Preston Bradley Hall is cold in late September and the sound in it arrives from the dome a fraction after it arrives from the stage, which is a problem for amplified music and an asset for anything acoustic. The World Music Festival ran September 25th through October 4th, across venues from the Cultural Center to the Beverly Arts Center, and nearly all of it was free.
The city has run this festival for decades on a premise that is unfashionable and correct: that a municipal culture department should import music its residents cannot otherwise hear.
Free admission at most venues. One attendee described the weekend as a musical UN, which is generous and also names the structural issue — a programme assembled by nation rather than by sound.
What That Format Does Well
A nine-piece ensemble playing to a seated audience under the Tiffany dome is a configuration almost nothing else in this city produces, and the Cultural Center's rooms are the festival's real instrument. Indian classical programming anchored one day; the lineup elsewhere ran through regions in sequence.
The weakness of the format is that a listener who wants to follow a thread cannot. Programming by country means consecutive sets with nothing in common but the building, and the audience turns over completely between them.
Ten days is also long enough to expose the other problem, which is that nobody attends a ten-day festival. The audience arrives for one nation and leaves, and the programme never accumulates — there is no second night in which a listener hears the same ensemble differently. A city department can book the world and still not build a following for any of it.
A Free Building Doing Free Work
The Chicago Cultural Center was the city's first public library, built in 1897, and it carries the largest Tiffany glass dome in the world above a room the city now gives away nightly. A municipal department booking international ensembles into a former library, at no charge, is the single least fashionable cultural policy in America and this city has not stopped doing it.
The festival also went where the audiences are rather than making them travel — the Beverly Arts Center on the far South Side carried a free night of its own on October 3rd.
A Chicago makeup artist played one of the bills. Ten days of international programming, in a library, for nothing.
Cover image: Preston Bradley Hall, Chicago Cultural Center / Wikimedia Commons