New-music groups making a scene around Chicago
In his lively 2004 history of theater in Chicago, A Theater of Our Own, Richard Christiansen recounts a delicious moment from the early 1970s when the city had very little home-grown theater.
Stuart Gordon was thinking of transplanting his Organic Theater from Madison, Wis., to Chicago's North Side. He asked Chicago director Paul Sills what he thought about the idea. "Sure," Sills said. "Come on down. I'm here on Lincoln Avenue at the Body Politic; Kingston Mines is just up the street. When you get here, we'll have a scene."
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Maybe Chicago's scattering of small, new-music ensembles doesn't constitute a true scene just yet. But without a doubt, over the next few weeks audiences interested in new and unusual classical music will have a lot to choose from.
MusicNOW, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's contemporary chamber music series, opens its 11th season Nov. 10. Eighth blackbird, one of the country's most imaginative contemporary groups and a resident ensemble at the University of Chicago, collaborates with Glenn Kotche, percussionist with the Chicago rock band Wilco, in a concert Nov. 18. And one of Chicago's younger new-music groups, the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), opens a four-concert season at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, 600 S. Michigan, at 7:30 tonight.
Working with ensemble members saxophonist David Reminick and composer/percussionist Nathan Davis, ICE trumpeter Peter Evans will improvise in the museum's galleries where works by Dorothea Lange and other Depression-era photographers are on display along with the original manuscript scroll of Jack Kerouac's On the Road.
According to Claire Chase, a co-founder of ICE and a flutist who graduated from the Oberlin Conservatory in 2001, Chicago's thriving theater scene inspired her and her colleagues.
"I moved to Chicago right after I graduated from Oberlin," she said, "I was really interested in Chicago because of the theater scene. There were 200-some tiny, little itty-bitty theaters functioning in a totally healthy, totally exciting, very productive way. I thought there's this incredible, sort of grass-roots arts organizing movement happening in theater. Why couldn't it happen in the contemporary music, classical sector, as well?"
Chase and other enthusiastic Oberlin grads founded ICE that year, and the ensemble has thrived. A loose collective of 30 artists, they divide their time between Chicago and New York City. In addition to four concerts at the Museum of Contemporary Photography during 2008-09, ICE will be in residence at Northwestern University this fall, with concerts scheduled in Evanston on Nov. 20 and 21.
Tickets to ICE's concert tonight are $10. Call (312) 494-2655.
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MusicNOW launches its 2008-09 season at 8 p.m. Nov. 10 in the Harris Theater for Music and Dance, 205 E. Randolph. Conductor Ludovic Morlot leads two pieces by Peter Lieberson: "Raising the Gaze" and "Ziji," and two world premieres of MusicNOW commissions. One is "Infinite Reflections" by Derrick Hodge, who wrote the score to Spike Lee's film documentary about Hurricane Katrina, "When the Levees Broke," and collaborated with Chicago-based rapper Kanye West on the album "Finding Forever." The second is "Cafe con Pan" by Venezuelan composer Gonzalo Grau. Tickets are $20. Call (312) 294-3000.
MusicNOW's season continues with performances Jan. 12, March 2 and June 8.
Eighth blackbird and Kotche share the stage at 7:30 p.m. Nov. 18 at the Harris Theater. Kotche will perform solo works in the evening's first half, drawn from his third solo album, "Mobile." He also will appear with eighth blackbird in "Double Fantasy," an ensemble piece based on a vibraphone solo, "Fantasy on a Shona Theme," from the "Mobile" album. Eighth blackbird also will perform Kotche's "Individual Trains," and Lisa Kaplan, the ensemble's pianist, will give the concert premiere of Kotche's solo piano arrangement of "On the Corner" by Chicago rapper Common.
Tickets are $30. Call (312) 334-7777.
Free-lance writer Wynne Delacoma was the Sun-Times' classical music critic from 1991 to 2006.