In May, Florenz Ziegfeld, Sr. visited Berlin and invited Ganz to join the piano department of the Chicago Musical College.
Ganz joined the piano department and became a member of the board of directors of the Chicago Musical College from fall 1900 through spring 1905.
On 5 March 1905, in a Chicago recital at the Music Hall, Fine Arts Building (Chicago), Ganz became the first pianist to perform Maurice Ravel's music (Jeux d'eau (Ravel)) in the United States (Harold Bauer played a first Boston performance of Jeux d'eau on 4 December 1905).
From fall 1905 to spring 1908 Ganz lived in New York City and began concert tours throughout North America, Europe, and Cuba.
On 8 November 1907, in New York's Mendelssohn Hall, Ganz played the American premiere of Ravel's Oiseaux tristes and Barque sur l'ocean (from Miroirs, 1905).
At the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Ganz returned to New York City and taught at the Institute of Musical Art (later The Juilliard School).
The orchestra's first recordings, innovative children's and young people's concerts, as well as extensive spring tours to the Midwest, South, and Southwest were the sources for this new audience.
[4] While in St. Louis, he was initiated as an honorary member of Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia music fraternity in 1924 at the University of Missouri.
In 1923 he received the Légion d'honneur of France for his introduction of the works of Claude Debussy and Ravel to American audiences, and in later years he performed and conducted pieces by Pierre Boulez, John Cage and Arthur Honegger.
Moldenhauer, who was also a friend and former Ganz student, had just discovered a number of original manuscripts in the attic of the Webern home in Mittersill, Austria.
Other students included Dean Sanders (Professor Emeritus, School of Music at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Deniz Arman Gelenbe (1963-64) who is Professor of Piano and Head Emeritus of te Keyboard Department at the Trinity-Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance in London, Audley Wasson (1915-2001), Marion Edna Hall (1910–2012), who taught for many years at the University of Indiana's Jacobs School of Music, Lucy Scarbrough (pianist and conductor), Abby Whiteside, Evelyn Hora, Gena Branscombe, Beatrice Sharp Karan (1918–1909), Evelyn (Wilgus) Lewis, Ilse Gerda Wunsch, Adrian Lerner Newman Goldman, Vera Bradford Arne Sorensen, Sheldon Shkolnik, Jeffrey Siegel, and Ludmila Lazar.