"Tonight of course is a very special occasion," conductor Riccardo Muti said Thursday night, standing on stage at Symphony Center, the assembled Chicago Symphony Orchestra behind him, the long absent audience in front. "After 19, 20 months of separation, of disaster in the world, so many people killed, we've almost forgotten: lack of culture can damage society."
It can? I suppose so. Though with all the other harmful factors, the continuing plague and corrosive politics, the rising chorus of lies and entrenched delusion, with all the vigorous partisan structural vandalism being inflicted upon our country, I'm not sure how far down the list of harm the loss of classical concerts should be placed. Does it even register? I suppose it must. Music is in some ways the most essential thing, in that it offers us an abundance of harmony, grace and perfection in short supply anywhere else. Maybe music calls us to our highest selves.
"Culture is not entertainment," Muti said. "You did not come tonight because you did not know how to spend your evening. You're here because you needed to hear music."
I can hear music wherever and whenever I like, with a flick of the thumb. What I needed, very badly, was to go somewhere. A functioning orchestra has long been the hallmark of any great city. The CSO starting up again means something, if only a determined show of normality as we try to beat back this COVID epidemic that just will not go away.
Muti asked the audience to consider the musicians, how they have endured and kept themselves in world class form over a year and a half of lockdown.
"That is the reason I am playing 'Eroica'" he said, referring to the third piece on the program, Beethoven's "Symphony No. 3 in E-flat Major, Op. 55." The Sinfonia Eroica, or "heroic symphony," supposedly named for Napoleon, then yanked back when the little corporal crowned himself emperor (something for us to look forward to, perhaps).
"They have been heroic. .. they couldn't communicate the real reason of their life, to give the public beauty."
Now they can.
He pointed out that the first two composers on tonight's program—Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, and Florence Price—are both Black. Saint-Georges a contemporary of Mozart (the two lived together briefly). Price was a Chicagoan who work was featured at the 1933 Century of Progress Fair. In 2009, new music of hers was found in a run down house in Kankakee County. Quite the story, really.
"It shows culture is open to everybody," Muti said. In theory, yes. Still an overwhelmingly white audience at Symphony Center. Neither Saint-Georges nor Price were geniuses—his "Overture to L'Amant anonyme," his only extant opera, was pleasant baroque fodder, Maybe his other five operas were better, but they were lost in the span of time. Price's "Andante moderato" struck me as something you'd hear on a 1940s movie soundtrack, vaguely Southern (she was born in Arkansas). But then I am not a classical music critic, and if you want the performance assessed by someone know knows what they're talking about, you can read the Sun-Times review.
Muti's point is taken, about the desire for openness telegraphed by featuring those two composers (I'm tempted to lump in the third, Beethoven, just to be a wise-ass. There have been several attempts over the years to argue that the composer was Black, but those are more arguments made for rhetorical impact than anything based on empirical evidence) Two out of three ain't bad, and it takes a long time to turn the ship of society. Before people feel welcome at a place, the place first has to welcome them. Sometimes for a long while. Across the street, the Art Institute is going large for textual artist Barbara Kruger, splaying her work across the building's facade, even on the walls outside. That doesn't make women suddenly well-represented at major museums, but is another step in the right direction. Her show is certainly engaging, and taken along with the recent exhibit of Bisa Butler's wildly colorful quilted portraits, you can't help but think that the two mainstays of Chicago's cultural life are hitting the ground running in the post George Floyd, post COVID (please God) era.
Muti surprised me by pleading with the audience to spread the word about this orchestra thing.
"Where most of the world will become more and more savage, I am asking you to stay close to the orchestra," he said.
Okay, maestro, that sounds like a plan.
Sunday, September 26, 2021
'Stay close to the orchestra'
Saturday, September 25, 2021
Ravenswood Notes: Assuaging Fear
So much is said about a city like Chicago, it's unusual to run into an entirely fresh take. But if anybody has ever postulated, as EGD Ravenswood Bureau Chief Caren Jeskey does today, the city as revered ancestor, I haven't encountered it. Her Saturday report:
Since I am speaking of my particular family, Chicago has also guided us to grow things in her soil. Green beans under the skyway on the far south side. Roses wrapping around the Virgin Mary statuette in the Vet’s Park area of South Deering. Tomatoes and cucumbers, grown out of necessity by an immigrant railroad worker, to sustain the family, precariously (and often unsuccessfully) protected from rabbits, squirrels, and birds in the shadow of Senn High School. Eye popping, deep green leaves and happy, colorful flowers in a copious container garden on a back deck in Rogers Park. Rows of crops planted outside of the McCormick YMCA in Humboldt Park, where a Schwinn bike factory once stood. Palms rescued from the alley on a porch in Ravenswood. And always, always propagate.
Avocado pits cracked open as roots break free, rambling vines spilling out onto window sills in glass jars filled with water. Jade and Tradescantia zebrina pups sprouting up from clippings that friends and neighbors shared. A baby rubber plant that’s at least 25 years old on an alley salvaged end table in a window on Wilson.
I thought I’d be writing about fear today. Waking up at 4 a.m. after not enough sleep prompted me to take two hydroxyzine (not a regular habit since as an old school Polish/Irish/Lithuanian girl— who turned 52 this week— I am deathly afraid of prescribed medications even if they are needed). I have a feeling my Polish ancestors were the type who made tinctures from herbs and medicinal plants they grew themselves. While I am also drawn to natural remedies, I am out of practice and don’t have the intuitive sense of which plant medicine I need these days. Plus I don’t trust it enough not to die while forsaking pharmaceuticals like a Sri Lankan shaman tragically did this week.
In the past, I had tens of jars of dried flowers, roots, and leaves that I’d pull out in the wee hours when anxious thinking tried to take hold, preventing me from enjoying my zees. Chamomile and peppermint to relax, star anise to settle a tummy, sage for purifying and comfort, senna after eating too much cheese, St. John’s Wort to boost the mood.
Today I reached for the prescribed meds and embarked upon a meditation. This combination usually works. Breathe deeply, choose a mantra. “Clear mind” on the inhale, “don’t know don’t know don’t know” on the exhale (as taught to me by Ana Forrest many moons ago), or simply “I am OK right now. It’s time to sleep.”
But no. I’m wide awake and realized that fear woke me up in the first place. I’m having complications after round two of three of a dental procedure, and that scares me. Will my gums ever be the same? I’ve had a falling out with a childhood friend, which is unnerving even though our expiration date may have come. I’d like to be in a state of calm acceptance about this. I will get there, but have been ruminating about our last conversations and how angry I feel about being misunderstood. It will take some processing and active healing though, since one of the reasons I came back home was to reconnect with people. Since I got back in May, I’ve learned that I have some healthy friendships and familial ties, but I also have vestiges of a sometimes broken past to face.
I could go on about what troubles me, but you get the drift. We all have things on our minds. I know that as I age, and those I love age, it behooves me to live a life that’s as present as possible, taking each challenge as it comes with as much grace and courage as I can muster. Good rest and healthy habits that contribute to the most balanced version of myself are the only recourse for the daunting task of being human.
Off to water and prune. Wishing you a good day.
Friday, September 24, 2021
‘A cheap and easy way to save lives’
Like most boys, I have an outsize interest in emergency gear. From road flares to safety goggles. It could be the most mundane thing. A fire extinguisher. A sewing kit. You name it. Certain devices practically vibrate with possibility. Even a flashlight is halfway to an adventure story: the rainy night, the dark cave, the unexpected bear.
That’s the fantasy. The reality is more complicated.
The Chicago Park District announced it was going to start placing life rings along strategic spots on the waterfront, in the wake of the tragic drowning of Miguel Cisneros in Lake Michigan in August, less than six feet from the pier. His family felt that if there were a life ring, the 19-year-old could have been saved.
Maybe. I don’t want to dispute with a grieving family. But the views of the bereaved and public pressure do not always lead to good policy. A question arose that cuts to the heart of this: Does anyone ever get saved by life rings?
A quick check of the Sun-Times and Tribune archives found nothing, unless you count sailors plucked out of the Atlantic during World War II. Ditto for a century of the Daily News. The Red Cross deferred to the Coast Guard, which is mum. The Department of Transportation maintains 27 life rings on the Riverwalk, and 135 scattered around branches of the river. But they don’t keep track of how they’re used, other than to note that 20% vanish every year.
Thursday, September 23, 2021
Flashback 2012: The secret joys of piano tuning
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra performs tonight at Symphony Center after a COVID-induced hiatus of a year and a half. I've got my tickets and am looking forward to it. I don't write about the CSO as much as I should, perhaps because the cultural icon is already well-covered by others who know far more about classical music than I do. But a certain aspect of the operation just didn't get the attention it deserved, in my view, and in 2012, with a month-long piano festival going on, I saw my opportunity.
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra has a lot of pianos. At least 20 scattered throughout Symphony Center, including three concert grands, three baby grands plus uprights in rehearsal spaces and studios.
And now, with its “Keys to the City” piano festival going on until mid-June, there are even more pianos, brought in for the occasion. Chicago Piano Day on Sunday, an afternoon of free performances and activities, culminates with a “monster finale” of eight Steinway concert grands on stage, thundering through “Stars and Stripes Forever.”
No matter how talented the artists playing these pianos, however, none of them will sound good if the pianos are not in tune.
Which makes this an ideal moment to examine a vital yet rarely considered aspect of music: piano tuning.
A piano has hundreds of strings — 243 in a Steinway concert grand — plus hammers, dampers, pedals.
“The piano is an intensely complicated instrument — 12,000 parts — and all of those parts have to work as one,” said Paul Revenko-Jones, director of the Chicago School for Piano Technology in the West Loop.
Piano tuning is not a calling heard by many. A dozen students at any given time attend the Chicago School. The Piano Technicians Guild, based in Kansas City, Kansas, records 61 registered piano technicians in the Chicago area.
This is one of the rare corners of commerce not overseen by the government.
“It’s an unregulated profession,” said Revenko-Jones. “You don’t have to be licensed or certified to be a piano tuner. The way you become one is by saying, ‘I’m a piano tuner’ and no one would know the difference.”
That’s how Jack Zimmerman got into the business in the early 1970s.
“A guy thought I was a piano tuner and hired me to tune his piano,” said Zimmerman. “I needed money, desperately, so I ran out and got a set of tools, got a book, and tried to teach myself.”
That first tuning was “a disaster,” but Zimmerman took a class and ended up working as a tuner for 15 years.
“It’s a good profession,” said Zimmerman. “You can make a good living at it.”
Contrary to expectations, you don’t have to play the piano in order to tune one.
“Probably 75 percent of tuners including the really, really good tuners don’t play or don’t play much,” said Revenko-Jones. “We have to play something, we all have some tiny repertoire in order to hear what we’ve done. The skills are entirely separate.”
The CSO has four part-time staff tuners, who rotate being on call, each taking a week a month; otherwise, they work at other venues. Charlie Terr, for instance, the day before Chinese superstar Lang Lang played at the Lyric earlier this month, headed over to the Civic Opera House after Steinway & Sons Chicago delivered a nearly 9-foot-long, Model D concert grand. Terr first let it sit for a few hours, to warm up — a change of temperature will throw a piano out of tune, as will changes in humidity. (Harpsichords are notoriously susceptible to humidity — the moisture in the breath of an audience can put the fragile baroque instruments out of tune, and they often must be retuned during intermissions.)
Not only did this piano need to be tuned, but it had to be adjusted to suit a world class artist’s preferences. “I need to work on the tone of each note and brighten it up a little bit,” said Terr, who has been tuning for 41 years. “He likes a bright piano.”
Terr first worked mutes — strips of grey felt — between the strings to isolate each string — some notes are actually three strings being struck. He hit one key, then stopped, got up and checked the brass wheels of the piano to make sure they were locked.
Rolling into the orchestra pit will put a piano out of tune in a serious fashion.
“It has happened before,” he said. “Just not to me.”
The $148,000 piano secure, he took a tuning fork out of his tool box and hit it against his knee, sounding one of the most famous notes in music: A440, the “Concert A,” 440 standing for 440 hertz, or vibrations per second, a standard set in this country in 1926.
From that A, Terr tunes by octaves, working his way down the piano to the bass notes.
“I’m always playing two notes together,” he said. “I’m listening for how the harmonic series interacts with each other.”
After Terr tuned the piano, he “voiced” it for Lang Lang, adding drops of liquid acetone to many of the felt hammer heads inside the mechanism, to give a brighter sound.
“For me, it’s very important to have a piano that can do a lot of range of colors,” said Lang Lang. “Also, I need a very strong sustaining sound, ringing tone. A piano can be quite percussive sometimes. We need to make the piano more lyrical.”
Piano tuners report a high degree of job satisfaction.
“It’s all I’ve ever done for a career,” said Jim Houston, another CSO staff tuner, who started in the late 1960s. “You are entrusted with a lot of responsibility. You get to rub elbows with great artists. Tuning itself is a very enjoyable activity. ”
“Getting three strings to make one note, that becomes a Zen moment,” said Zimmerman. “Sitting alone, trying to get three strings to sound as one, it can be quite remarkable.”
—Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 27, 2012
Wednesday, September 22, 2021
Should Illinois bring back parole?
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| Michael Simmons speaking at a convocation for North Park University’s School of Restorative Arts inside Stateville Correctional Center in 2019./Photo by Karl Clifton-Soderstrom |
“We got rid of our parole system in 1978,” said Burlet, campaign strategy director of Parole Illinois, a coalition committed to addressing the needs of prisoners.
Along with Illinois, 15 other states have abolished parole. California, on the other hand, has mandatory parole and in August pushed the issue into the headlines when a parole board voted to free Sirhan Sirhan, who assassinated Robert F. Kennedy in 1968.
This is one of those debates where people of goodwill can have opposing views. You could argue that Sirhan’s crime is so vile, not only snuffing out the life of a father of 11 but a beloved leader who inspired millions, that he should never go free. I can see that.
Or you could counter that 53 years in prison is punishment aplenty, that keeping Sirhan in jail until he dies won’t bring RFK back, that we are too punitive a nation already, with 1.8 million incarcerated at any time. I can see that too.
Burlet is pushing Senate Bill 2333, which would allow convicted criminals in Illinois who have served 20 years in prison to be eligible for a parole hearing.
“It restores parole for people serving the longest sentences,” she said.
People like Michael Simmons. Burlet came to this issue after running a debate program at Stateville Correctional Center. I asked her to put me in touch with a prisoner who might be affected by changes in the law, and she offered Simmons, convicted of murder in 2001 for killing Kurt Landrum during a robbery and sentenced to 50 years.
Tuesday, September 21, 2021
Keep your day job
But something called "Digiday Daily"—a bit redundant, yes?—dangled the intriguing headline, "‘Quit your f – king job’: How the pandemic has pushed journalists to exit the industry" by Sara Guiglione, and that seemed as good a way as any to dip a toe into the day's media pond. Maybe one of my adventurous former news colleagues will point out a path that could prove useful should I, like the Von Trapp Family, suddenly need to chirp my brief farewell, then make a quick exit out of Austria, through the Alps, toward some unimagined fresh start.
Maybe so. And good for him for taking dynamic action. Though that sailboat kinda stuck out for me. Who owns a sailboat on $45,000 a year? Perhaps it's a very small sailboat. But it's also a reminder that people sometimes have all sorts of invisible means of support, well-compensated spouses and such, and the Digiday Daily (try saying that three times, fast) story, for me, waves more unquestioned red flags than May Day in Beijing. Another of the four, count 'em, four journalists in the story recovered from his ordeal at the New York Times by spending a month in Hawaii. A third flees the Wall Street Journal after two years of servitude for the security of a tech start-up, which is like leaving your wife for a stripper you met last night. People do it, though I can't imagine encouraging anyone to consider that path without at least hinting at possible downsides.
I don't want to pick apart the story, which is competent enough, other than to point out the last sentence:
“The pandemic has drained the life out of [these journalists]. My answer to them is to quit your fucking job," Herrera said.
Which made me wonder: why dash the obscene gerund in the headline only to deploy it full strength in the kicker? Maybe Digiday Daily (what's that Australian horn? A didgeridoo) has different standards for headlines and text, or, more likely, no standards at all. That's okay. We're all making it up as we go along.
Nor do I want to be unkind to the article's author, less than a decade out of college (go Cavaliers!) and gainfully employed as a media critic in a profession that is falling away in big chunks. So my sympathy. Being a media critic nowadays must be like being a village's officially designated mourner during a plague, a hard enough job without having some old crocodile you never heard of rear out of his obscure midwest swamp to snap at you. Think of it as part of the education. Mike Royko once threatened to break my legs: scary then, now a point of pride. (Well, not pride. That's the first thing to go in journalism, whose continual, doglike humiliations are a ... wait a sec, maybe we should all quit).
Sorry. Yes, writing can be a thankless grind. And the temptation of leaving the sun-baked desert island of any particular place of employment and paddling away on your lashed-together raft to find some imagined ambrosia-scented paradise must be a powerful one. But I feel responsibility dictates pointing out that people who try that also drown. Not everybody who leaves journalism is glad they did. I've seen more than one colleague who quit the paper to go scale the heights of their dreams, or at least snap at a 25 percent raise shilling for some pol, later return to smear their face longingly across the newsroom window and plead to come back. The process of prying their fingers off their old desk and gently leading them away is a heartbreaking one, softly reminding them that certain professions are like being baptized. Some stains just won't wash off.
Anyway, as a guy who has been on staff of the same newspaper for 34 years, I thought I would put in a good word for holding onto your job, despite the pandemic. Bad years come and then they go. Yes, times have changed, and being strapped to the block, listening to Alden Capital whetting their cleaver, must be a terrifying situation to be in. I thought my friends over at the Tribune did the right thing, grabbing their cush salary-for-a-year buy-out life ring with both hands. Because odds are, if they didn't, they'd likely be laid off anyway in three months with nothing to cling to. Though they're still facing the problem of which direction to go. Sailing off into uncertain waters is no panacea, particularly if you don't own a sailboat.
It's possible to step back, strip off your barnacles, exercise self-care, as the kids call it, while still maintaining your connection to a publication—my colleague S.E. Cupp just did it, apparently to good effect. In my third of a century at the paper, I've taken off ... calculating ... nearly two years, total, between paternity leave, travel, book projects, rehab, medical leave and, umm, suspensions. I recommend considering that as well, if it's an option. (And it may not be. I'm well aware that anything said by a journalist working under a valid union contract risks straying into "Let them eat cake" territory. If this piece is merely a self-own, a bleat of obliviousness revealing my utter failure to grasp just how lousy the profession has become for people who are not me, well, sorry. I hope I'm not snug in the lifeboat, wrapped in a wool blanket, carping about those splashing around in the icy chop. And I hope this isn't as serious a lapse as Gene Weingarten dissing Indian cuisine, which seemed to echo and reverberate across the globe. For a flippin' month).
Consider the source. As I've said before, if you're not in the paper, you might as well be dead. That isn't a life imperative that meshes well with becoming a Lyft driver. There is no question that being a journalist is a calling, like being a doctor, though not nearly as well paid. For some of us. For others, well, if you can be more fulfilled renting out your sailboat, don't let me stand in your way. One problem in journalism is that too many people attempting to practice it don't grasp the privilege they enjoy, to snag the attention of the public and give them something worth reading. Or not worth reading, as the case may be.
Monday, September 20, 2021
Like being stabbed all the time
Pain is a constant of Beverly Chukwudozie’s entire life. Not every minute of every day, and not always severe — what she calls a “10” level of pain.
But most minutes of most days, somewhere between discomfort and agony. And the rare times the pain vanishes altogether, it is always still in the background, “a constant fear.” Certain to return, the only question being when, and where and how severe.
Chukwudozie, 43, doesn’t remember a time when it was otherwise. As a girl in Nigeria, she was told she was suffering from rheumatoid arthritis. That’s what made her joints ache, sometimes as if they were being stabbed with a knife.
“I had a major complication that kept me in the hospital for about a month,” she said. There, a hospital resident told her, offhandedly, that no, it wasn’t arthritis. It was worse; she had sickle cell disease, and might expect to live to be 21.
She was 12 years old.
“There was really limited knowledge at the time,” she remembers. “I did my best to find out more about it.”
So did I. After Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s office announced September is Sickle Cell Disease Month. I realized that while I’d heard of the disease, I knew almost nothing about it except that it affects Black people, primarily, making their blood platelets, rather than being vaguely round, take on a crescent shape — the “sickle” part of the name.