Archives West Finding Aid

Stanley Chapple was director of the University of Washington School of Music from 1948 to 1962

When Stanley Chapple retired in 1971 from the University of Washington, he had hoped to spend his retirement years writing symphony and opera music. Instead he was approached by Seattle Mayor Wes Uhlman to begin a senior music program through the newly established Mayor's Office for Senior Citizens. It was the beginning of a new career for Chapple and for the senior community.

Stanley Chapple had already accumulated a remarkable musical career. In 1920, at the age of nineteen, he was hired as director of the City of London School's opera, and two years later he was invited to appear as a guest conductor with the London Symphony Orchestra; and shortly after he was made head director. In 1930, the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra invited Chapple to appear as guest conductor, and by the end of the decade he had become one of the most coveted guest conductors on the European Philharmonic circuit, traveling to Vienna, the Hague, and Warsaw.

The young conductor's dream of going to Russia was ruined when war broke out in 1939. He was in Boston at the time and a tour to Russia had to be cancelled. The English ambassador in Washington D.C. asked him to stay in America to "promote good will". During the war, Chapple conducted the National Symphony in the Watergate concerts.

In 1940, the director of the Boston Symphony opened a school for conductors and orchestra musicians in Massachusetts; and made Chapple its director. Thus was born Tanglewood, a music academy that is still going strong today. Leonard Bernstein was Chapple's first student there.

Chapple was invited to teach at the University of Washington and to be its director of the UW School of Music in 1948, when the active dean of the department heard him at Tanglewood.

When the Seattle Symphony lost its conductor in 1950, Chapple took over and virtually remodeled Seattle's culture. He used the Symphony as a means of introducing Seattle to the opera, ballet, and the theater. During his tenure as conductor, he greatly enhanced the professional level of symphony players.

In 1962, Chapple became director of symphony and opera at the University of Washington, and when he retired in 1971, Mayor Wes Uhlman asked him to direct the Seattle Senior Symphony (Musicians Emeritus) a program providing "encouragment and help to former music-makers wishing to resume their participation in music-making". For the next fourteen years Stanley Chapple was the much beloved conductor of Musicians Enmeritus Symphony Orchestra and Thalia Symphony Orchestra. (Source: http://www.mesoseattle.org/about.html)