“You may sometimes notice when you sit on the back porch after dinner that there are other back porches with people on them,” says Ben Hecht at the opening of his short story Grass Figures.

He then goes on to notice that wherever he goes and whatever he does there are the inevitable other people also there, also doing the same thing: shopping, lying on the grass, going to the theater, you name it.

In a flash of solipsistic insight he decides that the whole city is a “vast, broken mirror giving him back garbled images of himself.” He then thinks if he can figure out what it is he’s doing with his life then by extension he’ll know what other people are doing with theirs and maybe find the secret to everything.

But he isn’t doing anything with his life but waiting he says, and so that must be what everyone is doing: waiting.  Life is “a few years of suspended animation,” and nothing more. But there’s no story in that, better forget it.

Hecht was a young man in Chicago when he wrote those words. Despite his pessimistic tone, (which would only get worse in later years reaching its peak in his screenplay for the original Scarface) Hecht wanted nothing more at this time than to unlock the secret of people.

He had an uncanny ear for dialogue and for writing people of all backgrounds exactly as they actually talked.  His first major project was to convince his editor at the Daily News to let him write very short stories inspired by people he saw on the streets of Chicago.  They ran in the paper every day for a year and have since been collected as 1001 Afternoons in Chicago.

Back in 2014 ACM collaborated with Strawdog Theater to adapt six of the very best of these stories into a radio play for voices and music.  My colleague Amos Gillespie and I wrote the music and I’m really excited to announce that we’ve finally made a digital release of the album.  I’m truly not sure what took us so long to do this.

I’m very proud of how this turned out and hope you can give it a listen! Just click on the image below.

In Italo Calvino’s short story The Light Years, the narrator is a primordial immortal who spans time and space.  Even so, he has a few concerns.  One of which is surveillance.  One day he notices that an unknown entity has hung a sign on a galaxy a hundred million light years away that says simply “I saw you.”

By multiplying the distance times the speed of light, the narrator is able to look up the exact day in question in his diary and finds that in fact there was something he did that day that he’s not at all proud of. In fact it’s something he wants to hide. Soon, just a few tens of millions of years later, he begins to see other signs also saying “I saw you.”

The story is from 1965 and it’s part of a collection called Cosmicomics in which Calvino took a scientific fact, often very new findings from quantum mechanics, and created an inventive story around it.  In this case the fact concerns the expansion of the universe.

As the galaxies get farther and farther apart, the narrator is increasingly unable to clarify his good intentions with response signs until communication ceases altogether and he’s left knowing that for some people in the universe he’ll only be that one bad thing he wishes he hadn’t done.

Other stories concern the speed of light, the formation of the universe, the appearance of colors and probably the best-known of the stories, a love triangle from the time when the moon and Earth were so close together you could easily step from one to the other.

In between other projects for the last couple of years I’ve been writing a large-scale chamber piece inspired by many of these stories.  It’s about halfway done now and I’m hoping to boogie and get the last few pieces done in time to record it this fall for a release in early 2023.  In the meantime though I’ve been lucky enough that every movement I’ve finished so far has been performed somewhere.

Next up is, you guessed it, The Light Years, which will be premiered this Sunday at the Queens New Music Festival by the RAM Players.  Calvino’s story is light and funny and meant as a joke but I can’t help but wonder what he would have thought of social media.

My piece is a reaction to the many emotions living our lives in public can elicit: anxiety, joy, melancholy and obsession which is represented by a hard driving toy piano part.

Well, it’s a real piano instructed to be played like a toy piano which is not the same thing but, as Calvino, (and Carl Sagan for that matter,) would be quick to point out, they do both come from star stuff. So, there’s that.

This piece was originally commissioned by the Ear Taxi Festival in Chicago in 2016.  The festival coincided with the 100th anniversary of the publication of Carl Sandburg’s Chicago Poems collection so I decided to set one of those poems.

Many of them are homages to a muscular, urban city but I found one that almost like a haiku.  Called Nocturne in a Deserted Brickyard, it’s a different kind of poem.  Still, meditative. The image is of moonlight reflecting onto a small pool of water in a brickyard at night after the laborers have long since gone home.  I was smitten.

The piece was premiered twice as part of the festival and then sat on the proverbial shelf for six years. Until now!  Random Access Music will be performing the work twice this upcoming weekend.  Once on April 30 at Culture Lab in Queens and then the following night at the National Opera Center in Manhattan.

The Wurtz-Berger duo will give a reprise performance of my piece Hot Streak for piano and cello at the legendary Green Mill Tavern in Chicago on Sunday, May 1st at 4:00 PM.

Of the many things that were canceled way back in the spring of 2020 the one I most regretted having to miss was the New York Times Crossword Puzzle Tournament.  I had been thinking about participating for years but had finally actually registered and was all set to compete.

But it was canceled and then the following year they held it digitally but I somehow never got the invite and only found out about it after the fact like a schnook.  But this year I’m going!

Look at all those wonderful nerds doing crossword puzzles! Doesn’t it warm your heart? On April 1st and, should I demonstrate sufficient skill to advance, April 2nd and 3rd, I will enter the hallowed deluxe conference center at the Marriott Hotel in Stamford, Connecticut to take my rightful place among them.  And I shall conquer.

It’s going to be a heady weekend. In addition to solving six puzzles a day, we will be treated to a ton of special programs including a palindrome fight, a Wordle contest featuring remarks by Wordle creator and newly-minted millionaire Josh Wardle and last but not least a new musical written and performed by Yale students called Word Nerd which honestly I will probably skip.

Thankfully there don’t seem to be any events involving puns.  I have to admit that my only trepidation in going to this thing is a fear of spending my weekend with a bunch of punsters.  I draw the line at puns you see.

Anyway, wish me luck!

My latest piece If It Bleeds, It Leads, for bass flute, bass trombone and double bass will be premiered on February 19th at the Greenwich Music House in Manhattan.

Nearly two weeks ago I had the extraordinary honor of sharing the stage with one of the world’s foremost architects, Daniel Libeskind.

I had written him through the contact page on his website to ask if he would be willing to be a guest on the Relevant Tones festival at which we’d screen several videos from ACM’s new project Songs About Buildings and Moods, a series of videos exploring the intersection between music and architecture, and incredibly, he said yes.

The other person on the panel is Dorothy Dunn from Open House New York, one of the sponsors of the event.  This evening was really important for me because ACM has put a lot of resources into this new series and this was the first time we were showing any of the videos publicly. In short, I was nervous.

Ultimately each video will combine narrative about the space with conversation from the composer about how the space inspired them and then we fade all the background sounds away and we hear the piece performed while watching exquisitely-shot footage of the space.

Our production team does a great job lingering on details and following the narrative arc of the piece with the photography.  We stay away from any scientific or technical aspects of music and architecture and focus on emotionality instead.  How does a building make us feel?  How does a piece of music make us feel? Each space is an immersion into a totally different world.

For example, The First Church of Deliverance in Bronzeville, seen above, was designed by Walter T. Bailey, Chicago’s first licensed Black architect. The church was built in a Streamline Moderne style, which is not exactly the norm for a house of worship.

To top it off, Bailey put a huge multi-colored mosaic of a cross on the ceiling and, as if that weren’t enough, it lights up.  The church is more than its architectural legacy though. It is a vital institution in Bronzeville with a rich history and a mission that has had a positive impact on the lives of tens of thousands of people since it opened in 1929.

We’ve finished the videos for five sites total and will be pitching them to major media outlets early next year and hopefully releasing them soon after so hopefully you won’t have long to wait to see them.

But you can get a special sneak peek at the video of the First Church of Deliverance tonight as part of a virtual conversation with Open House Chicago. Last minute notice I know…

Join composer Regina Baiochhi, Reverend James Bryson Jr., design writer and critic Zach Mortice and me for an exciting conversation about this unique space that will culminate in a screening of the video.

Today at 5:30 PM Central/6:30 Eastern
Virtual Presentation
Free with Registration

I overhead an argument recently between two composers about whether or not to leave applause at the end of a live recording when sharing it on social media. The argument against doing so seemed to be that leaving the applause signaled a kind of desperation to show that the audience liked the piece and that their approval of the piece was important to you.

Taking the applause out showed that you were above such concerns and merely wanted to share a live performance of your music with people on the off chance that they had some extra time on their hands and were looking to fill it with unfamiliar music.

My own opinion is that you leave the applause in however long it takes for someone to yell woo! If no one yells woo then you leave the applause in but fade it immediately to hide the fact that the applause is perfunctory in nature and they didn’t really like your piece.

Getting applause is the easy part. I’ve never been to a concert where a piece didn’t get some applause, though of course I’ve sometimes had a sneaking suspicion that we were applauding the fact that the piece had finally ended.

But no one yells woo unless they mean it.  Woo just isn’t the kind of thing you yell willy-nilly.

In my early years I confess that I tried often to rig the system. I once wrote a piece with an ending calculated to elicit the maximum number of woos by giving everyone a trill with a big crescendo leading to a final crashing chord.  It worked and the woos rang throughout the hall.  But I felt cheapened by the experience rather than emboldened.

I’ve since rewritten that piece to end with twenty minutes of awkward silence during which half of the musicians are instructed to eat some kind of snack, ideally a Fruit Roll-Up, while the other half stare hungrily.  There are no longer woos though the piece does still get a polite smattering of applause.

Naturally I fade it down.

Written for Newcity Magazine’s September 2021 issue

“I had the image of a composer’s head—imagine that famous bust of Beethoven—with a line of ten taxicabs driving out of each ear,” says composer and musical powerhouse Augusta Read Thomas of the first Ear Taxi Festival in 2016. “The image illustrates that Ear Taxi Festival is taking you on many composers’ aural taxi rides, each one fresh, fun, engaging and unique and played by a huge array of world-class musicians.”

I’ve always loved that image of an ethereal taxi cab ferrying musical ideas from the composer straight to the listener. We often come into a concert with preset expectations of what music should sound like or what a given musical act will perform but this image turns that on its ear, so to speak, in that it presupposes that the listener is receptive to new ideas and sounds coming from a different perspective.

The 2016 Ear Taxi Festival was an enormous success, planned as a one-off festival showcasing the depth and breadth of new music in Chicago. Spearheaded by Thomas with curatorial input from Stephen Burns and invaluable production help from Reba Cafarelli, Ear Taxi was such a hit that it was scarcely over before there was talk of mounting a reboot.

Curatorial director Michael Lewanski and executive and artistic director Jennie Oh Brown have planned an ambitious festival with hundreds of events taking place in neighborhoods all over the city.

The 2021 Ear Taxi festival’s initial mainstage concert on September 19 celebrates LGBTQ musicians in Chicago and closes on October 4 with a concert by jazz trumpeter Chad McCullough that features composer Matt Ulery on bass. In between is a dizzying array of performances and talks that showcase the incredible variety of new music in Chicago and take place in neighborhoods throughout the city, an important part of the festival’s mission.

“It’s a huge city, and we are all better served to go to neighborhoods we don’t normally go to, and to learn about new venues,” Lewanski says. “Big picture: we want to contribute to positive culture change. Our field faces huge challenges: systemic racism, economic inequality, precarity, accessibility for starters. Clearly we can’t solve these problems ourselves, but we hope to facilitate conversations that lead to real, tangible, in-the-world changes. The goal is for all of us to grow.”

Though she is not directly involved in the planning of the 2021 Ear Taxi Festival, Thomas looms large. Jennie Oh Brown says that “the one aspect that I hope people will see as a continuation from Ear Taxi Festival 2016 is something I’ve heard Gusty describe as the ‘citizenship’ of her work in general; this is truly the spirit of the first Ear Taxi Festival in 2016. Ear Taxi Festival was always intended to be a vehicle to serve the entire new music community of Chicago: to showcase, uplift, and provide meaningful opportunities for our truly world-class local artists… Or in Gusty’s words, ‘Go team!’”

The lineup is divided into Mainstage concerts and Spotlight concerts, plus professional development workshops. It’s a staggering list of performances, so here are a few of my personal must-see shows.

Part of the Mainstage series, D-Composed is a “Chicago-based chamber music experience that honors Black creativity and culture through the music of Black composers,” and they’ll take to the stage on October 3 at the Epiphany Center for the Arts.

Quince Ensemble plans a fascinating program for September 30 at the Kehrein Center for the Arts in the Austin neighborhood and ~Nois, a saxophone quartet, will give the world premiere of a work by Annika Socolofsky, which will also feature vocals by the composer, at Constellation on October 3.

Also on October 3, Devin Clara Fanslow’s ensemble Fire Thief will perform a set of original music at the Epiphany Center for the Arts.

There are three new pieces commissioned by the Ear Taxi Festival. Zachary Good and Tonia Ko collaborated on a work called “Up High,” an installation and concert piece in which the two artists confront a shared fear of heights by performing at the Performance Penthouse on the ninth floor of the Logan Center for the Arts, atop pedestals while wearing custom-made bubble-wrap jackets. One can only imagine what the rehearsals for this piece were like.

Another commissioned work is a large-ensemble piece with electronics by Janice Misurell-Mitchell that takes its inspiration from text from Jacques Attali’s book “Noise: The Political Economy of Music” in which he posits the theory that “noise (unwanted sound) represents people and forces in a society that are excluded from the mainstream culture, and that cultural change will be heralded by musical change.” With its emphasis on equity, that could be the mantra for the Ear Taxi festival as a whole.

The third commissioned work is by Chicago favorite Tomeka Reid, a versatile composer and performer if ever there were one. Reid’s piece has yet to be titled and there’s scarce information about it, but I feel comfortable recommending it as a highlight. The premiere is October 3 at Epiphany Arts Center.

On the Spotlight side of the fest, intriguing shows include the Chicago Composers Orchestra’s collaboration with Homeroom Chicago and Spudnik Press on Ten x Ten, a pairing of screen prints with new orchestral works by Chicago composers. That’s on September 25 at St. James Cathedral.

On September 29, Lakeshore Rush perform a program called “Sunlit,” a “musical exploration of humanity’s relationship with nature” at the Garfield Park Conservatory. The music explores the “ever-present influence of the sun and its cycles, the seasons, animal life, and our inescapable need to take an active role in preserving nature.”

Those are just a few of the many concerts taking place, with nearly 600 performers in all. Complete information is online at Ear Taxi Festival’s website. Much of the music you see on the site will be unfamiliar to you, but that’s the point! The Ear Taxi festival is a great chance to explore new venues, hear new music and leave your comfort zone in the dust.

Back in 2001 there was a big brou-ha-ha about gentrification in Chicago’s Wicker Park neighborhood that I still remember clearly.  I myself rarely went to Wicker Park because as early as 1995 I was told that it was “over” by someone I held in high esteem and why would I go to a neighborhood that was over?  I’m a happening guy and I need to be where the action is.

Anyway, Wicker Park had been gentrifying since at least the seventies but suddenly there were protests and a small but very vocal group of people were mad as hell and weren’t going to take it anymore. The cause of this ruckus?

MTV had opted to shoot the eleventh season of their hit show the Real World in Chicago and they chose the Wicker Park neighborhood which was bad enough but, heaping insult upon injury, they chose to bring this abomination of a show to the building that once housed the Urbis Orbis Cafe and the last few hipsters remaining in Wicker Park were incensed.

Urbis Orbis was the kind of coffee shop that Thomas Pynchon probably would have felt comfortable writing something like the Crying of Lot 49 in.  Not Mason & Dixon, nothing that heavy but definitely Crying of Lot 49 or Inherent Vice or something. Maybe Bleeding Edge…

Anyway, Urbis Orbis was a Pynchon-esque hipster coffee shop where magic happened over midday lattes.  Bands were formed, art festivals created, the relative merits of post-punk hotly debated. You know the kind of place. But they were a victim of their own success. The rent went up and Urbis Orbis closed its doors forever.

Now MTV comes in with its fresh-faced kids to film their reality show here? On hallowed ground?  There were huge protests. People stood outside with bullhorns and shouted for the cast to leave town immediately. It was chaos.

But all these years later I learned something interesting about that movement.  It was faked.  Yeah.  See, the planners of those “protests” were rightly worried that no one would show up and so they decided to trick people into coming.

They printed up fliers advertising the chance to audition for the show at the time of their planned protest.  Most of the people at the protest were not against the show, they wanted to be on it.  Once the protest started they stuck around to see what was happening and many of them made it on the nightly news.

I uncovered this underhanded deception the old fashioned way: by getting a grant from the Wicker Park Chamber of Commerce to make an audio walking tour called Sonic Walkabout that combines narrative storytelling with commissioned music.

We chose eight sites in all and I wrote music for two of them: the aforementioned Real World site and Quimby’s Bookstore, purveyor of unusual publications, aberrant periodicals, saucy comic booklets and assorted fancies, for whom I wrote a heroic anthem because, you know, comic shop.

After the brou-ha-ha half the Real World cast broke up with each other and they stopped the show and the building sat empty and then became a Cheetah Gym for years and years and now is empty again.

For my piece I was thinking of the fake media circus and of gentrification itself and how for better or worse once it starts it’s hard to stop.  It’s just a minute long because I know we’ve all got important things to do. It’s scored for flute, alto sax, cello and piano.

I found the image below on the internet.  Seems that lots of folks still remember the protests.  Click on it to listen to the piece!