Against all odds, the Ear Taxi Festival is back — and how.
Uplifting the niche, little-celebrated world of contemporary classical music, the massive musical festival happens just once every few years. But in a disruptive arts funding landscape, this one might have sprouted in the most challenging environment for music festivals yet. That’s saying something, seeing as the last Ear Taxi happened in, oh, fall 2021.
But where national and city funding has flagged, state funding stepped up in a big way this Ear Taxi. In July, the festival received a $49,000 grant to support its Composer Showcase concerts, which led to a staggering 22 new works for voice and varied ensemble — possibly the largest musical commissioning initiative in state history. And the festival’s lavish attention on vocal music was a breath of fresh air in a new-music landscape that often forgets singers exist.
In all, the festival’s leadership team — singer and arts nonprofit leader LaRob K. Rafael, composer and pianist Amy Wurtz, and composer Tim Corpus — pulled off an Ear Taxi that was logistically tighter and more thematically unified than the 2021 edition, if not as stylistically wide-ranging. But they retained the best parts of the 2021 Ear Taxi, foremost of these a commitment to appearing on all sides of the city.
The festival opened on the South Side, at the University of Chicago’s Logan Center for the Arts, with Bella Voce’s Oct. 3 performance of the oratorio “Lost Objects.” Composed by Michael Gordon, David Lang and Julia Wolfe in 2000 and rarely heard since then, “Lost Objects” unites a chorus and vocal soloists with an ensemble that’s halfway between a Baroque orchestra and rock band. There’s even a DJ, remixing audio from the performance in live time — though, on Oct. 3, that was one of the performance’s few misfires, pummelingly loud and often out-of-step with the piece’s overall arc. The Bella Voce corps, however, showed off laudable choral commitment and zesty instrumental color.
Ear Taxi also brought back Austin’s Kehrein Center as a venue — still a great setting for live, unamplified performances, and a perfect home for Chicago Fringe Opera’s Oct. 17 triple bill of one-act operas by Kate Soper, Jasmine Barnes and Regina Harris Baiocchi. Though stylistically disparate, the three works together flowed together thematically: Soper’s “Here Be Sirens” and Barnes’ “On My Mind” dabbled in allegory, while “On My Mind” and Baiocchi’s “No One’s Child” offered a trenchant view of racism and its many permutations.
There’s still much audience development work to be done for Kehrein shows: The concert, like Ear Taxi 2021’s finale, was sparsely attended. But the works themselves, particularly Barnes’ and Baiocchi’s, received the enthusiastic reception of a full hall.
Overall, Ear Taxi 2025’s biggest coup was successfully making the festival longer and its bookings more spread out. Instead of the crazymaking schedule of festivals past, where it was physically impossible to attend every performance, Ear Taxi 2025 experimented with a new format: triple bills.
Some of these tested the audience’s endurance, like an early one I attended at PianoForte Studios that clocked in at three and a half hours long. Others were just right. One of the most thrilling and intellectually stimulating bills I experienced at the festival, in any format, was the Oct. 9 triple bill of baritone Ty Bouque, saxophonist Nick Zoulek, and pianist/bandleader John Bitoy in the Epiphany Center for the Arts’ intimate upper loft.
At the other end of the spectrum, Ear Taxi hosted four large-scale “anchor performances” as its core series. In addition to Bella Voce and Chicago Fringe Opera’s concerts, that included William Ferris Chorale and the DePaul Ensemble 20+’s presentation of Christopher Tin’s “The Lost Birds” on Oct. 11, attentively interpreted but compositionally unwieldy. (I personally found more to love in the four minutes of Ayanna Woods’ “Close[r], now,” featured on the first half, than the hour-plus of Tin’s oratorio.) It also included the festival’s Oct. 18 grand finale at Harris Theater — an appropriately epic sendoff, and musically excellent, with new works by Chicago composers Stacy Garrop and Damien Geter.
Prolific as she is, Garrop has never written a piano concerto. She burst into the genre with “Invictus,” played with uncompromising intensity by pianist Marta Aznavoorian and the Chicago Philharmonic. Like much of Garrop’s work, “Invictus” follows an extramusical narrative: Echoing the William Ernest Henley poem of the same name, the piano protagonist toils to fight off oppressive forces and free itself from a deep, dark pit, both embodied by the orchestra.
Sometimes Garrop betrays her newness to the genre — the solo doesn’t hit its pianistic stride until the second half — and the drama of the piano-slash-hero’s final escape underwhelms somewhat. But the ingredients for a fine new concerto are all there, and it could become truly great with some straightforward tweaks. In the meantime, look out for a recording of “Invictus” by Chicago label Cedille Records, planned for a mid-2026 release.
Though not a premiere, Geter’s “African American Requiem” made off the crowning work of Ear Taxi, and indeed much of the symphonic calendar this year. Also the festival’s composer-in-residence, Geter weaves the traditional Latin requiem mass with texts taken from spirituals and the words of Black men and boys killed by police — sometimes overlapping, sometimes intoned alone.
It’s hard to single out moments from a work that holds centuries of grief, endurance and memory in 80 minutes of music. But one, featuring the gleaming tenor Cameo Humes, still chills me to the bone. After a very Verdian “Dies irae,” Humes repeats the final words of Eric Garner — “I can’t breathe” — with increasing desperation. As Humes’ desperation increases, however, so does the orchestra’s fury. He’s drowned out entirely by the ensemble until, what feels like an eternity later, it relents. He whispers the refrain once more in a heavy, graveyard silence: I. Can’t. Breathe.
Like “Invictus,” Geter’s “Requiem” loses some steam at its climax. The penultimate movement, taken from Chicago journalist Ida B. Wells’ 1909 speech “Lynching Is Color-Line Murder,” could benefit from tightening and refocused attention to the vocal-orchestral balance. (Mezzo-soprano soloist Leah Dexter got swallowed on Saturday.) Otherwise, Geter’s piece is a sobering triumph. Might Cedille, or some other smart record company, look at recording this, too?
Though Ear Taxi’s anchors lifted on Saturday, one must hasten to add in an infomercial-ready voice: But wait, there’s more! The festival technically lasts through Nov. 2, via “accent concerts” not organized by the festival but marketed under its banner.
I attended one on Sunday by Ensemble Dal Niente, which, at 20, is by now Chicago contemporary classical music’s éminence grise. Its name, meaning “from nothing,” is both an acknowledgment of its humble origins — an early performance was held at a tattoo parlor, after the ensemble discovered it’d been double-booked by its original venue — and a nod to the 1966 solo clarinet work of the same name by Helmut Lachenmann.
Despite that, Dal Niente has never actually played “Dal Niente” on one of its programs. That changed Sunday, in a gripping, cool-headed performance by founding clarinetist Alejandro Acierto. The piece is mostly unpitched or semi-pitched air, though the soloist’s fingers fly as though playing a concerto, wild and virtuosic.
Every once in a while, a pitched fragment passes by, glimpsed like a shape behind a veil. But then, it, too, is gone. In the end, all — all it ever was — is breath.
Hannah Edgar is a freelance writer.
A full list of the remaining Ear Taxi concerts is available at eartaxifestival.com