-concert season is also what we're about, balancing eras of composers, from 21st century to Baroque composers," he said.
“How many German romantic pieces are there, how many French pieces, how many South America?” he said. “There are all these different agendas that we have to keep in mind. And it's really an art because you have to have a feel for the audience and what your audience wants.
"And one thing that I think absolutely is continuing from the Dixon days is a trust that our audience has," Smith said. "You know, they may not know every piece that I programmed on a season, but they have come to trust me and us that we're going to present it, first of all, with great passion and with great musicality and with great conviction.
“But also, they may not like it,” the conductor said. “But they know they're going to get something very interesting and thought-provoking, and they know that it's somehow going to work on a program. There's going to be balance in the program. And so somehow it's going to comment or it's going to be a new experience for them. And I mean, just in this past season, the past two Masterworks, we've had world premieres.”
Those premieres were both female composers (which the QCSO has made a priority), Angel Lam and Rebecca Burkhardt.
“It's been a great past couple years, actually. The programming and the audience response to it,” Smith said of the Lam dance-themed piece this past February, commissioned through the League of American Orchestras.
“And so a dance company came in and it just happened that we already had the ‘Rite of Spring,’ like the ultimate dance piece program on the second half,” he said. “So it just kind of really serendipitously happened that we ended up with two amazing dance pieces, one with dancers, with this Chinese dance group, was just like, off the charts fantastic. And then, one of the most important pieces in the whole oeuvre is ‘The Rite of Spring’.”
“That happens when you're open to new ideas and to opening to composers and to commissions and things,” Smith said. He’s also close friends with composer Michael Abels, who’s been performed here many times, and the QCSO will do his new cello concerto next season.
One letter from Dixon in the exhibit says: “If we refuse to listen to new works and please remember, every work is new to its initial listeners, then music will die. It would have died long ago if everyone refused to give new works a chance.”
Curated by Assistant Professor of Instruction Sarah Suhadolnik from the UI School of Music and Rita Benton Music Library Director Katie Buehner, this exhibition explores Dixon’s adventurous international conducting career as well as his important impact on orchestras and musicians at home in Iowa.
The exhibition includes personal correspondences, photographs, artifacts, music scores, audio clips, and much more from the UI Libraries Special Collections and Archives and the Rita Benton Music Library that help tell the story of Dixon’s life and work. These materials and the stories shared by the curators also celebrate the ways in which orchestras of all sizes connect with their local communities.
“This is a story about Iowa and Iowans,” says co-curator Katie Buehner. “While many of the characters in the exhibit travel a great deal to other locations, their roots stay firmly in this community. This is also a story about music and how it brings people together.”
“Dixon operated at all times with a tangible vision of what his ensembles contributed to their respective communities,” says co-curator Sarah Suhadolnik. “I hope visitors will leave the exhibit with a better appreciation for the arts of all sorts as fundamentally collaborative undertakings.”
The James Dixon Papers were recently donated to the UI Libraries by Carey Bostian and Miera Kim, close friends of Dixon. They are also leaders of and core musicians in local nonprofit organization Red Cedar Chamber Music.
The library exhibit will be on view through June 26, 2026.
Challenge of contemporary pieces
“One of the early challenges that the Quad City Symphony faced was contemporary programming,” Loftin (a QCSO percussionist from 1976 to 2009) said.
“In the 1950s, there was a conductor who programmed for the very first time Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra. The audience and the board were not pleased with that piece."
Dixon ran into that kind of thing as well.
“So he stepped carefully, but at the same time he was bringing in works that were written in the late '50s, early '60s, and many of those were very difficult works of that era," Loftin said.
“I'm absolutely thinking about our audience and audience experience all the time, while making sure that we do keep supporting composers, and so we find composers,” Smith said. “So if people get to know the composers as people and believe in supporting them as artists, that also helps.”
“I am not about cramming any down anybody's throat, anything that people don't want to hear,” he noted. “After all these years, we're at a really nice place where everybody works together and there's a trust.”
“People come to the orchestra to be enriched, to learn, to hear old things, to be challenged by new things,” Smith added.
Dixon won countless awards recognizing his significant contributions to the field of music, from the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Medal in 1955, given to the finest young artist of the year for conducting, to the Gustav Mahler Medal in 1963, to a 1978 Laurel Leaf Award from the American Composers Alliance in New York, to several honorary doctorates awarded in the 1980s. He mentored more than 30 conducting students and conducted world premieres of nearly 40 works.
The QCSO today is "extremely intentional about underrepresented and women composers," Smith (a longtime champion of new music) said.
“Absolutely is at the forefront of when we're talking about what new pieces we're going to introduce in our season and how we can make sure that that is addressed, because it is absolutely something that is vitally important for equity's sake."
Loftin recalled his time working with Dixon (including at UI), who was known for a strict, demanding, gruff manner.
“He didn't suffer fools lightly, as one person described him, but he, even though he was gruff, there was always a twinkle there in his eye,” he said. “If he snarled a little bit or seemed to snarl, it was done with a wry joke at the end. And I hope the kids got that. The adults do or did, but I hope the kids understood that he wasn't wagging his finger too strongly at them. He was trying to lead them to greater things.”
Loftin said the conductor also did not call the musicians by their first name in rehearsals.
“Like for the principal oboe, it wasn't Bob or Mary or whomever was the person holding the instrument. It was ‘First oboe, can you do this? Would you play this phrase?’” he recalled. “So there was that professional distance that he maintained, certainly in the rehearsal situations. Dixon was not a social animal with orchestra.”
Connected to UI since ‘40s
An orphan, Dixon grew up in Guthrie Center, Iowa and first enrolled as a music student at the University of Iowa in 1948. On campus, he worked closely with composer, conductor, and director of the University of Iowa School of Music Philip Greeley Clapp (1888–1954).
Off campus, Dixon worked with Dimitri Mitropoulos on formal conducting lessons and informally as an apprentice of sorts during summer breaks throughout the 1950s.
Dixon graduated from the UI with a bachelor’s degree in music in 1952, and a master’s degree in music in 1956. The years on faculty that followed (first from 1954–1959 while he was a graduate student, then from 1962–1997 as a full-time faculty member) completed Dixon’s music education.
As one of only two permanent conductors of the UI Symphony Orchestra, and the longest-serving conductor to date, Dixon built an orchestra dedicated to what he described as “the established masters of music, the furtherance of contemporary music, and a long history of performance of the work of Gustav Mahler—even before that composer’s true greatness was universally accepted.”
After graduating from University of Iowa in 1952, Dixon joined the U.S. Army as a musician. First, he was assigned to the Navel Academy of Music in Washington, D.C., and the Band School at Fort Riley in Kansas. Then, in 1953, he was relocated to Stuttgart, Germany, as an assistant conductor for the Seventh Army Symphony.
This ensemble of military musicians toured the country’s “Amerika Häuser,” or United States Information Agency German American libraries and cultural centers, “acquainting the German public with a hitherto little-known side of American culture.”
In summer of 1953, Dixon’s music director resigned when faced with the prospect of directing a double program of Gian Carlo Menotti (1911-2007) operas The Old Maid and The Thief and The Telephone. Without any operatic conducting experience of his own, Dixon took over rehearsals and debuted as the newly appointed music director of the Seventh Army Symphony in the Aug. 20–21, 1953, performances of The Old Maid and The Thief and The Telephone. The U.S. Army reported an average of 500 people in the audience at each tour stop.
German critics praised the “surprising capabilities” of Dixon and his musicians. On the heels of the successful Seventh Army Symphony Tour, the U.S. State Department sponsored an even larger touring production of The Medium and The Telephone in 1955. For his achievements in cultural diplomacy, Dixon was awarded both a Seventh United States Army Certificate of Achievement and the 1954 Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge International Award in conducting—a prize for “the finest young artist of the year.”
An appointment with the Tri-City (now Quad City) Symphony Orchestra (QCSO) made Iowa James Dixon’s home base for the bulk of his professional life. In 475 performances and over 700 musical works make the conductor the longest-serving music director of the QCSO to date.
Through 1,800 trips from Iowa City to the QC (an hour drive compared to over five hours from Minneapolis), Dixon brought performers, audiences, and patrons of the arts from all walks of life closer together.
Lance Willett, a Dixon student and former executive director of the QCSO, is quoted in the new exhibit: “I think it’s something that rarely, if ever, will be seen again in most communities. That kind of dedication and connection to a community…is the sort of relationship that exists very, very, rarely.”
The QCSO is one of the oldest continuously operating orchestras in the U.S., now nearing completion of its 111th season. In 1965, the 37-year-old Dixon was hired as music director, appointing him steward of this legacy. Budgets, board meetings, and bolstering local pride were all now a part of his work as a conductor.
Although Dixon’s programming choices initially tested the tastes of audiences and administrators alike, he quickly garnered a reputation for steady leadership, the exhibit says.
While learning to work with professional musicians, Dixon also grew into his role in the organization’s ongoing efforts to secure subscribers—members of the community who provide essential annual support. The care Dixon brought to his work combined with his military discipline transformed him into a local celebrity.
In his tenure with the QCSO, Dixon also directed the Youth Symphony, which steadily produced generations of new ensemble performers and concertgoers. The work of the Youth Symphony has also anchored the subsequent development of additional QCSO music education programs, such as “Musicians in the Schools,” which serves over 50,000 students per year.
Hisham Bravo Groover, current director of the QCSO youth ensembles, noted he also continues Dixon's emphasis on modern music for students to play.
For his last performances with the orchestra—April 9 and 10, 1994, at the Adler Theatre in Davenport and Centennial Hall in Rock Island—Dixon selected Symphony No. 5 by Gustav Mahler (1860-1911).
Past and present university presidents and directors of the UI School of Music spoke alongside former students and colleagues at Dixon’s last UI concert at Hancher Auditorium on March 12, 1997. Anyone who did not get a turn at the microphone was offered a seat in the orchestra for the performance of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 6, “Tragic.”
Mahler returns to QCSO Masterworks
It’s fitting the next QCSO Masterworks (April 11-12) highlights Mahler’s Sixth, since he was Dixon’s favorite composer.
“He was an early performer of Mahler, particularly with the universities where he started with that and he brought that forward into his career at the Quad City Symphony as well, to introduce people to this music that needed to be heard,” Loftin said. “In the ‘50s and ‘60s, of course, Mahler had faded from view and only a few orchestras were still playing him. And then Leonard Bernstein helped to rekindle the Mahler candle, so to speak, and light it so that it has burned ever since very, very strongly.
“But Mahler was definitely Dixon's go to, when he could go to, because the resources that it takes to play Mahler always were right up there,” he said. “We did Mahler 8 with the university orchestra and that was quite an event all the way around.”
Mahler is “the master musical psychologist,” Smith said. "The way he uses sounds and the way he uses musical memory and psychological memory is masterful. And I think he's popular because he speaks so directly."
“We have marches, we have fanfares, we have klezmer music, we have breathtaking choral music. We have just the highs and lows," he said.
“And Mahler has said, like, I want the symphony to portray everything," Smith said. "I want the symphony to portray the world and the highs of the world and the lows of the world, and love and anger and passion. I mean, he's covering everything. And that's why I think he speaks to people."
“What is a little unusual is that his symphonies are long and that is very countercultural now. And we're such a visual society and like sound bites are 35 seconds.
"We're really countercultural in that way," he said. "But as far as the vividness, as far as the experience, as far as sitting in a place and feeling something and taking a journey, there is no other composer like Mahler," he said.
"And so it's a thrill for a conductor. I think it's a thrill for an orchestra," Smith said. "I mean, he challenges an orchestra to the nth degree, just instrumentally and psychologically and endurance-wise. And so you just take a magical journey. And if counterculturally, you allow yourself to sit there and take the 65-minute journey of Mahler Symphony No. 6, then on the other side of it, you are a different person.
"And we've collectively done this together," he added. "And that's something that I think as humans, we need to do. Have these communal experiences — the highs and lows through a great artist like Mahler. He's just one of those amazing artists for the ages."
The Mahler Symphony No. 6 is 79 minutes long (according to the QCSO website), but it is not his longest (which is the Third, topping out at about 110 minutes). In contrast, the Beethoven Ninth is typically a little over 60 minutes.
The QCSO Masterworks finale (appropriately No. 6) will be at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, April 11 at the Adler (136 E. 3rd St., Davenport), and 2 p.m. Sunday, April 12 at Centennial Hall (3703 7th Ave., Rock Island).
Presented in partnership with “Violins of Hope,” the opening work is J.S. Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins, featuring QCSO violinists Emily Nash and Sabrina Tabby and members of the orchestra performing on historic violins, symbols of resilience, hope, and remembrance.
The concert culminates in Mahler’s gripping Sixth Symphony, an emotional testament to humanity’s strength and ultimate triumph over adversity, according to the orchestra. For tickets and more information, visit QCSO.org.
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