Arts in Seattle - The 1980s

The 1980s

But it wasn't until the 1980s that Seattle began to be generally recognized as an important performing arts locale. One of the key events in this respect was the Seattle Opera's ambitious and successful staging, under its founding general director Glynn Ross, of Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen. Performed in its entirety every summer from 1975 through 1983 back-to-back cycles (first in German, then in English, by 1982, the New York Times reported that Seattle had become a serious rival to Bayreuth. Seattle's Wagner festival has continued to the present day, albeit no longer quite such an ambitious annual event. In 1982 the Seattle Chamber Music Society was formed for the purposes of presenting a summer festival of chamber music. The organization has since expanded to include a winter festival and regularly includes internationally recognized artists such as Cynthia Phelps and James Ehnes on their artist roster.

The popular music scene at the time included such teen-pop bands as the Allies (whose song "Emma Peel" received a good deal of local play, but never broke out nationally) and the Heaters (later "the Heats"). That same era saw the more sophisticated pop of the short-lived Visible Targets and the still-performing Young Fresh Fellows and Posies; the pop-punk of The Fastbacks; and the outright punk of the Fartz (later Ten Minute Warning).

By the late '80s a group of thirty artists had organized themselves into an organization called Northwest Crafts Alliance. This group's purpose is to promote emerging and established artisans through their art show Best of the Northwest. Today this alliance includes over five hundred local, regional, and nationally acclaimed artisans.