2022 Festival

View the 2022 Collaborative Works Festival Broadcasts:
Concert 1 - Chicago's Own: premieres Wednesday, September 21 at 7pm CT and airs through Sunday, September 25
Concert 2 - Music & Poetry: premieres Wednesday, September 28 at 7pm CT and airs through Sunday, October 2
Concert 3 - The American Songbag: premieres Wednesday, October 5 at 7pm and airs through Sunday, October 9

Click Here to View Broadcasts

Click Below to View the Collaborative Works Festival Program Booklet

collaborative works festival program booklet

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MASTER CLASS

SEPTEMBER 6, 2022
4:00 - 6:00 PM CT
Ganz Hall, Roosevelt University

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The Festival Master Class, which will include performances by students at Chicago College of Performing Arts will focus on songs by poets and composers who have lived, studied, and worked in Chicago. Festival Artist Whitney Morrison will lead this class.

Master Class photo: The skyline of Chicago

CONCERT I
CHICAGO'S OWN

SEPTEMBER 7, 2022
7:00 pm
Ganz Hall

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The Festival’s opening program, Chicago's Own, will feature songs of composers who were born in Chicago as well as those who studied and taught at many of Chicago's universities and institutions. Among those born in Chicago are composers Ernst Bacon and Reena Esmail. We look forward to presenting works from composers who taught and trained at the American Conservatory of Music and Chicago Musical College (now Roosevelt University Chicago College for the Performing Arts), including Ned Rorem, Joseph Schwantner, and Ruth Crawford Seeger. Their songs will be featured alongside some of those teaching and residing in Chicago today, including Clarice Assad, Stacy Garrop, Lita Grier and Eric Malmquist.

Concert I photo: View eastward on the Chicago River from the Clark Street

CONCERT II:
MUSIC & POETRY

SEPTEMBER 8, 2022
7:00 pm
Ganz Hall

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The second concert, Music and Poetry will feature the music of some of Chicago’s Black American composers who blazed new trails for Black American composers and musicians both in Chicago and nationwide. This history spans Nora Holt becoming the first African American in the US to receive a Master of Music degree in 1918, the founding of the National Association of Negro Musicians (NANM) in 1919, the premiere of Florence Price’s 1st Symphony with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Margaret Bonds becoming the first African American musician bow as soloist with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. We highlight this history with songs by Bonds and Price, in addition to songs by former NANM presidents Betty Jackson King and Nathaniel Dett, and former director of the Center for Black Music Research, Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson. Alongside these will be songs by Black American composers currently living in Chicago.

The concert takes its name from Nora Holt's musical journal of the same title, which she published in Chicago with the mission of promoting the work of African American musicians.

Concert II photo: Nora Holt

CONCERT III:
THE AMERICAN
SONGBAG

SEPTEMBER 11, 2022
2:00 pm
Epiphany Center for the Arts
Epiphany Hall

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The closing concert will examine Chicago poet, journalist, and urban folk singer Carl Sandburg’s seminal anthology of American Folk songs, The American Songbag. Published in 1927, while Sandburg was living in Chicago, the anthology was an instantly popular collection of folk songs that proved to be foundational for the American folk resurgence, inspiring singers like Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie. A powerful statement of a diverse vision of American identity, Sandburg described the collection as a "ragbag of stripes and streaks of color from nearly all ends of the earth ... rich with the diversity of the United States."

The concert will feature arrangements of many of the songs contained in Sandburg's collection alongside various art song settings of his poetry.

Concert III photo: Carl Sandburg