Originally ran in Newcity Magazine on July 3, 2016

I had just moved to Chicago in 1995 when I was asked to play a friend’s wedding. I was happy to have the gig but had mixed feelings because the wedding was being held at what I thought was a McDonald’s in Oak Brook and I remember thinking, who the hell has their wedding at a McDonald’s?

When I got there I realized pretty quickly that this wasn’t a fast-food restaurant but a giant corporate campus. It wasn’t exactly as if Grimace were the best man or anything, but it still seemed like a strange place to get married. I played “Wind Beneath My Wings” like a good soldier and moved on with my life.

Now, almost exactly twenty-one years later I see that McDonald’s is moving this corporate campus, including their august institution of higher learning, Hamburger University, into the former Harpo studios in the West Loop, and I can’t help but wonder if there isn’t a golden arch of opportunity in this somewhere.

I mean there’s the obvious benefit of prestige.  An institution like Hamburger University could go anywhere in the country. But I’m thinking bigger. Our mayor and governor, despite making millions of dollars together in the past, don’t seem to like each other anymore and the city is suffering as a result.  And of course the governor is hardly a friend to higher education but this isn’t something frivolous. This is an institution of higher learning that even Rauner can support. This is Hamburger University.

I have this vision of Rauner and Rahm at the groundbreaking ceremony for the new building, cheeseburger in one hand, shovel in the other, jointly ushering in a new day for our city to the tune of “Wind Beneath My Wings.” Grimace is there too, smiling for once. It’s a beautiful vision but, until that magical day we’ll just have to console ourselves with the fact that we still have a thriving music scene.

Here’s a small sample of upcoming events.

Chartreuse Trio

Though it’s no Hamburger University, Oberlin has produced numerous truly stellar musicians and greatly enriched the Chicago scene. The latest ensemble to migrate our way, the Chartreuse Trio, combines great chops with a restless search for new music from composers around the world. Here they are the meat in a new music hamburger, performing the second set of a three-act bill that also includes guitarist Terrence McManus and the Drobka/Weller Duo.
July 11, 9pm at Elastic Arts Foundation, 3429 West Diversey #208; $10.

Rush Hour Concerts

Chicago’s St. James Cathedral, not to be confused with the St. James Infirmary of song, is the setting for a stellar summertime series of classical music concerts. Started by the late, great Deborah Sobol and still going strong many years later, the Rush Hour series features some of the city’s top musicians performing often daring blends of new music. This week it’s the Spektral Quartet performing with the superlative pianist Daniel Schlosberg. This concert is especially noteworthy as it’s a memorial concert for Sobol.
July 12 at 5:45pm, St. James Cathedral, 65 East Huron; free.

Takacs String Quartet

Clarinetist Anthony McGill is one of Chicago’s great musical success stories. From inauspicious beginnings on the South Side, through the Merit School of Music to the Metropolitan Opera, and now principal clarinet in the New York Philharmonic, it’s an incredible journey. He’ll join the wonderful Takacs Quartet for a concert featuring the beloved three Bs of classical music: Beethoven, Brahms and Shostakovich. Yeah, yeah, I know, but cut me some slack. I went to Hamburger University.
July 15 at 7:30pm, Ravinia Festival, Highland Park, $40/$60, lawn $10.

October of this year marks the hundredth anniversary of the printing of Carl Sandburg’s collection Chicago Poems and ACM is working with mezzo-soprano Julia Bentley and five composers, myself included, to set several of the poems for voice and piano trio for a performance at the Chicago Cultural Center as part of the Ear Taxi festival.

I hadn’t read the poems in some time and have greatly enjoyed reading through them again. Many of the poems are quite clear in their meaning and employ a workmanlike, rough-hewn structure.  And others leave you thinking about them long after multiple readings.  Such a poem is the poem I chose to set for this project: Nocturne in a Deserted Brickyard.

Before writing a note of music I tried to analyze the poem as best as I could.  Here is Sandburg’s beautiful short poem and my analysis is below.

NOCTURNE IN A DESERTED BRICKYARD
STUFF of the moon
Runs on the lapping sand
Out to the longest shadows.
Under the curving willows,
And round the creep of the wave line,
Fluxions of yellow and dusk on the waters
Make a wide dreaming pansy of an old pond in the night.

Why stuff of the moon?  Not light of the moon?  Or some poetic word for light?  It’s as if he’s saying that the moon’s contribution to the scene is somehow more than merely light. Stuff of the moon.  The moon is investing in the scene, the stuff of the moon like the stuff of life, or the stuff of legend.  It’s moonstuff, not light.  All things attributed to moon: light, energy, femininity, etc.  He’s setting the stage with an odd word but there is power here too.

Runs on the lapping sands.  The sands don’t lap of course, the water laps the sand or so we would think.  But because of the stuff of the moon perhaps it is confused what is lapping what. Also, perhaps it’s not a bright moonlit night, again stuff does not necessarily evoke light, but could also be the moon’s power to obscure or to subtly alter our perception of a scene.

Out to the longest shadows.  The stuff of the moon runs on the lapping sands out to the longest shadows.  What an odd sentence. Now we have the “stuff” of the moon running presumably at a tilt from above on the lapping sands.  The sands seem to be moving, to be lapping, which is an effect of the moonlight.  So the stuff is the moonlight. But again I feel there is more to it.

The stuff of the moon runs on the lapping sands but it stops at the longest shadows. The stuff of the moon cannot penetrate the longest shadows.  Or does it create the shadows?  Doesn’t moonlight create shadows?

Under the curving willows and round the creep of the wave line, fluxions of yellow and dusk on the waters make a wide dreaming pansy of an old pond in the night.

I believe we’re following the moonlight-created shadows first and then we go round the creep of the wave line which is confusing because the pond would presumably be still.  Is he talking about waves of light?  Did they know back then that light was waves and particles?  At any rate, we follow the moonlight, the stuff of the moon carrying with it its power to alter perception, to the sands and out to the shadows, or defining the longest shadows as we light up everything else, and then under the willows, round the creep of the wave line.  Here I think it’s just poetic language evoking waves, of light, of water, etc.  Fluxions is a mathematical science-y term. It appears that mister Sandburg knew his physics a bit.

Yellow and dusk flux together the way waves do in particle physics and they make the old pond appear to be a pansy, a kind of flower.

Overall it’s an evocation of a lonely scene. There are no humans here, including I believe the narrator who is not a witness.  This poem is an evocation of a scene without a first person narrator.  And yet, that can’t be true because reality is altered by the stuff of the moon, or by the waves, fluxions, etc.  But perhaps this is the tree that falls in the forest.

At any rate for coherence’s sake let’s go with the idea of this as an evocation of a lonely, nighttime scene. There is wonder here, mystical but also a new mystical, the mystics of modern science and physics in which nothing is as it seems.

Also this is a brickyard but a deserted brickyard.  Is it deserted because it’s late at night or is it no longer in use?  Is the brickyard itself a metaphor for loneliness, for lost purpose?

At one time the brickyard was a bustling scene, provided jobs and was emblematic of the rise of a great city.  now, in its desertion, either temporary or otherwise, there is a sense of loss, of nature reasserting itself without humanity.  Chicago is a great city and the work of ambitious men and Sandburg aims to praise that but, he also sees that it is temporary, without purpose aside from that which we humans give it and the works of man appear odd, shiftless

I believe the title is significant too.  It’s a nocturne in a deserted brickyard.  Not nocturne for or of a brickyard.  There’s something to that.  This isn’t a song for the brickyard or even a song of the brickyard.  It’s a song in the brickyard like the waves represent not only light but sound as well. The path the moonstuff takes creates the shadows, alters the pond and is a kind of ghostly song of loneliness.

Originally ran in Newcity Magazine on June 10, 2016

It’s that time of year—when I look ahead to the coming summer months with joy and irrational exuberance, and start to compile a thoroughly unreasonable list of exciting things I plan to do. Every year I think to myself, this summer is going to be epic!

This summer I’ll drink on every rooftop bar in the city, bike downtown on the lakefront path every day, make a hundred free throws in a row, one-handed, before the Creamsicle in my other hand melts, and rappel down the hole in the ground that was supposed to be the Spire, and sit at the bottom for a while listening to Kurt Vile and kind of just looking up at the sky.

I’ll also perfectly execute a Triple Lindy, obtain facial hair from somewhere, stage my own Air and Water Show in the backyard, hang out at the Holiday Club with my new motorcycle gang and, dammit, finally go on the freaking riverboat architecture cruise that I know is an essential part of Chicago but which after twenty-one summers have come and gone, I’ve still never done.

And of course, being a rabid fan of live music; and I’ll start it all off by going to these great concerts. This summer is going to be EPIC.

Grant Park Music Festival
Outdoor music is hardly a rare commodity in Chicago during the summer, though many of our street festivals frankly are in dire need of some new ideas. Or at least some new bands. Not so the Grant Park Music Festival, which every year provides some of the most consistently interesting programming in the city. It continues that tradition with this concert, pairing works by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Aaron Jay Kernis with a new piece by Michael Torke, a synesthete who associates colors with individual pitches. Beethoven’s first symphony is the meat in this contemporary music sandwich.
June 17 at 6:30pm, June 18 at 7:30pm, Pritzker Pavilion, Millennium Park; free.

Chicago’s Next Generation
Composer and pianist George Flynn started the Green Mill contemporary music series decades ago and it’s still going strong, featuring concerts of bold new work about every other month or so in Chicago’s favorite former speakeasy.  In June clarinetist Cory Tiffin puts together a great cast of musicians to perform world premieres by Conrad Tao and DownBeat Award winner Jennifer Bellor.  Music by Louis Andriessen, Kaija Saariaho, Alexandra Gardner and George Flynn himself will also be performed among others.
June 19 at 3pm, The Green Mill, 4802 North Broadway; $10.

A pe ri od ic
Chicago-based collective A pe ri od ic performs a concert of music by composers Morton Feldman and Earle Brown, both friends and colleagues of John Cage and important proponents of the so-called New York School—an artistic aesthetic that, in music, encouraged the introduction of chance, experimented with alternate notation systems and incorporated improvisation. These guys were a huge inspiration to musicians in the downtown scene in New York that so thoroughly dominates contemporary American classical music today. In other words, they’re kind of the original badasses.
June 26 at 8:30pm, Constellation, 3111 North Western; $8-$10. 18+.

Eighth Blackbird’s residency at MCA
Four-time Grammy-winning ensemble Eighth Blackbird concludes its extraordinary year-long residency at the Museum of Contemporary Art this month, and if you haven’t gone, you owe it to yourself to drop by. The players have actually moved their practice space into the museum and, when they’re in town, they rehearse in the gallery. It’s unlikely that most of us have seen high-level music-making this up-close and personal. Interactive video installations show the Birds at work when they’re not in town.
Through July 10 at Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 East Chicago; free with admission.

Close your eyes for a moment and picture this familiar scenario: A super-villain is sitting in a high-backed chair, fiendishly stroking a kitten while he tells a momentarily incapacitated super-spy and a handful of hapless goons his current plan for world domination. What music is he listening to as he does this? That’s right, he’s listening to classical music.

Given that this is one of the enduring images we who have chosen this field have had to deal with at least since Wagner, how disappointing was it to open up the newspaper the other day and read that that arch-fucker Vladimir Putin had decided to put on an open-air classical music concert in war-torn Syria featuring his good buddy and fellow one-percenter, and also decidedly mediocre cellist, Sergei Roldugin.

I was eating tacos at a great new spot in Uptown when I read this and I actually turned to the guy next to me, shaking the paper in such a way that he couldn’t possibly read it, and said, “Do you believe this shit?!” Naturally he moved to the other side of the restaurant, but I was too distracted to notice.

I mean here we have Hitler, at least half of the James Bond villains, Gary Oldman’s character in “The Professional” and Alex DeLarge from “A Clockwork Orange,” just to name a few—and now Putin too? It’s too much. Obviously we’ll never overcome the image of classical music as the genre of choice for super-villains, but still I’d like to respectfully ask a favor. If you’re a super-villain and you’re thinking of trying to legitimize your recent bombing campaigns by having a concert on a historic landmark, for fuck’s sake call Yanni.

And now for some local classical music events put on by the good guys.

Currents initiative
Percussion quartets have sprung up like wildfire over the last twenty years or so around the world, so it was probably only a matter of time before Chicago got one too. Luckily for us Third Coast Percussion is one of the very best: an exciting group of topnotch players who consistently choose interesting composers with whom to work, frequently write their own material and are electrifying performers. The latest in their ongoing series, called Currents, features new music by Danny Clay inspired by music games he made for children, new music for solo vibraphone and new works by ensemble members Peter Martin and David Skidmore.
June 5 at 8:30pm, Constellation, 3111 North Western, $10-$20. 18+

Grant Wallace Band
A trio of composer-performers who, by their own description, “weave a diaphanous sound from threads of new music, modern jazz and old-time folk styles,” the Grant Wallace Band, consisting of Northwestern University music school alums Ben Hjertmann, Chris Fisher-Lochhead and Luke Gullickson, always put on a good show.

I’ve seen them live several times—including once at the Empty Bottle and once in Austin for the opening-night party of the Fast Forward Austin festival—and I’m a big fan of their unique blend of instrumental chops, rough-hewn vocals and tight compositional forms. (Although I will admit I had to look up the word diaphanous. It means light, delicate and translucent.)
June 6 at 9pm, Hungry Brain, 2319 West Belmont, free.

Our Severed Sleep Record Release
A new album by three guys who, according to their press release, have served as the human ambassador to the great Ursine civilization, been raised from birth by a community of human-sized insects and toured with Wire. Naturally I’m cherry picking from the release but I think there’s a nice flow there. These three preternaturally interesting individuals, Daniel Wyche, Ryan Packard and Julian Lynch, are getting together to celebrate the release of their new album featuring original material for guitar, drums and electronics.

Inspired by a diverse range of composers from German experimentalist Mathias Spahlinger to the repetitive looping of minimalist composers such as Steve Reich (but with a sense of style all their own), this promises to be an interesting evening. Ape Forward and Akosuen will also perform.
June 10 at 9pm, Elastic Arts Foundation, 3429 West Diversey #208, $7.

Ten years ago this month was the first time I flew to New York to attend the awards for new music held by the American Music Center, as it was then called.  I had a great time and from then on it became a ritual for me each year.

New Music USA was the first organization to write about ACM’s Weekly Readings project way back in 2004. They thought it was good for composers and so they spotlighted it, and that’s the simple litmus test that they’ve used since the beginning: is it good for composers?

Since that first event I’ve sat in on many meetings and have always been blown away by the integrity, dedication and selflessness of the staff.  Which is especially laudable as it’s mostly a group of folks who are composers themselves.

We composers can be very selfish.  We spend so much time trying to get our music out there that we don’t often realize we’re only one of tens of thousands of composers in the same boat.  The truth is that no one organization can effectively convince classical music institutions to embrace contemporary music, find funders, guarantee commissions and match composers with professional level ensembles skilled in concert production and promotion. There’s just too many of us. But therein should lie our strength.

I get a number of emails every year from composers complaining that ACM hasn’t done enough for them.  My question for them is, what have you done to help another composer lately?  Because if each of us did something to help someone other than ourselves we would all be helped.  This would be so much more effective and beautiful than ten thousand plus composers with an every man for himself attitude.

New Music USA is a wonderful organization but it’s only the beginning.  We need to create a buddy system or, filtered through a Hitchcock-esque lens, we need to swap murders except instead of murders it’ll be advocacy.  Seriously though, many of us have a hard time with self promotion. What if instead we promoted each other?

Close your eyes for a moment and picture this familiar scenario: A super-villain is sitting in a high-backed chair, fiendishly stroking a kitten while he tells a momentarily incapacitated super-spy and a handful of hapless goons his current plan for world domination. What music is he listening to as he does this? That’s right, he’s listening to classical music.

Given that this is one of the enduring images we who have chosen this field have had to deal with at least since Wagner, how disappointing was it to open up the newspaper the other day and read that that arch-villain Vladimir Putin had decided to put on an open-air classical music concert in war-torn Syria featuring his good buddy and fellow one-percenter, and also decidedly mediocre cellist, Sergei Roldugin.

I was eating tacos at a great new spot in Uptown when I read this and I actually turned to the guy next to me, shaking the paper in such a way that he couldn’t possibly read it, and said, “Do you believe this shit?!” Naturally he moved to the other side of the restaurant, but I was too distracted to notice. I mean here we have Hitler, at least half of the James Bond villains, Gary Oldman’s character in “The Professional” and Alex DeLarge from “A Clockwork Orange,” just to name a few—and now Putin too? It’s too much.

Obviously we’ll never overcome the image of classical music as the genre of choice for super-villains, but still I’d like to respectfully ask a favor. If you’re a super-villain and you’re thinking of trying to legitimize your recent bombing campaigns by having a concert on a historic landmark, for Pete’s sake call Yanni.

Recently my life abruptly somersaulted between two extreme opposites as I went from living an intensely introspective, rarely leave the house kind of lifestyle in which I spent my days in a feverish haze working constantly on my piano concerto that I’ve spent the last two years on and really need to finish, to walking the runway as a male model at a fashion show.

Yeah, it was weird. In fact you might even think I’m making it up.  I was in such a Barton Fink Life of the Mind haze for so long myself that I also wasn’t sure if it was happening but no, it was all too real.  This is how it came about.

My talented wife runs a successful company that makes bike bags and as such is kind of a superstar in the biking community and she was exhibiting at one of the biggest bike fashion shows in the country and they needed male models and, well, she volunteered me.

It was pretty intense. They did my hair and put makeup on me and gave me clothes to wear and even taught me how to walk down the runway. They couldn’t do anything about my bad posture and general slouchiness or the fact that I couldn’t stop thinking obsessively about how the orchestra relates to the piano in the fourth movement of my concerto but, overall it was surprisingly fun to show off high end bike products for hundreds of serious bike geeks.

Plus I was recognized at the after-party which was a new experience for me. I felt like a superstar.  But now it’s back to my little home studio and the life of the mind.  Oh, there’s John Goodman – what’s he doing here?

French artist and curator Jean Dubuffet coined a term he called art brut, which he defined as “works produced by persons unscathed by artistic culture, where mimicry plays little or no part. These artists derive everything from their own depths and not from the conventions of classical or fashionable art.”

In art brut the expressive content was more important than a glossy finished product; practitioners of art brut walked to the beat of their own drum and never gave a thought as to how their artistic vision fit into larger trends. Art brut would later become known as outsider art, a movement to which Chicago has contributed plenty.

I thought about all of this last month when Henry Threadgill became the first native Chicagoan to win the Pulitzer Prize for music. To me, Threadgill is sort of the ultimate musical equivalent of an outsider artist. Over the last fifty years or so he has built an incredible legacy of uncompromising recordings and compositions that reveal a singular musical vision and he certainly wasn’t thinking about musical trends.

It’s a bit of a surprise, albeit a welcome one, that Threadgill won the Pulitzer; but it’s no surprise that Chicago is home to so many outsider artists and musicians.

And really, reading the definition of outsider art, what other kind of artist would you want to be?

May is always a busy month for classical music as we wrap up our concert seasons and prepare to adjourn to our summer homes to drink port, abuse the help and shoot defenseless animals.

Sadly though, this year I’ll be stuck in the city as my beloved manor burned down last fall during a regrettable flare-gun duel with an impudent young oboist who questioned my knowledge of French Baroque performance practices.

Which admittedly I know nothing about, but still, what the hell? At any rate, here are my favorite upcoming classical music events, sans impudence.

Bernstein and Mahler—Elgin Symphony

I heard an interview with Leonard Bernstein many years ago in which he spoke about conducting the music of Mahler in the composer’s hometown of Vienna. The musicians hated the music and Bernstein could hear them muttering “scheiße musik”—“shitty music”—under their breath throughout the rehearsals.

Nowadays the general consensus is that Mahler’s music is quite a lot better than shitty and, in large part we have Bernstein to thank for it. The Elgin Symphony closes out their season with a brilliant pairing of Lenny’s first symphony, inspired by the angst-ridden life of the prophet Jeremiah, with Mahler’s Symphony Number 4, containing a musical depiction of a child’s vision of heaven.
May 1 at 2:30pm, Hemmens Cultural Center, 45 Symphony Way, Elgin; $30-$65

Flutronix
At this point people have tried blending classical music with everything from rock and reggae to drum and bass, usually with limited success. Which is a nice way of saying that it sucked. But flutists extraordinaire Nathalie Joachim and Allison Loggins-Hull have created an undeniably interesting performance aesthetic with Flutronix, a “blend of classical music, hip-hop, electronic programming and soulful vocals reminiscent of neo-R&B stars like Erykah Badu.”
May 10 at 6:00pm, Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 East Chicago; $12 ($7 students & seniors)

Ursa Ensemble—Quartet for the End of Time
A story old as time: prolific visionary French composer is captured during WWII and sent to a German POW camp, where he spends his days scribbling away on a transcendental masterpiece which he then premieres in the camp with other musician inmates for a small audience comprised of prisoners and guards.

Though I’ve never heard it performed as it’s meant to be heard—on makeshift instruments in a jail watched over by stone-faced Nazis—it’s still an incredible experience when played by professionals on modern instruments in a pristine concert hall. Any chance to see it performed live should not be missed!
May 11 at 7:30pm, Narloch Piano Studio, 4636 North Francisco; $10 suggested donation

The Chicago Composers Orchestra—Hymn to Humanity
Begun by composers Brian Baxter and Randall West and now in its sixth year, the Chicago Composers Orchestra is a kind of miraculous happening akin to, well, watching a winning Cubs team. A full orchestra interested in programming new works, often by unknown composers, most of whom are local? It’s proof positive that anything can happen.

Led by its new music director Allen Tinkham, the CCO takes on works by Bang on a Can stalwarts Julia Wolfe and David Lang and premieres an ambitious new work for orchestra and chorus by Eric Malmquist for which they’ll be joined by the Wicker Park Choral Singers.
May 13 at 8pm, St. James Cathedral, 65 East Huron; $15-$20

High Concept Labs—Open House 2016
The artist residency program at High Concept Labs has consistently produced imaginative collaborations and wide-ranging cross-disciplinary works of great quality. Their annual Open House is a chance to experience a kind of speed date version of their current visual art, performance art and musical projects.
May 14 at 7:30pm, 2233 South Throop; $15-$30

What do you suppose is the approximate age where we tip over into nostalgia, where we can’t go anywhere without thinking obsessively about the last time we were there?  I’m thinking about this because I’m in Boston today for a speaking gig at the New England Conservatory of Music but everywhere I go the ghosts of the last time I was here crowd my mind.

At the time I had only been in Chicago for a couple of years and my mom was living in Augusta, Maine.  During the summer she suggested that my sister, who still lived in Missouri, and I come to Maine and we would spend a week at the Old Orchard beach which turned out to be one of the happiest times I ever spent with my family.

At the time I was working as a “job recruiter” at a place called Adlab. Our job was to pre-screen applicants for major companies and weed out the crazies. The phone would ring and I would answer, “thank you for calling Target” or perhaps Fidelity Investments or whatever the company was. Then I would lead the applicant through a series of brain dead questions that a surprisingly high number of people would get wrong. If they missed too many we would “flush” them by hitting F7.

The great thing about Adlab, aside from the stimulating conversations, was the flexible hours so I decided to stay another couple of days after my sister left and my mom and I drove to Boston for two nights.  The first night we had dinner at the Fairmont Hotel on Copley Square and it’s one of the happiest memories I have of my mother.

For once our conversation seemed natural, not strained or full of real or imagined recriminations. The restaurant was elegant and there was a wonderful pianist and I felt like such a grownup sitting there casually drinking wine with my mother.

So of course I made a beeline to the hotel to drink a toast to that night but, unsurprisingly after so many years, they’ve completely remodeled it.  The beautiful ceiling is still there but they’ve installed a ton of TVs and the piano has been replaced by piped-in dance music and they don’t even serve dinner anymore, just upscale bar food.

It was very crowded though and I doubt that anyone noticed the guy standing by himself in the corner silently drinking a glass of wine in homage to a long-ago night.