About two and a half years ago, I was standing outside of the MacDowell Library on a windy February night eagerly awaiting a phone call from an old friend. Marianne Parker and I played together in the Missouri State University Wind Ensemble ages ago. I remember her as an exceptionally talented pianist and one of the friendliest people I’ve ever met. We had sort of kept up with each other, but our paths took different directions. I eventually ended up in Boston and she built a thriving freelance career in Chicago.
Over the years, we had casually discussed collaborating on a project someday and it looked like it was finally going to come to fruition. She and percussionist Laurel Black are the two halves of L+M Duo and had come up with a really interesting approach to commissioning a new piece. A friend of Marianne’s had a connection with an international architecture firm that had recently rented a few floors of the iconic Wrigley Building in downtown Chicago. They were interested organizing a musical event for clients in their newly renovated offices. After a visit to the space and many, many emails, it looked like this project was finally going to work out. Because of my tight composition schedule and the timeline of this project, I had to jump right into composing. However, after finishing the piece (to make a long story short…) our connection with the commissioner fell through. We were all pretty disappointed, but Marianne said that she wasn’t going to give up on making this idea come to life.
About a year and many more emails later, I got an enthusiastic message from Marianne that she had a new lead. The Wrigley Building had recently been purchased by Mansueto Properties. A friend of a friend of hers knew Joe Mansueto and saw him regularly at the dog park. She mentioned the project to him and he was intrigued enough to ask if he could talk to Marianne about it over the phone. To make another long story short, he and the building manager loved the idea and wanted to fund something even more grand than we had initially planned. Instead of a semi-private indoor concert they wanted to present at one of the busiest public spaces in Chicago, the plaza right across the street from the Wrigley Building on Michigan Ave.
In addition to L+M Duo’s performances, Cadance Collective also presented a new interdisciplinary work and artist Arthur Wright was on site to paint a beautiful portrait of the event as it happened. In spite of the throng of naked bikers that passed by about halfway through the event, everything came off without a hitch. The premiere of Twenty-Five Million Candles was last on the program and the Wrigley Building lit up during the performance. It was absolutely magical and I’m so thankful to Marianne, Laurel, and all of the other lovely people who made this happen!
You can take a look at a quick excerpt from the premiere here:
…and you can take a listen to the mockup of the entire piece here
Program notes:
“The Wrigley Building’s most striking features, however, were the two hundred high-powered incandescent projectors mounted on adjacent buildings throwing over twenty-five million candlepower onto its facades and making the building visible – indeed, unavoidable – from the riverfront and Michigan Avenue.”
– Thomas Leslie: Chicago Skyscrapers, 1871-1934.
How brash. How bold. How audacious. How… American. A self-made man accumulates millions of dollars from selling 5-cent packs of chewing gum and builds a gargantuan, shining beacon in the center of the country’s architecture mecca. That wasn’t enough though. He wanted to shine 200 flood lights onto it so that it could be seen from miles away even in the middle of the night. Not only did he want people to admire his accomplishment amongst its many other magnificent neighbors, he wanted to literally shine a spotlight on it. Every last corner and carving stood in stark relief, proudly inviting scrutiny and wonder from any passerby. With the exception of a few months during power shortages in the 1970’s, this tradition has continued every night for the past 100 years.