Click here to view the online version of our Lincoln bicentennial commemorative book "Mystic Chords of Memory".
Mystic Chords of Memory
Ravinia Celebrates the Bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln
Message from Welz Kauffman, President and CEO of Ravinia Festival
Less than 40 years after a solemn train carried the body of our 16th president back to Springfield, a different train company started an amusement park with a concert pavilion on Chicago’s north shore.
The train is a leitmotif in the history of Ravinia, the oldest music festival in North America, just as it’s been a symbol of American growth and vitality and—in Lincoln’s case—a grim reminder of mortality. The legend persists in the Land of Lincoln that the specter of this death train can still be heard riding the rails with its mortal quarry.
Despite the train connection between Ravinia and Lincoln, I received more than a few raised eyebrows and looks of concern when I floated my idea of celebrating the bicentennial of the birth of Abraham Lincoln as a multiyear theme for our music festival. The symphonic world, of course, is notorious for programming to anniversaries— Ravinia will be doing a lot of that ourselves as we acknowledge the likes of Frédéric Chopin, Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland and Stephen Sondheim, all of whom have major anniversaries in 2010. But to celebrate a political leader, a man who is almost more legend than flesh, and a man who is not without great controversy, was largely uncharted territory.
Welz discusses the 2009 season live on WFMT. the official classical music station of Ravinia.
Certainly there are the classics. Lincoln and art are not strangers. The paintings, statues and monuments are abundant, and not everyone gets to be immortalized by the likes of Walt Whitman. Ravinia looked to the great works of the past in this celebration. We considered the divergent settings of Whitman’s When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d by Hindemith, Vaughan Williams or even the notoriously thorny piece by Roger Sessions. But we felt our adventure lay in less familiar gardens. Even in programming the de rigueur work on our schedule—Copland’s Lincoln Portrait— we wanted to make sure we had something new to say both through our choice of narrator and its juxtaposition with Fanfare for the Common Man and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. The once-in-a-lifetime talent Jessye Norman narrated the piece with aplomb and authority. Its pairing with a symphony that ends with the “Ode to Joy” transforms the entire evening into a celebration of emancipation.
To say I “did my homework” seems harsh, because studying Lincoln became a new joy and passion, and more than 60 books later, I still can’t get enough. I was appointed to the Illinois Lincoln Bicentennial Commission that planned events and restorations around the state, and that helped facilitate Ravinia’s goal of reaching out to our neighbors throughout the Land of Lincoln.
But we did not want to just look back. Lincoln is a figure of change. To celebrate Lincoln in a year that brought America its first black president was more than serendipity; it was reinforcement of the belief that our celebration should look toward the future. That means new work. The first new piece came from Chicago composer Elbio Rodriguez Barilari, who created a dramatic melding of Latin-infused jazz and spoken narrative to recount Lincoln’s historic relations with the president of Mexico, Benito Juarez.
Ravinia also hosted its first competition for composers, and more than 100 submitted entries based on the words of Lincoln or Walt Whitman. Three winning pieces were selected. Musicians from Ravinia’s Steans Institute performed one of the pieces on their tour, while the aptly named Lincoln Trio took another on a tour of communities that played a role in Lincoln’s own life, including a performance in Springfield for the newly inaugurated President Obama and another at Lincoln College. This was our opportunity to really reach young people. Lincoln is a figure that all elementary school children know and recognize, so he became a shared experience, a perfect entry point to introduce kids to musical forms that may be new or foreign to them. Our own Reach-Teach-Play projects employed Lincoln as a portal to music, and on tour we even went into schools to have children narrate the piece.
Our 2009 season was bookended by commissions from Chicago’s own jazz giant, Ramsey Lewis, and the charismatic choreographer Bill T. Jones, who’d been labeled “the political lion of the dance world” by the New York Times because of his fearless approach to often controversial subject matter. Not known to be a music-maker himself, Lincoln appreciated music both as art and an emotional expedient for healing his war-torn nation (witness his use of the song “Dixie” in welcoming home the South). Music was critical in Lincoln’s era, and the music that sprang from his lifetime, Gospel, blues, spirituals and the roots of jazz inspired programs throughout our celebration, most notably the Ramsey Lewis commission, Proclamation of Hope. This multimedia “symphonic poem” set the tone (and raised the bar) for the 2009 season.
The grand finale of our celebration—which we presented under the umbrella title Mystic Chords of Memory, a beautiful musical allusion borrowed from Lincoln’s first inaugural address— was the extraordinary full-evening dance theater work Fondly Do We Hope . . . Fervently Do We Pray by the Tony- and MacArthur “Genius Grant”-winning choreographer Bill T. Jones. It’s unlikely that any single work has brought more attention to Ravinia in our entire history. And the exquisite piece made the most of our new video screens in the pavilion.
The piece also built on the visual and aural train imagery so important to the history of Lincoln and Ravinia. Jones’s entire creative process was filmed for a forthcoming feature-length documentary from Kartemquin Films that is expected to be televised nationally next fall. So we will get to relive this bit of recent Ravinia history and fondly look back on our Lincoln adventure. Let us hope that these events will strike new chords of memory in us all.
Welz Kauffman
Ravinia President and CEO
Click here to view the online version of our commemorative book "Mystic Chords of Memory".