I’m writing from sunny Mexico where I just finished two shows at the Cineteca Nacional as part of the first ever Vitaphonc Festival featuring films with live music in several different contexts, including ACM’s long-running Sound of Silent Film Festival, live music from Stanley Kubrick films as part of an incredible exhibition and a xxx animation festival which, while not quite as titillating as it sounds, was still a lot of fun.

Today is National Worker’s Day in Mexico, similar to Labor Day in the U.S. but, as far as I can tell, with fewer BBQ’s.  Although if you’ve ever been to Mexico then you know that I’m not exactly starving.  Great food is never a problem here.

So I’m taking it easy today and thought it would be fun to celebrate the holiday by lying in the sun and typing up a funny work story from the past.  I got my first job as a paperboy when I was twelve years old and have been continuously employed ever since so there are a lot to choose from but I’ve settled on a little incident that occurred during my stint as a delivery driver in college.

I was studying music composition at the University of Missouri and insisted on having an apartment instead of living in the dorms so for most of the four years I was there I delivered sub sandwiches to anyone who could afford our minimum $6 order which, unfortunately for me, was nearly everyone.

The job was appealing to me though because they had their own cars and had found an insurance company somewhere that would insure a bunch of 20 year-olds, most of whom were male, which is crazy when you think about it.  So none of us had to worry too much about the cars and well, we didn’t.

One night I got an order to Highland Parkway which was in a tony suburb of sorts and was a very long street with no stop signs, causing us to refer to it as Highland Raceway.  I located the house and, for some reason backed into the drive which I never usually did, and would never do again.

I stopped the car, apparently leaving it in reverse, and craned my neck to make sure it was the right address.  At which point my foot slipped off of the brake and the car, having a fast idle, began moving. I panicked and tried to hit the brake but hit the gas instead and slammed into the garage door hard.

The door made a horrific sound and immediately collapsed around the back end of the car.  I got out and stood there stupidly holding the food. When the incredibly angry man came out of the front door I stood there like a moron and all I could think to say was “the sandwiches are free, man.”

I then had to gingerly hand him the bag, get back in the car, repeat the horrific metal grinding noise as I worked the car out and head back to the shop where I was greeted by my manager who was, well, less than pleased.

They paid for the damages to his door and, incredibly, I kept my job.  I wouldn’t get fired for nearly another year but that’s another story altogether.  Happy National Workers Day!

Shakespeare was half right when he said all the world’s a stage.  What he forgot to mention was that the world’s a stage and we the players but we’re mostly just starring in a revival.  For the four thousand years of recorded human history we’ve pretty much been playing out the same sordid drama over and over.

I first read of the concept of the hydraulic despotism in the works of historian Arnold Toynbee who did not coin the term but wrote compellingly about it. As soon as humanity left behind the hunter/gatherer way of life in favor of agriculture, it became necessary to control water distribution and to stockpile grain and crops and other resources.

A class of despots arose who claimed divine rights to the lion’s share of these resources and a priestly class arose who backed up their claim. It was also necessary to protect the resources from marauders and so the soldier class arose.  For the first time we donned our roles and not much has changed ever since.

The agrarian revolution was certainly a great thing in many ways.  It allowed for specialization which brought technological improvements and a class of professional artisans, doctors, philosophers and more, but we’ve never gotten over this idea that some people deserve more of the resources than others. It has, in fact, haunted civilization from the beginning.

In hunter/gatherer times if an individual were a selfish asshole, he could smash someone on the head and take his nuts and berries sure, but he had limited power to affect the group as a whole and the group always had the power of casting him out which in most cases was certain death.

There is a thought that human history is on a divine path from the muck of our beginnings through the various seismic shifts of agrarianism, industrialism and now technologism (which sounds kind of weird but is in fact a word, and not a dirty word either.)  But where does this path take us?

At the moment our greatest resource, money, is mostly invisible and psychological in nature. People get rich, and poor, merely by speculating on psychological reactions other people will have to various and sundry phenomena, many of which were manufactured to have the desired effect. The hydraulic despotism still exists but it’s now an economic despotism.

As recent political movements have shown, people are aware of this and unhappy but we have a new priestly class in propagandist media and their message is powerful, constant and, as it was in the past, meant to keep Pharoah in control.

I don’t call for a revolution because revolutions are never successful in the long term, merely another act in the drama.  Instead I wonder how we shift people’s focus from shortsighted accumulation of power and resources and instead onto the only thing that matters in a reality in which your individual self is fated to die: helping other people.

In the meantime another act in the drama plays out.  Again…

It was a gorgeous day in Helsinki in August of 2014 and I was sitting outdoors at a pub drinking a ludicrously expensive bottle of beer and thinking about what kind of music I wanted to write next.

In the past I had always let the music I wrote be dictated by commissions or projects and I would typically finish one and move right on to the next, but this time I wanted to do something different. I wanted to write something that wasn’t inspired by a story or visual art or anything external. I wanted to write something personal in my own artistic language that would challenge me creatively and take me to the next level as a composer.

I was convinced that all of this breathless careening from project to project was not allowing me time to think about what it was I wanted to say as an artist, that I was too busy meeting deadlines to do the really hard self-examining that an artist must do if he expects to ever say anything of value.

Somewhere in the middle of my second beer I decided that the perfect thing for me to do was write a piano concerto. I could tell that it was the perfect thing to do because I immediately got very nervous.  My heart fluttered and I felt shaky, which for me is always a clear sign that I’m on the right path, or that I need a third beer.

I got to work on the piece right away but as it turns out nearly everything I wrote in Helsinki was garbage and the only thing I kept was the opening figure in the piano, a kind of menacing, rhythmic figuration that you’d typically hear in a movie when things are about to go really bad for someone. (Don’t worry though, it all works out in the end.)

I didn’t find the real inspiration for the piece until a few months later in a conversation about art with friends. I was talking about my obsession with writing in my own language with as few outside influences as possible.  Meanwhile I had sketched another movement that was meant to sound like it was me improvising at the piano and one of my friends said the piece was a self portrait. I liked that idea and ran with it.

I called the piece Satori which is this wonderful Japanese Buddhist term that can mean self-knowledge, the search for self-knowledge or one who has attained self-knowledge. The finished work is in four movements and it’s getting performed for the first time next week by the Chicago Composers Orchestra with the wonderful Marta Aznavoorian as soloist.

They are sounding amazing and it’s just stunning for me to hear this piece brought to life after having existed for so long solely in my head.  It truly is like an out of body experience. Or at least, not having had an out of body experience that I know of, what I would think an out of body experience would feel like.  You know, like surreal and floaty.

Anyway, here are the details in case you can make it.   I’ll post videos too shortly after the performance.

It’s terrible when a normal dream turns into an anxiety dream.  At first everything is perfect. You’re sailing on a yacht somewhere in the Mediterranean Sea surrounded by friends, Yanni is serenading you, the wine sparkles like the sea, the bust of Homer on the prow of the boat nods his head in gentle approval, everything is dandy.

But then it all goes bad.  The sun starts crying, the boat somehow hits an iceberg, your elementary school bully speeds by on a sea-doo and throws lunch meat at you, Homer won’t stop singing Frere Jacques in a creepy stage whisper.  Everything just goes south.

I’ve been having more than my fair share of anxiety dreams lately but, perhaps strangely, not so much about politics, although I did have a dream where I woke up and was in bed with Betsy DeVos and I never want to have that dream again.  Never.

No, most of my anxiety dreams lately have been about the premiere of my piano concerto coming up on March 9.  I’ve had dreams that the orchestra members turn into clowns and start mocking me, that the audience consists entirely of barnyard animals who, while well-mannered, don’t seem to have an ear for music and then, just last night, I dreamed that the orchestra wouldn’t stop playing Happy Birthday. I yelled and yelled at them to stop and get on with my piece but they never did.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m very excited about this premiere.  This is just how I get.  I’m a high-strung person and for me, having a piece played publicly creates a response in my body that is something like the fight-or-flight instinct but, like all of the fight-or-flight any humanoid creature on earth has ever experienced happening to me all at once.  Plus butterflies.

So, yes, I’m always nervous before a big premiere but this one makes me especially nervous because this piece is a kind of musical self portrait.  You know like visual artists do but with music instead of paint.

The piece is in four movements and each movement reflects a different aspect of myself, both the self I’d like to be and the self I’m stuck with. The title Satori is a Japanese Buddhist term for seeking self knowledge.

The pianist is Marta Aznavoorian which is just amazing.  I’m so happy.  And nervous.  I hope that you can come.

Thursday, March 9
7:30 pm
Ganz Hall @ Roosevelt University
430 S Michigan Ave, 7th Floor, Chicago

The Casa Mas de Miquel in Barcelona is a striking building on the Avinguda Diagonal in the heart of the city.  Designed by Domènec Sugrañes i Gras, one of Gaudí’s protegés and the man entrusted with finishing the Sagrada Familia after Gaudí’s death, the building combines Gaudí’s modernist style of windows with classicist pillars and features a stunning tiered oval courtyard capped with an ornate, highly decorated cupola.

I first saw the building in a brochure in July when I visited the Open House Barcelona office to talk about a musical collaboration and, even looking at it in a black and white photograph, I knew that if they agreed to the project, this was the building I wanted to write music for.

As it happened they agreed and I wrote a piece for violin and cello to be performed in the courtyard on the day of the event, October 23rd, a day which I consider to be the highlight of my artistic life thus far.

The building had recently been converted to private residencies and a lot of people wanted to get a look inside it so the line went all the way down the block and around the corner.  The managers allowed 140 people to come in at a time.  The Open House volunteer told them about the architecture and then introduced me and I talked about the project and my music and then the musicians performed the piece.

When it was over everyone hung out for a bit taking in the space and then they were ushered out and another 140 people were ushered in and we started it all over again.  In all well over a thousand people heard my music that day and the responses were wonderful.

I was really moved by the concentration that the audience gave the performance and by the conversations I had. I remember thanking a woman for coming and she said to me, “no, es un regalo” or “no, it’s a gift.”

The day was magical for me because not only was my music being performed in an incredible space for oodles of appreciative people but also because it was happening in Barcelona, a place for which I’ve long had a fascination.

After the final performance the musicians and I had lunch in a nearby cafe with the videographer and a few others.  We talked in a mixture of Spanish, Catalan, English and German and I felt like I was in heaven.

I spent nearly three months of 2016 in five different European countries and, there as well as in the U.S., I heard the same thing.  Close the borders, expel the foreigners, bring back outsourced jobs, preserve our cultural heritage. I don’t know where it’s all heading but I do know that travel, language study and international projects have enriched my life incredibly and opened me to all kinds of different ways of seeing the world.

The new year is a time of hope and I have a very sincere hope that we won’t let fear get the better of us this year and in the years to come.  I like cultural diversity and I like the idea of a global village in which we recognize the humanity in others and I hope we get there.  In the meantime I’ll always have that magical day in Barcelona.

Open House Barcelona 2016 – Casa Mas de Miquel from ACM on Vimeo.

The story of Cain and Abel is usually interpreted as being about envy.  Cain was a farmer and Abel a shepherd and when they made offerings to God, well, God accepted Abel’s offering but not Cain’s and so, the rules on this sort of thing being as yet a bit unclear, Cain killed him for it.

But for me, a more interesting read of the story is that it is actually a myth inspired by the agricultural revolution.  Cain the farmer represents mankind’s increasing use of, and dependence on, agriculture and Abel represents the former nomadic way of life which did not adapt to the change.  The agricultural revolution led to the founding of cities and ultimately civilization as we know it.

Though there were nomadic invasions of cities throughout history and the nomadic way of life persists even today in some isolated areas, it can pretty safely be said that Cain killed Abel, that the agricultural revolution was here to stay.

We’re pretty clearly in the midst of a revolution at the moment that I believe will have a similarly huge impact on human history. There is the shift away from industry and manufacturing toward technology, there is the trend toward globalization and there are massive social upheavals as frequently marginalized people increasingly, and rightly, demand to be treated as human beings.

In this context, it’s not surprising that there is a kind of hysteria gripping much of the world at the moment and of course a whole lot of people have been left behind. The changes are happening fast, a whole lot faster than the agricultural or industrial revolutions happened and it’s scary for all of us, though especially for those who were highly adapted to the industrial/nuclear family model and are having a hard time adapting to the new technological/diversity spectrum model.

I believe that the next few years will be intensely painful as many people struggle mightily to reverse the tide.  But it can’t be done.  Cain has killed Abel and there’s no way back.

Originally ran in Newcity Magazine on November 27, 2016

Nature has provided us with many subtle clues that we’re getting older. I’m not talking about the day you wake up and discover that there is now a small profusion of hairs shooting out of your ears. That’s not subtle. I’m talking about the little things you catch yourself doing that gradually wear you down until you eventually become the cantankerous old coot you were apparently always meant to be.

This is essentially the Calvinist doctrine of aging. It’s God’s will that even the cutest baby is foreordained to one day think that blowing his nose onto his overalls is an act of personal expression. Thankfully that day hasn’t quite arrived for me yet, but there are signs that it’s coming.

I start way too many sentences with some variation of “In my day.” Younger people look at me with pity when I tell them how old I am (just turned forty-five). And I’ve developed this weird penchant for thinking that my generation went through hard times the likes of which these youngsters have never seen which is, well, definitely not true.

A few days after the election my wife and I decided to bestir ourselves from our deep funk and go out to celebrate the opening of a new bike shop. When we got there and I took in the scene, it occurred to me that I finally understood the concept of the safe space, which I, in my growing peevishness, had previously dismissed. But it was refreshing to be around diverse views and people, and to me this was absolutely a refuge.

I think that events like that, and certainly the arts, are now to us what monasteries were to the Middle Ages: little microcosms of culture and tolerance, and our support is more important now than ever. I can’t do much about the fact that prunes are starting to look good to me and I can no longer prevent myself from correcting someone’s grammar in the middle of their sentence, but I can get out and hear some strange and wonderful new music—and these three concerts are a great place to start.

a.pe.ri.od.ic and Dante Boone play Jurg Frey

One of the founders of the loosely organized, barely defined but internationally successful musical movement Wandelweiser, Jurg Frey takes the “less is more” aesthetic to extremes in his spare, lovely music. Chicago-based a.pe.ri.od.ic is quite at home here, having produced an entire Wandelweiser festival a couple of years ago, and Dante Boone is a pianist who has made the music of Jurg Frey one of his special interests.
December 4, 8:30pm at Constellation, 3111 North Western; $10.

Katinka Kleijn and Cory Smythe
Improvisation was once an integral part of classical music, but—perhaps with the advent of the formal recital in the nineteenth century—it has steadily lost ground to polished performances from notated scores. For the last several years, however, improvisation has returned to classical music with a vengeance. Two stalwarts from the International Contemporary Ensemble now join the trend, and will leave their music stands at home for an evening consisting entirely of improvised duets.
December 7, 9pm at Constellation, 3111 North Western; $10.

Jessica Aszodi and Jenna Lyle

Stunningly wide-ranging vocalist Jessica Aszodi, who has performed everything from bristlingly difficult contemporary scores to resurrected pieces from hundreds of years ago and everything in between, teams up with composer Jenna Lyle for a choreographic voice and electronics piece called “Grafter.” Lyle is a composer interested in physicality in terms of what a performer can do with gestures and movement on stage in addition to playing their instrument. The results have always been fascinating, and I have no doubt that this collaboration will be astonishing.
December 9, 9pm at Elastic Arts Foundation, 3429 West Diversey #208; $10.

Tonight, as many of you already know, is game seven of the world series.  It’s a big deal for Chicago because if the Cubs win tonight not only will they have broken a drought of 108 years but they will also be the last of the three “cursed” teams in baseball to break their curse, and the win will be definitive proof that Theo Epstein is a magic man who can do anything and should immediately replace Rahm Emanuel as mayor.

I have to admit, though, that my feelings about the Cubs over the years have been mixed.  When I moved to Chicago in 1995 I played piano at the Annoyance theater which at that time was on Clark street just north of Wrigley Field and to those of us in the theater community the Cubs games were simultaneously a source of irritation and excitement.  As there was little to no expectation of winning in those days, home games often brought an ugly streak of drunkenness that once seen is difficult to forget.

At the same time I can remember being at the Gingerman Tavern when Kerry Wood had his famous 20 strikeout game.  There were guys watching the game who realized that this first year rookie was going to tie a record and quickly settled their tabs and ran to the stadium to buy last minute tickets to watch it in person. You could do that back then.  Despite the excitement though, I stayed behind and worked on my patternless crossword puzzle.

Speaking of the Gingerman, it was my favorite bar at that time not only because it was across the street from the Annoyance which was then the center of my social world, but also because they played classical music after every Cubs home game, a move taken less from an enthusiasm for classical music and more as a way of keeping drunken mayhem to a minimum.  And it worked.

Drunks in Mark Grace jerseys would crash into the bar, hear the music, noisily disapprove and storm back out.  Meanwhile we in the bar would raise our glass of port and return to our patrician pursuits, which at the Gingerman in the ’90’s were myriad.   There were always chess and scrabble games happening and a wildly popular backgammon tournament on Sundays.  There were lively political disputes, poets scribbling away in corners and of course the ubiquitous theater people, some of whom now write for SNL and Conan O’Brien and one of whom, Matt Walsh, plays the press secretary on Veep.

The Gingerman was also one of the very best bars in the city for high caliber billiards, so much so that a scene from the Color of Money was shot there, and two of the bartenders were big music heads: Joel Leoschky started Cranky Records and Harrison Bankhead is still a well-known bassist on the free jazz scene, though he has long since quit bartending, much to the chagrin of those of us who fondly remember his skills.   All of this and classical music playing after Cubs home games?   Yes, please.

Living near Wrigley Field you always had a Cubs schedule in your car so you’d know on which days to avoid Clark street like the plague.  I always claimed to hate Cubs games and the attendant traffic jams, but I was also sympathetic to the team’s plight and would pay close attention in the years when it seemed they had a shot.  A friend of mine once jokingly asked me if I had ever listened to a Cubs game on my car radio and rooted for them while simultaneously cursing the extra traffic the game had caused.  The answer is yes and I’m sure I’m not the only one.

I’m not a person who defines himself by loyalty to a sports team, not by a long shot. That said, tonight’s game will be epic and I’m looking forward to watching it. interestingly enough though, it won’t be the only epic in my day.  I’m in Dublin at the moment for an opera called Heresy by Roger Doyle about Giovanni Bruno, a medieval free thinker who was tortured and eventually killed for his beliefs.

So I’ll head straight from a three hour opera to the hotel bar to watch a three hour baseball game in which it would be nothing less than heresy not to root for the Cubs.  Things didn’t turn out so well for Bruno.  Here’s hoping they go a heck of a lot better for the Cubs.

Originally ran in Newmusicbox on 10/5/2016

The Ear Taxi Festival coincides almost exactly with the 100th anniversary of the publication of Carl Sandburg’s seminal collection Chicago Poems,which—while wholly unintentional—is still a neat coincidence.  Sandburg did as much as anyone to cement Chicago’s reputation as a city of rough-hewn individuals who created a great metropolis through physical labor and are justifiably proud of it, and I see Ear Taxi in a way as the musical manifestation of this: a celebration of the individual composers and performers who have created a bustling contemporary music scene and who are, if you missed the posts on social media, also proud of it.

Five years after Sandburg’s poems were published, Ben Hecht would paint the city with similar strokes in his great collection of stories, which was later published as 1,001 Afternoons in Chicago. In Hecht though, the rugged individualism of Sandburg is combined with a search for a common thread—or motif, in his words—that connects everyone he wrote about. To me, this is an impulse also present in Ear Taxi, as the festival is an attempt to bring all of the disparate styles and the whole tangled mass of creative musical energy in the city under one metaphorical roof.  This uniquely Chicago paradox has always fascinated me.  It’s a city of individuals with an entrepreneurial streak and a DIY mentality who work hard to build from the ground up, but who are also very interested in finding their shared identity.

Over the years, I’ve seen numerous attempts to codify Chicago’s various arts scenes. Whether it’s film or music summits, the Architecture Biennial, the Sonic Impact Festival, Chicago Improv Fest, Lake FX, the Chicago International Music and Movies Festival, or one of many others, the intention is to show off the entire range of any given art form happening in the city and put it in one place. As another example, a few years ago Boeing donated a large sum of money to the Elastic Arts Foundation to create chicagomusic.org, which was meant to be a one-stop shop for all live music in the city. But, though their efforts to include every performance in Chicago were nothing less than heroic, the task proved impossible as there is simply too much happening.   The quixotic attempt, however, is uniquely Chicago. One thinks immediately of architect and urban planner Daniel Burnham’s famous maxim to make no small plans.

This constant search to find a shared identity among disparate individuals reminds me of a story in Plato’s Symposium.  In the work, Socrates, Aristophanes, and the boys are up late drinking and, as boys will do, they start talking about the origins of love. Aristophanes says that in the beginning humans were not individual entities but two separate people fused together which, according to him, was actually a happy arrangement. Unfortunately though, as in so many other mythological tales, we somehow offended the gods and Zeus promptly sent one of his ever-ready thunderbolts to cleave us in half. Now we spend our lives searching to be made whole again.

I believe the metaphor transcends geographic and cultural boundaries.  Chicago is a famously divided city yet there is something innate that causes it to celebrate the individual while searching restlessly for shared identity, and I believe this has led to an unusually tolerant arts scene.

The style wars did not hit Chicago as hard as in other places.  Composers in Chicago didn’t always approve of other composers, and they didn’t always believe certain directions were fruitful or had artistic merit. But when the call to unity came, it was generally heeded.  Sure, for the most part we’re still very much clumped along academic lines: if you are a composer who went to Northwestern, for example, most likely it’s Northwestern groups who play your music. But that’s natural. What’s unique about Chicago is that there is always a basic assumption that everyone, regardless of affiliation, is adding to a collective scene and that their contribution to that scene is important.

I’ve seen this tolerance firsthand numerous times, but I really put it to the test in 2004 when I created an organization called Accessible Contemporary Music. “Accessible” isn’t exactly a hip word now, but it was practically obscene back then. I got a decent amount of crap for it, naturally, but when leaders of Chicago’s new music community got together to decide how we could all best cooperate to mutual benefit, there was a seat for me at the table. I’m not entirely certain that this would have happened in another city. It’s not that Chicago is more enlightened than other places, it’s just that all voices are welcome as it continues this interesting search for a collective identity.

When we sat down in the basement of Symphony Center in 2005 to formulate what would eventually become New Music Chicago, interestingly enough most of us at that time did not know there had been a previous organization with the same name that flourished in the 1980s under the leadership of Patricia Morehead (who was also the artistic director of CUBE, Chicago’s second contemporary music ensemble) and George Flynn (whose Chicago Soundings series started at the Green Mill jazz club in the 1970s and continues today).  Ours was not a conscious attempt to resurrect the former organization, but an example of the city’s latent urge toward unity manifesting itself through us. To paraphrase Voltaire, if New Music Chicago didn’t exist it would be necessary to invent it.

Chicago in many ways is a kind of self-contained universe, a place for artists to thrive by turning inward. I believe that in many ways this is because of the vitality of the ubiquitous storefront theater scene.  If you live anywhere in the city, it’s unlikely you live more than a few blocks from a small theater.  But the small theaters get big reviews every bit as often as the Goodman or Steppenwolf do, and the small storefronts are widely considered to be the place for innovative, edgy productions. The goal isn’t to send a production to New York or London, the focus is instead on the work itself.

You can see this in the visual arts as well. Chicago’s most important art movement may be the Chicago Imagists, which includes several interestingly named sub movements like the Hairy Who, the Non-Plussed Some, and the Monster Roster.  Most of these artists never left Chicago and, as such, they created unique local styles and are kind of the epitome of a bonded group of distinct individuals.   They represent the proud Chicago tradition of loudly not caring about the goings-on in other cities, and they cite staying in Chicago as having given them the freedom to develop according to their innermost desires rather than larger trends.

So it’s not all that surprising that, as the contemporary music scene in Chicago has begun to really thrive, it has grown up along similar lines.  Though the downtown Loop was once the go-to concert destination, performances now frequently happen throughout the city, mirroring the storefront theater trend. Over the years, as new ensembles have sprung up like musical weeds, I’ve seen shows in former mansions, furniture stores, cabaret clubs, jazz clubs, empty storefronts—even an empty restaurant that had gone out of business.

When Ralph Shapey moved to Chicago in 1964 his colleagues widely assumed he was moving to a contemporary music desert but, even assuming that were true at the time, it’s certainly not the case anymore. Composers and performers are moving to the city every bit as much to be part of the scene as to go to school, and those who move to the city for their studies are increasingly sticking around after they finish.  In just the last five years, the number of emails I get about new music performances has increased three-fold and it shows no sign of stopping. The range of music being performed is dizzying.

Ear Taxi is the most ambitious attempt yet to bring all of this disparate activity and unruly DIY individualism under one roof, and the audacity is something at which Sandburg, Hecht, and Burnham would have nodded approvingly—probably through a thick haze of cigar smoke.  Chicago may never find the unity that it’s searching for, but the search has created a unique arts scene where its individuals can flourish and be truly creative.

Originally ran in Newcity Magazine on September 27, 2016

There are things in this world that, though thoroughly fascinating, I will never attempt to do myself. I’m talking about things like sword-swallowing, cliff-diving, high-stakes gambling, possibly-spoiled-milk-drinking and running for pleasure. I don’t run because I lack a certain grace and have little stamina, but also because I can’t seem to control my arms when I run and they flail around in a most distressing way.

But despite these personal failings I have great respect for people who run and so, by extension, I’m fascinated with the whole concept of running a marathon.

According to my research, the first marathon took place accidentally in ancient Greece when, following the stunning naval victory of the Athenians against the Persians in the first Persian War, a lowly soldier and holder of the fleet’s only cell phone, Pheidippides, excitedly dropped it into the sea and had no way to tell the folks back home.

Understandably upset and unwilling to fess up, he decided to run the whole way from Marathon to Athens, whereupon he immediately yelled the news to the town drunk and dropped dead of exhaustion.

At any rate, for those of us in the contemporary music field there are not one but two marathons happening in Chicago the second weekend of October, the other being the long-awaited Ear Taxi Festival which requires no running and very little sword-swallowing, but at least some high-stakes gambling.

It’s an incredible week of music and here are my recommendations plus a kick-starter.

John Elmquist’s HardArt Groop

Honestly I can’t think of a better starter pistol for a new music marathon than a show by John Elmquist’s Hard ArtGroop. I once heard one of their performances described as “the New Yorker comes to life” and that’s a perfect way to describe it. Elmquist is a highly talented pianist, bassist, composer and arranger who weaves together a musical mix of tight grooves, delicately balanced nuances and just plain hot playing by an all-star group of jazz and classical musicians. In between symphonic numbers are songs that are political, deeply moving or sometimes just plain silly. It’s hard to describe but impossible to forget.
October 3, 7:30pm at Merit School of Music, 38 South Peoria; $20.

ICE at the Harris Theater

It’s not always easy for New Yorkers to remember this, but the now-renowned International Contemporary Ensemble, or ICE (not to be confused with the bounty hunter in season two of “Arrested Development”), began in Chicago. They’ll return to town to headline the opening of the Ear Taxi festival with premieres of two works by Marcos Balter and Anthony Cheung. Both composers have an ear for color and solid compositional craft, but otherwise they’re stylistically very different and I think this will make for a heady musical mix. ICE will be joined by a student ensemble from the People’s Music School and the new music ensemble of Northwestern performing music by modern-day modernist Hans Thomalla.
October 6, 7:30pm at Harris Theater, 205 East Randolph; $20/$10 students.

Chicago Composers Orchestra

The Chicago Composers Orchestra continues their wonderful habit of giving composers absolute freedom in writing for the ultimate ensemble. This program features three world premieres including a new installment in Randall West’s continuing musical exploration of the periodic table of the elements, a work by Olivia Block exploring the relationship between found sounds and orchestra, a new piece called “Lake Effect” by Kathleen Ginther and a reprisal of Brian Baxter’s earnest meditation on place, “Roots Run Deep.”
October 9, noon, Chicago Cultural Center, 78 East Randolph, 3rd floor; free.

Amy Wurtz and MAVerick Ensemble

Amy Wurtz is a pianist and composer to watch, and as one of the last concerts in the Ear Taxi festival she’ll be joined by cellist Alyson Berger to give the world premiere of her new piece “Songs and Dances” for cello and piano. The MAVerick Ensemble opens with a new piece by William Jason Raynovich inspired by the poetry of e.e. cummings. Listen, there is a hell, but it isn’t this concert.
October 9, 3pm, Chicago Cultural Center, 78 East Randolph, 3rd floor; free