(First in a series that will feature interviews with organizers of the Fête de la Musique – world music day in its original French incarnation – around the globe)
The weather seems to be an increasingly repetitive theme these days. When I met Deborah Sobol, Artistic and Executive Director of Rush Hour Concerts at St. James Cathedral, and Julie Hutchison, her Managing Director, for a virtual coffee on Skype last week, I found them not in Chicago, where they’re planning the first ever Make Music Chicago, but in sunny California. Apparently, Deborah relocates to California every March for a month-long artist retreat. The reason? It’s cold in Chicago in March. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t jealous of the bright California sun streaming through my computer screen.
It’s fitting that my first city profile be one of a city with a first of its own. Make Music Chicago will début this June 21, 2011, and from our conversation last week, it’s shaping up to be an amazing event.
We can’t understand the enthusiasm behind Make Music Chicago without first knowing something about (as Deborah put it) its “seasoned and spicy team”. Deborah is deeply interested in the role of great art in every day lives, and in making this art accessible; it’s been a cornerstone of her career since the beginning. The way she sees it, there are two plumb lines that have taken her through, from beginning her career as a concert pianist in the ’70s to founding Rush Hour Concerts in 2000. First: that great art always has a community involved. As she explained, “I can’t play a Beethoven sonata by myself and have the same experience as I would playing it for someone else. And as soon as you have someone else listening, it moves very quickly into that really magical triangle of performer, composer, and listener.” Second: that art has the power to transform people’s lives. “It doesn’t take a long time”, she noted. “It can happen in twenty minutes and you can suddenly be taken up to the 35,000 foot level, and be reminded of your humanity by being in a community of engaged listeners, and leave and go back to work the next day a better person.”
The tag line for Rush Hour – “great music for busy lives” – speaks to these two principles on many levels, and it speaks to the ideas behind the Fête de la Musique (which you can read more about here) as well.
The Rush Hour ‘Founder’s story’ goes something like this: “with Rush Hour, it was actually very much on my mind about five years before we actually founded it because I saw a very distinct change in our cultural trends … it was the first time a generation of women had gone on and lived out that liberated workforce, and were feeling the strain of what that does to our social and cultural lives. The cultural life we grew up with in the ’60s was no longer there because we were all working. To me that was a huge shift. So, I started Rush Hour as a response to those demands on our contemporary lifestyles. It was conceived out of the box, conceived with the idea that everyone, no matter what their station in life, should have easy access to great music.” Today, Rush Hour attracts more than 500 individuals, a third of which are “young people”, to their free weekly summer series. “When Make Music Chicago came along, it seemed like a natural extension of the Rush Hour mission,” Deborah explained, and not only because June 21 falls on a Tuesday this year, which happens to be the weekly Rush Hour evening.
Deborah was introduced to the Fête by Chicago’s French Consul, General Graham Paul. When Julie pulled up some info on Make Music New York, and the duo saw what it had been and could be elsewhere, well, they “were off to the races. Chicago is a city of neighborhoods, and all summer long there are festivals. So [the Fête] was a natural fit” noted Julie. The city, Deborah says, has been on board since the beginning. “The City is used to things like this happening in the summer, and they’re offering us some of their more public spaces where they’re used to people doing things. It all has to go through permits, of course, but they’re very enthusiastic about it.”
In their first year, they’re starting modestly. Deborah laughed: “Chicago is a huge city, and has just as huge a number of neighborhoods. So for us to start now and try to get every neighborhood involved would be total suicide. This is just partial suicide.” When I confessed to Deborah and Julie that my understanding of Chicago is that of a classical music city – the Chicago Symphony Orchestra is one of the best in the nation after all, the city has given rise to the likes of the International Contemporary Ensemble, and Rush Hour itself is largely classical-themed – Deborah laughed, again. “The first two people who signed up were rock bands. And the folk genre is very popular in Chicago… so that will be very well represented. And we have a lot of ethnic neighborhoods as well, so we’re hoping we’ll have segments of everything.”
The Grand Finale will be at St. James Cathedral. “We’re planning a Grand Symphony in C. A few minutes before sunset, we’ll have everyone who’s participated during the day gather in the cathedral and sing or play something – anything – so long as it’s in C Major. So there will be kazoo players, and string quartets, and a lot of people humming and singing in C. We’ll probably have the organ put the pedal point down. And we’ll have someone, hopefully a person of note (no pun intended) conduct us for five minutes or so, because you know a Symphony in C…a little will go a long way at that point in the day. So that will be our Grand Finale to send the Fête de la Musique further west on its day-long journey.” (At this I couldn’t help but think with nostalgia about NYC’s performance of Terry Riley’s In C in our own first year.)
One of my favorite aspects of Make Music New York is how it encourages all sorts of people to come out and play, which, actually, plays directly into Deborah’s mission of music for all. “A lot of people are inhibited from [playing in public] because they think they have to be perfect. It’s another phenomenon of our culture that people are beginning to think that you just press an iPod button and that’s what it means to make music. But when you begin to do something yourself you realize that it’s so much more gratifying, and it becomes a much bigger part of your life, which is another reason I’m very excited about Make Music Chicago.”
But perhaps the most fun part of the Fête de la Musique for me is the surprise and pleasure of coming across friends and colleagues in a different context. Already Deborah has some interesting stories of cross-over and unexpected musical twists. “Kuang-Hao Huang, a wonderful pianist in Chicago, he is so excited that he asked if he could participate in other ways – he’s playing on the Rush Hour concert that night. Turns out he used to be in a marching band in high school and wants to pull out his trombone again and get some marching band together on Daley Plaza to play the Stars and Stripes or something.”
If you find yourself in Chicago on June 21, be sure to stop in with an instrument tuned to C for the Grand Finale. And look out for Deborah “hiding out in the alto section of an amateur madrigal group.” Looking forward to seeing how Make Music Chicago unfolds in year one.
UPDATED: for clarity
