To expand their skill sets, Civic Fellows team with premier new-music group

Civic Orchestra of Chicago’s partnership with the International Contemporary Ensemble is designed to teach the orchestra’s Fellows about much more than new music. 

The two groups will present a concert Jan. 25, at Epiphany Center for the Arts, 201 S. Ashland Ave., but the process of planning and curating is every bit as important as the actual concert is for the Civic Fellows who will perform. 

Ross Karre is a percussionist and former artistic director of the International Contemporary Ensemble, a New York-based new music group that has been performing and premiering experimental concerts for more than 20 years. The upcoming Civic concert, he said, is meant to show emerging professional musicians that “from a livelihood perspective, working in a lot of different contexts is a must.” 

The Civic also believes in investing in music by living composers and supporting new voices in classical music, which is another objective of this collaboration. (For examples of past Fellows’ recordings of contemporary chamber works, check out this playlist on CSOtv.)

For working free-lance musicians, Karre said, “versatility and open-mindedness in many contexts is paramount to livelihood and success. Versatility in an instrumentalist should be treated as equal to other concepts in music education.” 

Kari Novilla, a harpist and Civic Fellow who is sponsored by The League of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, will participate in the concert and perform a piece titled UNIT/ED, which she co-wrote. “It’s a great opportunity to not only plan, but also take ownership of being a composer,” she said. 

Civic Fellows worked with Karre and another ensemble musician to choose a theme for their program and to think of works that might fit. “They had databases of composers and performers,” Novilla said. “They asked us good questions for our thesis for the concert.” 

Eventually, the group came up with “Let’s Think About This,” with a theme of dialogues among composers, performers and listeners. “It’s not just a bucket list of pieces we want to play,” Novilla said. “We were asking, ‘What’s the thread?’ It’s an opportunity to lead and make artistic choices.” 

“There should be some sort of coherent relationship between the pieces, and that relationship should be communicated to the audience,” Karre said. For this particular concert, the audience will be a more active participant than usual — details will probably be worked out in rehearsal. 

“We want to make sure the audience feels welcome to the dialogue,” Novilla said. 

As well as the nature of the pieces themselves and the forces they call for, Karre said that the musicians have also planned “the ebb and flow of the number of people onstage,” with larger pieces to open and close and more intimate ones in the middle. “It will be eclectic in terms of what the composers aim to do and the sounds the audience experiences.”

Planning their own program also may give the Civic Fellows a glimpse into artistic administration, which Karre said is another necessary skill. “There are very few performers who don’t also have to do some administrative work,” he said, and it is best to embrace it. 

Looking at the totality of the musical world, Karre said. “There isn’t one set ecosystem. There’s a constant freshening by way of new projects.” The Chicago Symphony’s affiliation with the Civic Orchestra is a good example of a healthy ecosystem, he said, partly because “it exposes participants to so many other projects.”

Not all members of the Civic Orchestra are in the Fellows program, but Novilla said it has been an opportunity to learn more about music education, project management and other useful skills. “Being a harpist, you also have to be a great businessperson,” said Novilla, who also performs in jazz and pop settings. 

“I wouldn’t consider myself a composer,” she said, but this concert is an opportunity for her to present her first classical composition, which she defines as something written and planned in advance. “Classical music to me is a nod to history, but it’s also looking forward.” 

The choice to perform at the Epiphany Center, a renovated church that’s now an arts center, was deliberate. “It hosts all kinds of events,” Novilla said. “It draws different kinds of people and listeners — maybe they’ve never heard classical music before.”

The Civic Orchestra fellowship program, she said, is “taking music out of the concert hall and going into different communities.”