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!

I find myself thinking about space a lot lately. There is the space of my apartment with which I have become intimately familiar these last eleven months and counting of course.  But there are three spaces in Chicago I think about every day too.

They are the three locations for our ACM School of Music, now empty spaces.  One of them has become a repository for all of the stuff we don’t know where else to put.  Another is still somewhat busy as one of our wonderful teachers is there all by his lonesome teaching virtual lessons.

And one of them, the first one I opened fourteen years ago on Wilson Ave., is in a kind of chrysalis.  Or at least that’s how I think of it.  Like it’s sleeping right now and, once the loud men are done with their constant hammering and sawing, it will emerge in the spring as a beautiful butterfly.  Yes, it’s a deep sleeper.

I envisioned a kind of thriving community music hub when I opened the storefront back in 2007.  ACM was doing a project called Weekly Readings back then and I loved the idea of rehearsing and recording the new pieces each week in the window of a storefront.  I wanted music-making to be normal, as normal as anything the other businesses on the block did.

Though in retrospect, considering that the other businesses at that time were a shady tax guy, a chain-smoking dry cleaner and a corrupt chamber of commerce, maybe this wasn’t what we wanted to emulate. Today the other businesses are a sushi restaurant, a European clothing store and a math tutoring place, none of them corrupt so far as I can tell.  Incredibly, we’re now the oldest business on the block.

I started teaching a music composition class in our new space in the fall of 2008.  ACM musicians would come in on the final night of class to play the student works and then we’d drink wine and gush about music, art, life, all the good stuff. I was so happy.

Then the mortgage crisis happened and the Illinois Arts Council was gutted. We lost what little donations and other grants we were getting as well.  But now we had a monthly rent obligation and so we had to come up with another way to bring money in.

Composition lessons were so fun to teach but were never a best seller so I started teaching piano in the window.  After a few months my schedule filled and I hired another teacher. Then another and another.  The corrupt chamber of commerce went out of business and we expanded into their space.  A hair salon on the corner came and went and we expanded into their space.

We had been saving money for years to remodel the space when Covid hit.  At first we were nervous to move forward with the plan.  Now I know that we could never have done it without Covid. There was no way we could have closed the school for the six months and more it’s taking to complete the project.

The new design features teaching rooms equipped for virtual learning, a small performance space (in the window of course) that doubles as a recording and livestream studio and, the thing I’ve been talking about for so many years, a small coffee bar in the corner space with, in a nod to the old days, a secret cache of wine.

Everything about the new space is meant to foster community around music-making.  We’ve got another month or so of work and then another few months of siting empty most likely.  But eventually this beautiful heavy-sleeping butterfly is going to emerge. I can’t wait until that day.

In the meantime I’ll keep shoveling snow.

Written for Newcity Magazine’s December 2020 issue

It’s only natural to wax nostalgic at the end of the year but considering the year we’ve had and knowing that we’re likely in for a long winter, I find myself looking back even more than usual.

I keep slipping into the past like Brandon Stark or, perhaps more appropriately for this time of year, like Ebenezer Scrooge but with a better attitude and hopefully better hair.  Instead of the Ghost of Christmas Past though, my guide is the Ghost of Gigs Past.

I’ve been active in Chicago’s music scene in one form or another for twenty-five years.  My first gig in the city was at the Annoyance Theater on December 5th of 1995. They were on Clark St. back then across from the Metro Bar.  I had just moved to Chicago from Columbia, Missouri a few months ago and was excited to play an improv comedy show.

It was the final show for their advanced student class and my job was fairly simple.  I was tasked with drinking beer (always important at the Annoyance,) naming the groups, and of course improvising music for the scenes which included anything from gentle underscoring to sudden accompaniment in the event that someone burst into song.  After the gig we went to the Gingerman Tavern and drank more beer and they paid me in cash. I was hooked.

In the ’90’s if you could improvise on the piano you were set in Chicago.  Improv comedy was hot and there were dozens of troupes looking for a piano player. My favorite gig was with a group called Broken Pilgrims in Gothic Sneakers.  We played mostly at the old Bop Shop on Division St. which became Liquid Kitty, the first real sign of gentrification on the block.

There was a sign on the front door of the Gold Star Bar back then saying “this is not Liquid Fucking Kitty!”   Remember when bars like Liquid Kitty were the enemy? Life was so much simpler back then.

The Bop Shop is probably the Chicago venue I miss the most.  They moved to Andersonville and then to the South Loop in like 1997 which was a lot rougher then than now.  I would park in the lot across the street and race over to the venue like my life was in mortal peril.  I was stationed on my usual bar stool the night they closed forever.

In 1999 I worked at the Carl Fischer music store on Wabash and started grad school in music composition across the street at Roosevelt University.  I had actually been hired at Tower Records, (which I still thought of as Rose Records,) on the same day but Carl Fischer paid the princely sum of $6 an hour which was a dollar more than Tower so, sheet music it was.

At Carl Fischer I put one of my business cards on the bulletin board at the front of the store which led to an exciting call. In those days you’d check your voicemail every day for potential gigs. I got a call from the Palmer House Hilton that they were looking for a pianist in the lobby. I had to wear a tux just to audition.  I got the gig and played there for several months until they decided to just pipe in music instead.

After I finished grad school I started an organization I still run called Access Contemporary Music to promote contemporary classical music.  This was the early 2000’s now, a time I still think of as a golden age for Chicago music, at least in terms of having city support.

The Cultural Affairs Commissioner at the time was the legendary Lois Weisberg who had created the Chicago Cultural Center which was run by the equally formidable Janet Carl Smith.  The arts were taken seriously and there was a real budget. Mike Orlove launched hugely ambitious programs like Summerdance and the World Music Festival, and was director of music programming at Millennium Park when it finally opened in 2004.

Peter McDowell ran the classical music programs which included Summer Opera and the Sunday Salon series among many others.  At that time if you could play, write or produce, you had a pretty good shot at doing something with the city and getting paid for it.

ACM’s first performance venue was Preston Bradley Hall at the Cultural Center which at that time had live music nearly every day of the week. The only downside to this venue is that someone will always sit in the front row and play with a plastic bag all through your set. But, you learn to ignore it.

Perhaps my fondest Chicago gig memory is the time I was nearly arrested during the show.  I was producing and playing on the Sound of Silent Film Festival at the Chopin Theater. There was a fairly long piece that didn’t have piano or percussion so the percussionist and I would hang out backstage or go into the alley to smoke.

One night we went out but stupidly brought our beers with us.  A cop was actually walking a beat like it was 1930 or something and he walks up and starts giving us a hard time for the open containers.  We were like, we’re in the middle of a show!  You can’t arrest us.  Why else would we be standing behind a theater at night dressed all in black?  Oh, right.  He let us go though and we finished the show without further incident.

A few years later I talked my way into a gig at WFMT hosting a program called Relevant Tones about living composers.  We did a live broadcast from the Empty Bottle and had a packed crowd of young hipsters who were up for anything, including a 30-minute improvised meditation for clarinet and prayer bowls.

I had a piece on the program too but the audience favorite was a work that started softly and gradually built to a climax punctuated by the percussionist hitting a large pane of glass with a hammer into a metal tub.  Hard to top that.

There was so much great music on that show but my favorite memory was talking with someone who came out from WFMT who had never been to the Bottle, or perhaps to any rock club.  When I asked what she thought about the show she just said “the bathrooms were filthy!”

They sure were. And if there’s a God in heaven they will be again someday soon.

Chicago, like many cities with brutal winters, tends to try to make the most of summer. In a normal summer there are hundreds of street festivals throughout the city celebrating a wide array of things from a national independence day, to a centuries-old cultural tradition, to eating hotdogs in the sun until you puke.

With no street closure permits being offered this year though, it was an eerie summer in Chicago.

I myself got into the street festival game five years ago when ACM launched the Thirsty Ears Festival, a street fest dedicated to classical music. Every August we closed the street in front of our music school for two days of live music, craft beer, food trucks, vendors and kid-friendly activities.

Of all of our events this was the most difficult to reimagine to fit current circumstances.  I mean what are we going to do, give a virtual presentation of previous year’s performances with tons of shots of people enjoying themselves in close contact without masks?  Cruel at best.

No, we needed something different.  Something that showcased the creativity of modern composers and celebrated our community at the same time. The answer was to relaunch the event as a hybrid audio walking tour featuring commissioned music combined with limited live performances in a private parking lot that didn’t require a city permit.

We worked with the Ravenswood Historical Society to choose ten cultural and historic sites in the neighborhood and then asked composers to write short pieces inspired by them.  We got people connected with each site to record a narrative and paired the narratives with the pieces and I was amazed at what I learned.

For example…

I’ve walked by this building hundreds of times. I always thought it was cool and I knew that Louis Sullivan was one of the architects but…

I didn’t know that Sullivan, who is regarded as the father of the skyscraper and is still known for his mantra of “form follows function,” was seriously down on his luck when he designed this building.

He was completely broke, living in a men’s hotel and drinking nonstop day and night.  He got this commission for a music store that sold pianos, sheet music and radios and pulled it together long enough to whip out this masterpiece and then died soon after.

William Krause, who commissioned him, only got to enjoy the building for two years before the Depression hit and, despondent, he killed himself in the upstairs apartment.  On the right kind of night you can still see his shadow through the window stalking back and forth restlessly.

I’m very happy with how the audio tour turned out.

Download the Gesso app from the Play or Apple store, go to passcode in the left side menu and enter “thirsty” to check it out

I’ve long had a fascination with magicians and have tried numerous times to incorporate them into ACM concerts with varying success.  I once wanted to do a fundraiser where there was an escape artist in a water tank who only makes it out safely if we hit our goal.  Obviously no one really voiced any support for that plan so it didn’t go anywhere but I still think of it fondly and hope to bring it to life one day, perhaps virtually.

We did a CD release party a few years ago in Chicago that featured a sleight-of-hand magician but that was kind of a bust too because he was so amazing that he completely and thoroughly stole the show. To this day people talk about the awesome ACM event with the magician and completely forget that it was a freaking CD release party.

Perhaps my most successful foray into the magical arts was when I asked another sleight-of-hand magician, (I used to know a lot of magicians but have sadly had a falling out with the guild) to perform on our Green Mill series. The Green Mill is a really famous jazz club in Chicago and ACM did an annual concert there for years.

For the intermission one year the magician did his thing and I accompanied him in D-minor from the piano behind the bar.  Because sight lines are bad at the Green Mill we put up a screen and projected his hands onto it.  People loved it which was great because the previous year’s concert had been hijacked by a rogue a capella vocal group and I was eager to erase that painful memory.

My takeaway from the Green Mill magic act though wasn’t to ask the magician back the following year, largely because I was getting tired of being upstaged by magicians, but to think of other things we could do with a screen and projector.  After much thought I came up with the idea of commissioning new scores to play live to modern silent films.

That was fifteen years ago and we’ve produced the Sound of Silent Film Festival every year since. This year, in two days actually, we’re presenting it virtually and I couldn’t be happier.  The films are the best they’ve ever been and the music is wonderful.  Our musicians did a fabulous job recording sixteen pieces in two marathon recording sessions in the theater and our conductor, audio/tech director and video director outdid themselves as well.

For the 2009 festival I wrote filmmaker Guy Maddin and asked if I could write a new score for his classic short Heart of the World.  Incredibly he wrote back and said yes.  He loved my score and gave me permission to perform it live whenever and wherever.

Pressing my luck, I asked him if he’d contribute a quote for the Sound of Silent Film Festival.  He wrote back with this.  “Of all the art forms, music takes the shortest route to the heart, and this is especially true of live music. Something truly alchemical happens when film gets a live score.”

As I sat in the empty Davis theater watching the musicians play to the films I could only agree with Maddin. It’s absolutely magical. I hope you can join us this weekend.

WATCH HERE

On March 8 a colleague and I produced the tenth edition of our Concept Lab series in Manhattan.  We had a cello quartet visiting from out of town and we all went out for Korean BBQ after the concert and then out for milkshakes after that.  On the subway ride back uptown we talked of plans for upcoming concerts, travel plans for the summer, and recent things we’d read.

Three days later I was having a panic attack in my kitchen and the day after that I was on a flight to Chicago to work with my ACM team to figure out how we were going to get more than 300 students online in a matter of days and then, when it was unsafe for the teachers to come to our schools, how we were going to ensure they could teach from home.

Those were long days in which we were constantly updating our website and sending out email blasts only to get new information, change course and do it all again. We were also expecting to produce the 15th annual Sound of Silent Film Festival on March 28 and for a delusional week or so there I was convinced we’d be able to do it even if only as a live stream.

But priorities shift with dizzying speed in the face of something this devastating and, as with the cycle of grief, acceptance comes. Four weeks ago canceling a major show like that would have seemed like the end of the world to me.  Now I barely remember what it was like to feel like that.

After that initial flurry of activity, the shelter in place orders came down in New York and then in Illinois.  I realized that we were in for a long haul and so I took an eerie flight back to New York City on March 24 so I could spend quarantine with Maria.  There were exactly twelve of us on the flight and no one said a word.

At LaGuardia the few people who were there were leaving and they looked at us new arrivals like we were nuts.  Who flies into the epicenter? Luckily I made it back to our apartment safely and settled in for the long haul.  Days spent reading, practicing, composing, having Zoom meetings and virtual happy hours stretch into weeks of the same accompanied every day by the steady drumbeat of bad news.

There are some bright spots though. Every night at 7:00 for the last few weeks people have leaned out from their apartment windows and climbed onto fire escapes all over the city and applauded and cheered for health workers and others who have to work in unsafe conditions.

When I first heard it, the sound of cheering was so incongruous with my gloomy mood that my first reaction was annoyance.  Now I live for it.  I can’t tell you how much this simple act has heartened me and, I hope, many others as well.

It’s also been fascinating to see how artists and cultural institutions large and small are responding. I mean Titus Burgess is hosting Live With Carnegie Hall on Instagram for heaven’s sake. That sentence wouldn’t even have made sense a month ago.

And of course new rituals are being formed all across the globe.  Speaking of which, I have a very important lunch date with Mr. Sock.  It would be ever so rude to keep him waiting. He gets so angry.  Please stay safe and sane.  You know, the new sane.