OK, the name is a dud, but you can’t not like the big, sunny idea behind the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s new Citizen Musician initiative. It aims to make the world a better place by taking live music everywhere.
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At an event at the Cultural Center that afternoon, CSO president Deborah Rutter credited music director Riccardo Muti as the driving force behind the project. He “gave us a charge to deepen the connection with the community and go places we’ve never gone before,” she said. Muti himself was conspicuously absent—he wouldn’t be flying in from Europe for his two-week winter residency at Symphony Center until the following Monday. But no problem. Rutter explained that Muti “knew that he couldn’t do this alone—he needed a partner.” Ergo Ma, hired last winter to be the CSO’s first creative consultant and the face of Citizen Musician.
Ma said “everyone wants music in their lives” and Ax “leaked” the news that next year’s Citizen Musician events will likely include a “piano free-for-all” with kids and amateurs. Rene Roy—who produces shows for Children’s Hospital’s in-house television network, Skylight TV—described the scene that unfolded when Ma appeared there, played “This Little Light of Mine,” and took a call from a patient who’s also a cellist. But the most powerful words came from McGill, principal clarinetist with New York’s Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, who shares south-side Chicago roots with the kids he’d met that morning at the Parkway Community House. “Everywhere I go,” McGill told the Cultural Center crowd, “I talk about [Chicago’s] Merit School of Music, where I was nurtured beyond imagination. I grew up there, it was my musical family. Everything that’s happened in my life I pretty much owe to them.”
The CSO is giving vocal lessons to incarcerated young women, training musicians in the Civic Orchestra, planning a concert series for tots, and working with a charter school. But how much more we’ll see in the way of celebrity musicians concertizing at Chicago retirement homes and community centers is an open question. For now, the main thrust of Citizen Musician seems to be a public recruitment campaign at its interactive website, citizenmusician.org, which also launched on January 29. Created to be a hub for the nascent grassroots effort, it’ll list Citizen Musician events, tell participants’ stories, and provide a space for swapping information and making connections.
