The lawn at the Pritzker Pavilion fills from the back on a Wednesday, because the people who know take the grass under the steel trellis where the sound is actually aimed. Ben Folds made his Grant Park Music Festival debut on July 29th, in front of the Grant Park Orchestra, and admission was free.

He has spent thirty years writing songs for piano, bass and drums that were always secretly orchestral — the chords were too crowded for a trio and he kept writing them anyway. The arrangements have been waiting.

Free is the fact that organises this entire event. The Grant Park Music Festival has run for over ninety years and is one of the only free outdoor classical series left in the United States, funded to put a professional orchestra on a public lawn two nights a week all summer. A Ben Folds ticket in a theatre runs sixty to eighty dollars. This cost nothing and you could bring a bottle.

What An Orchestra Does To These Songs

"Zak and Sara" is a trio song with no room in it, and giving the counter-melodies to strings turned the clutter into architecture. "The Luckiest" went the other way — a song that survives on restraint, handed to seventy players, and the orchestra had the sense to stay nearly out of it until the last third.

He conducts from the piano bench, badly and visibly, which the orchestra appeared to find funnier than the audience did.

The Best Room In Chicago Is Outdoors

The Pritzker Pavilion is a Frank Gehry bandshell with a steel trellis spanning the lawn, and the trellis is the engineering that matters: speakers hang from it in a grid so the lawn gets a distributed array rather than a wall of sound shouted from the front. The practical consequence is that the cheapest seat here — the grass, which is free — sounds better than a mid-price seat in most paid venues in this city. That is a deliberate design decision about who music is for, made in 2004, and it is still the most radical thing about Millennium Park.

Somebody behind me spent the interval explaining to a visitor that yes, it was always free, and no, you did not need to book. They sounded personally proud of it.

Seventy players, a piano, and a zero-dollar ticket on a Wednesday in July. The lawn was full by seven.

Cover image: Jay Pritzker Pavilion / Wikimedia Commons