THE SONG OF CHICAGO

The below is my program note for the opening performance of CAIC’s 2022 Collaborative Works Festival, which took place at Ganz Hall at Roosevelt University on September 7, 2022 and broadcast from September 21-25, 2022

“Sometimes it seems so strange to me that I am actually in Chicago. I take everything for granted…the L, the busyness of it, the soot (!), the store windows, and I forget that I am actually in Chicago, the wonder city…”

– Ruth Crawford Seeger

I often find the seeds of future festivals buried in the layers of discovery that are unearthed as I research and program each year’s Collaborative Works Festival. This year’s festival, The Song of Chicago, is the result of this very process. CAIC’s first program entirely devoted to the music of Chicago was the opening program of the 2019 Collaborative Works Festival. Entitled The City, the program showcased the work of four of the Windy City’s pre-eminent women composers: Stacy Garrop, Lita Grier, Shulamit Ran, and Augusta Read Thomas. Limited to just one program, it was crystal clear that we were barely scratching the surface of the important musical work that is being created within the city limits. With each subsequent fact-finding expedition that has been a part of the last handful of Festivals, it has become increasingly evident that the narrative of Chicago’s music history is an important thread in the tapestry of America’s musical evolution, and that it merits its own full festival.

Tonight’s program serves as a sort of introductory tasting menu that samples some of the composers who have lived in Chicago over the last century and a half. Many of these composers studied and taught at Chicago’s influential educational institutions over the course of the last 150 years, including the University of Chicago Laboratory School, Northwestern University, the American Conservatory of Music, and the Chicago Musical College, which since 2000 has been known as the Chicago College of Performing Arts at Roosevelt University, and is the host and presenting partner for tonight’s program.

Dubbed “the world’s greatest composer of art songs,” it is only fitting that this year’s Festival begins with the songs of Ned Rorem (b. 1923), whose vocal output is roughly as prolific as Schubert’s. Born in Indiana, Rorem moved with his family to Chicago as a child, where he received his early musical studies at the American Conservatory of Music, which was then housed in the Fine Arts Building on Michigan Avenue. He would eventually leave Chicago for studies in Philadelphia and New York. In addition to over 500 songs, he has composed numerous operas and orchestral works, and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1976.

In addition to the pair of songs that open tonight’s program, two of Rorem’s settings of Walt Whitman poetry are paired with those of another prolific Chicago song composer, Ernst Bacon (1898 – 1990). Born in Chicago, Bacon’s early music education was made up of largely independent studies in Chicago, followed by a year-and-a half of studies in Vienna during the height of the post-war avant-garde movement. Not feeling that this style was reflective of his homeland, upon his return to the US, Bacon sought to express a distinctly American idiom through his music. His compositional work was steeped in Americana, heavily influenced by the United States’ literature, history, lore, and folk music. A composer of over 250 songs, a significant percentage of his songs are settings of Whitman’s verse.

Just before Rorem was born and Bacon was setting off to Vienna for his studies, Ruth Crawford Seeger (1901 – 1953) moved to Chicago to begin studies at the American Conservatory of Music. Initially intending to only study for one year and return home with a music teacher accreditation, she instead stayed on for eight years, devoting herself to composition. Chicago’s thriving classical music scene in the 1920s exponentially expanded Crawford Seeger’s musical horizons, and it was in the city that she was exposed to larger scale operatic and symphonic forms for the first time. It was also during these years that she fell in with a group of avant-garde composers who became known as the “ultramoderns” and became acquainted with the poet, journalist, and folk singer Carl Sandburg, the author of the poem which serves as the text for Crawford Seeger’s song, White Moon, which is featured on tonight’s program. (We will explore Sandburg’s work more in depth at the festival’s closing concert on September 11).

The earliest dated composer on tonight’s program is Cecil Cohen (1894 – 1967). Born in Chicago, Cohen left the city to study at Fisk University and Oberlin, eventually taking a faculty position at Howard University where, as head of the school’s concert series, he was instrumental in the events leading up to Marian Anderson’s Washington, DC appearance at the Lincoln Memorial. As the chairman of the presenting arm of the university that was tasked with finding a venue for her recital, it seems that it was Cohen who was famously turned away repeatedly by the Daughters of the American Revolution and other venues, which then led to Anderson’s appearance on the steps of the memorial in 1939. Cohen’sEpitaph for a Poet is a setting of a poem by the Harlem Renaissance author Countee Cullen.

The remainder of the composers on tonight’s program are all composers living today, a testament to the continuing musical vitality of the Windy City and its influence upon the musical nation-at-large. Among those who were born in Chicago are Reena Esmail (b. 1983), now based in Los Angeles; Dolores White (b. 1932), a former student of Cecil Cohen, who is now based in Cleveland; and the Pulitzer Prize - winner Joseph Schwantner (b. 1943). Those who are currently living and working in Chicago include Clarice Assad (b. 1978), Stacy Garrop (b. 1969), Lita Grier (b. 1937), and Eric Malmquist (b. 1985). Esmail is represented on tonight’s program with a setting of a sonnet by Pablo Neruda. White is featured with a setting of a poem by one of her faculty colleagues at Cuyahoga Community College, where she was an assistant professor of music until 2000. Schwantner’s Black Anemones is the second of a pair of settings of poetry by Colombian American poet Águeda Pizarro. Previously featured at the 2019 festival with settings of poetry by Billy Collins and Edgar Lee Masters, Grier is highlighted here with a pair of Emily Dickinson settings. Assad’s cycle Confessions explores the experiences women face in modern-day society. Garrop and Malmquist both spotlight Chicago history in their songs on tonight’s program: Malquist’s Anna Imroth is a setting of a poem about a young woman who burned to death in a Chicago factory fire by Carl Sandburg taken from his collection, Chicago Poems. Garrop’s We Real Cool is a setting of Chicago poet Gwendolyn Brooks, the former Poet Laureate of Illinois from 1968-2000 and the first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize.