I’ve done some research on former @chicagotribune arts critic Claudia Cassidy, and sometimes I'm asked if she was the paper’s first female chief music critic. No, she was not – that honor seems to go to 24-y.o. Ruth Miller, who deserves a profile of her own tbh (thread).

Ruth Miller was born in Missouri but grew up in Topeka, KS, where she was known as a local violin prodigy. While still a teen, she moved to Chicago for her musical studies, and also spent a year in Berlin, which she recounted to the Topeka Daily Capital Sun (fourth pic).

She was so accomplished that she actually soloed with the CSO in 1915, at Ravinia, for a “Student-Artist Day.”

Eventually she moved to Chicago and held a violin studio in Room 707 of the Fine Arts Building. The 1920 census reports that she was living in Hyde Park, at a boardinghouse at 5430 S. Cornell. She lists her occupation as “musician” (see above gray line)…

…but she also wrote for The Saturday Evening Post on American musical aesthetics. (Choice line: “I’m for progress myself and the maligned modern musical idiom has always been a thing of joy to me, but I avoid freak modern music as I do hash—and for the same reason.”)

In September 1920, she wrote a witty, self-deprecating personal essay that was featured in the Post’s “Who’s Who and Why” feature, alongside another up-and-comer named... F. Scott Fitzgerald.

the same year, she was announced as the new critic of the Tribune. She’d only serve as chief music critic for one season, but what a season: She covered the U.S. premieres of Holst’s Planets and Mahler 7, reviewed Rachmaninoff (x2), saw Prokofiev, Kreisler, Farrar, Caruso…

She was especially fond of Mary Garden, reviewing her glowingly. (She also covered the world premiere of The Love for Three Oranges, put on by Garden’s company, in a long-form piece for the Post.)

As far as I can tell, she was well-respected in Chicago. One commentator said: “[Miller] invariably uses the ‘other’ word in place of the one which would first come into the mind of the ordinary writer.”

After 1923, though, the record gets fuzzy. I *hope* that she is the Ruth Miller that wrote this long-form piece for Ladies’ Home Journal, skewering the sexist stigma of divorce. It quotes a Chicago woman and includes an interview with a Cook County Judge.

But I don’t know what happened to Ruth Miller, or when she died. When I first compiled all this research three summers ago, I tried and tried but had no luck. I can only hope she kept writing.

(An important postscript: Miller wasn’t the first female music critic in Chicago. Henriette Weber was at the Herald-Examiner at the same time, leaving the same year Miller joined the Trib. Weber was a pianist and hosted “Opera Talks” around the city.)