Chicago chamber music moves to art galleries

Like a good wine paired with the right food, the mix of music and visual art can enhance each other’s top notes, offering an enriched aesthetic experience. Chicago art galleries and contemporary chamber ensembles have discovered that performances in galleries can be a most winning recipe.

For the dozens of Chicago chamber groups, performing in a nontraditional venue – such as one of the city’s nearly 200 art galleries – is an attractive option. Booking shows in traditional venues such as university concert halls and churches can expensive, with costs that include rent and paying for sound engineers or security guards.

“It’s incredible how much security guards are making these days,” said Robert Katkov-Trevino, artistic director of Millennium Chamber Players, who had to pay for a security guard at a performance a few years ago at Hinsdale United Methodist Church. “It’s 80 bucks an hour, so if you do a three-hour concert, you’re paying 240 bucks just to have one person sit there for this non-rowdy, ‘Pierrot Lunaire’ program.”

Katkov-Trevino said that the Millennium Chamber Players, a group of 17 core musicians who performs works ranging from Bach to Berio, draw the same size audience no matter where they perform. Performing in a gallery, therefore, is an inexpensive and logical option.

“The alternative venues are often the ones that are willing to give us space for free,” he said. “Universities aren’t going to give you their big concert hall for free.”

Developing a relationship with a gallery or other fine arts space can lead to free rent. Some galleries offer a “sweetheart deal'' in the form of a discounted rental rate to ensembles they have relationships with. The gallery owners hope the performances will draw crowds to their spaces.

“We try to avoid (renting) as much as possible,” said Christopher Preissing, executive director of the Chicago Composers Forum. “That’s part of what we’re trying to do, to collaborate in every opportunity that we can.”

The Composers Forum presents performances of its members’ music, typically played by Chicago-area contemporary groups such as dal niente, International Contemporary Ensemble, Third Coast Percussion Quartet and Fifth House Ensemble.

Along with performances in spaces such as Bridgeport’s Zhou B Art Center and Ossia Fine Arts Space, located in the Fine Arts Building, the forum has a year-old series called New Music in the Gallery. The series includes chamber performances at galleries such as Rosenthaul Fine Art in Gold Coast and Packer Schopf Gallery in the West Loop.

Performances in a gallery can be cost-effective for both parties, said Preissing.

“We can often pool our resources with the gallery, especially if we can make it coincide with the opening or the closing of the show,” Preissing said. “Then they’re advertising and we’re advertising for the same basic evening.”

“Sometimes it’s easier to go after a smaller gallery or a gallery that’s not really well-established just because there’s probably more benefit that they see in it,” he said. “But we also like to get in a big gallery where there’s already a built-in audience.”

While Katkov-Trevino doesn’t believe performing in a gallery attracts new audiences, many musicians disagree.

“There’s a really big crowd out there that goes to see contemporary art,” said violinist Austin Wulliman, who performs with dal niente and with cellist Chris Wild as the duo Wild and Wulliman. “There are so many galleries and so many young artists in the city that would be really into what we’re doing – contemporary music-wise – if they just were exposed to it more.”

The benefits also work the other way. The performances draw new people and exposure to the galleries.

“I believe that people that would be interested in a certain kind of music might be open to a certain kind of visual art,” said Aron Packer, who runs Packer Schopf Gallery.

The galleries don’t necessarily performances to raise their sales figures.

Jennifer Norback, director of Rosenthaul Fine Art, said she would be surprised if someone attending a gallery concert wound up purchasing one of the art works on display – some of which sell for more than $400,000.

“I think that (a performance) adds to the art work and the art work adds to it,” she said, “but I would never do a show like this thinking that any kind of a sale would come out of it. It’s just a nice way to bring some life into the gallery and keep things kind of fresh and exciting.”

It’s logical to combine contemporary music with contemporary art, Katkov-Trevino said, because composers keep up with trends in the art world. His composer friends know a great deal about contemporary art, he said.

“Nowadays, a modern composer is going to be more informed about contemporary visual art. If someone had asked Beethoven about his favorite painter, he probably would have said, ‘What?’ And not because he was deaf.”

Performances often attempt to make a connection between the music being played and the art on display. Sometimes collaboration springs up between the musicians and the visual artists.

The relationship between Rosenthaul Fine Art and the Composers Forum began in 2007 when Preissing learned that Rosenthaul was showing a series of works by Ellsworth Snyder, an artist and composer who was close friends with composer John Cage. Norback then invited the Composers Forum to perform works by Cage and Snyder in conjunction with the show.

“Snyder wasn’t just a visual artist, he was also a performer and a composer,” Norback said. “It was a way to show these vital aspects of who he is as an artist.”

In spring 2007, the Composers Forum brought together Chicago composer Drew Baker and his brother, artist Brett Baker, for a collaborative piece performed by dal niente at Ossia Fine Arts Space.

“We rehearsed it, and it was good,” said clarinetist Alejandro Acierto, who performs with dal niente. “But when we got into the space, it made it a little bit easier to digest because we actually knew what he was talking about. [We knew] how he wanted the sound to be created in reflection of the pieces that were on the walls.”

Every gallery has distinctive acoustics that can affect how musicians use the space.

“We think a lot about venue, and we put the right music in the right venue,” said composer Kirsten Broberg, founder and director of dal niente. “We never plan a concert without knowing what the acoustics are like.”

When dal niente performed at the Renaissance Society, an arts space at the University of Chicago, Broberg said she was inspired to compose a piece specifically for the space, one of Chicago’s most resonant rooms.

“At the end of the piece, there are these big chords with a bunch of silence between each one,” she said, “because I knew that there would be this resonance that would last five or ten seconds after the chord ended.”

Every gallery offers a different visual ambiance as well.

When his duo performed in Heaven Gallery in Wicker Park, said Wulliman, the gallery’s raw, hip space lent itself to edgier, louder music than would be appropriate for the more refined space at Rosenthaul Fine Art.

“It was a very rock-show feel as opposed to a concert feel,” he said. “There are different feels you can go for in different spaces.”

The atmosphere at a gallery concert is different from than of a performance in a concert hall, said Acierto. He has performed in gallery spaces in Chicago with dal niente and in Manhattan with other groups.

“It’s a little less formal,” he said. “It gives the performance a more casual feel, but also allows the audience to interact with the performers on a different level.”

Katie McCall, a dancer and choreographer with the chamber music and dance ensemble Sonic Inertia Performance Group, said she feels immediate audience feedback in small galleries.

“You see the audience’s reactions,” McCall said. “If they’re bored, oh my God you can tell. It makes it scarier. It really does, when they’re up in your face.”