The Spirit of Music is a memorial to Theodore Thomas (1835-1905), first conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (CSO). German-born Thomas was a nationally respected violinist and conductor who settled in Chicago in 1889 to help establish the city's first permanent orchestra. After his orchestra played in the Auditorium Theater for many years, Thomas achieved his dream of building Orchestra Hall, designed by architect Daniel H. Burnham. Thomas dedicated the new building in December of 1904, but died only a few weeks later.
The B.F. Ferguson Fund commissioned the sculpture which was erected and unveiled in the south garden of the Art Institute facing Orchestra Hall in 1924. Albin Polasek (1879-1965), an internationally renowned sculptor who had emigrated from Czechoslovakia, and American architect Howard Van Doren Shaw (1869-1926) created the artwork. It featured a bronze figure of a muse that stood in front of a forty-foot long granite exedra and bench with a carved freize depicting Thomas and the orchestra members in relief.
Over the years, the sculpture was moved to several different locations in Grant Park. By the 1940s, the orginial granite exedra and bench had been separated from the bronze sculpture and placed in storage. A lakefront jogger discovered pieces of the carved granite exedra that had been dumped amidst the riprap along the edge of Lake Michigan in the early 1990s. The Chicago Park District soon retrieved the pieces, restored the sculpture and exedra and installed them in a new location at Balbo Drive and Michigan Avenue. The Chicago Park District created a new Spirit of Music Garden surrounding the sculpture and in recent years this has become the venue for Summer Dance, a popular annual outdoor music and dance series.
