2025 Ear Taxi Festival Announcement

Chicago, IL (November 22, 2023) – New Music Chicago proudly announces plans to host the next Ear Taxi Festival for Chicago in Fall 2025. Last presented in 2021, the Ear Taxi Festival is a city-wide, multi-day celebration of new and experimental musical traditions that will feature artists in dozens of hours of programming, the vast majority featuring recently created works by Chicago composers, improvisers, and sound artists. The 2021 festival successfully reached estimated audiences of over 10,000 through in-person and live-streamed performances, workshops, and receptions.

The Ear Taxi Festival 2025 leadership team was nominated by the New Music Chicago Board of Directors and includes Tim Corpus as Executive Director, LaRob K. Rafael as Artistic Director, and Amy Wurtz as Curatorial Director. 

The 2025 Festival furthers New Music Chicago’s mission of giving significant support for local composers writing new works. Additionally, this festival aims to connect Chicago's communities through the collaboration of instrumental and vocal music.  

“I was grateful to work on Ear Taxi Festival in 2021 as Director of Community Engagement. Now stepping into an Artistic role with the festival, I’m excited to support collaborations throughout Chicago with a focus on the complex instrument that is the human voice.” - LaRob K. Rafael, Artistic Director, ETF 2025.  

First presented in 2016, the Ear Taxi Festival was created and spearheaded by Augusta Read Thomas, who remains among the most highly respected and sought after composers and arts advocates of our time. The festival was a joy-ride through Chicago’s new music scene co-curated by Thomas, Stephen Burns, and a curatorial committee of Chicago’s leading artists and intellectuals. To date, the Ear Taxi Festivals have presented nearly 1,000 artists since 2016.

An August Update

Since our last blog entry, May 3, 2021, many things have changed both for the world and for Ear Taxi Festival, while some things seem eerily familiar.  The weather finally warmed up—it usually takes awhile in Chicago!—and has stayed warm.  Many of us got the COVID-19 vaccination, while unfortunately some of us got COVID itself.  We (well, some of us) stopped wearing masks indoors once case numbers dropped.  Concerts with in-person audiences began happening again.  Most importantly for Ear Taxi Festival, we finalized and announced our line-ups both for the Mainstage and Spotlight Series.  Lurking in the background the whole time was the Delta variant.  Cases have started to rise again, break-out infections are occurring (though dramatically less frequently than infections of the unvaccinated).  Masks have come back.  No one knows the future (with the catastrophic exception of the officially inevitable climate change); but here we are.

I don't believe in a sort of techno-fetishism or solutionism, nor am I especially inclined to be optimistic about much of anything.  However, the substantial benefit of curating Ear Taxi Festival over the last almost-two-years, and the (let me emphasize: extremely tiny) silver lining of the pandemic, is that we are all incentivized to make new connections—Zooming with someone who is in a place very far from you has become as common as your masked trip to the convenience store.  As the Ear Taxi Festival team considers and reconsiders its schedule, deals with logistics, etc., one particular thing has struck me time and again, something so blatantly obvious as to be nearly invisible: Chicago is a very big city with a lot of people.  Before the pandemic, many of us tended to stay in our lanes—we went to our friends’ shows, we collaborated with the people we knew, we attended venues we were familiar with, etc.  An explicit goal for Ear Taxi Festival in 2021 is to foster encounters that might otherwise not have happened.  I challenge all of us to take a close look at Ear Taxi Festival’s line-up, to familiarize ourselves with the venues, to commit ourselves to attending shows of musicians we did not previously know about, and to go to concert spaces we’ve never been to.

Both a distinct positive and a bewildering disadvantage of Chicago is how neighborhood-y it is.  I live in Humboldt Park, I have *the best* neighbors, and I love living here.  And people in all parts of Chicago are happy about where they live.  All of the city’s neighborhoods—Austin to Lincoln Park, Englewood to Rogers Park—have rich cultures, deep histories, and residents with vastly different backgrounds.  All our neighborhoods have distinct geographies, restaurants that have been there forever, people who have lived in the same place most of their lives.  Now, let’s be clear-eyed: urban areas always come with more than their share of challenges, and Chicago is no exception.  Some of our communities suffer from police violence, gun violence, a history of redlining, economic inequality, under-resourcing, systemic racism, and a host of other problems.  One way we can begin collectively to address the challenges our city faces is to make sure we have the best possible sense of what the city is.  There are probably areas of the city you’ve never been to, regardless of how long you’ve lived here, and we can change that.  Living as we do in a world that has been altered profoundly by the last year and a half, this is a change we can all make in ourselves.  We hope Ear Taxi Festival can be a part of this for you!

—Michael Lewanski

Spring 2021 Update

The leadership of Ear Taxi Festival made, in the spring of 2020, the unfortunate but necessary decision to postpone the festival until 2021. At the time, we clearly had no idea how profoundly our world would change in the intervening 10 months.

The news since then has mostly been bad, and not just slightly.  COVID-19 has killed almost 600,000 people in the US, more than 3 million globally; and while vaccination has improved things considerably in the US, many poorer countries are contending with devastating out-breaks. 2020 was the worst gun violence year in decades. The extra-judicial murders (by police or otherwise) of innocent and unarmed Black citizens like George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Rayshard Brooks, and others were hardly new or surprising, though the reaction throughout the United States and the world was. So tragic was 2020 that the existential crisis that is climate change took something of a back seat. 2021 began with a white supremacist attack on the US Capitol, and continued with violence against non-Black minorities: the murder of Asian-American women in Atlanta, the police shooting of 13-year-old Adam Toledo in our own city.

Thus, let’s resist the tendency towards toxic positivity. There is too much wrong in our world for that. There is, however, an opportunity, in the midst of planet-wide tragedy, for what we might call “real talk,” if not yet for hope.

Now would be a great time for the musical communities and discourses in which we work to do honest self-examinations, and to make practical attempts at real changes even if those attempts are not immediately successful or if they feel unsatisfying. How have communities we work in perpetuated economic injustice for musical laborers? How are our discourses foundationally—not incidentally or ancillarily—structured to other and to exclude non-white, non-cis-hetero artists? How do structures of privilege prioritize some knowledges, and some musical styles over others? How does our industry contribute to making artistic fulfillment extremely difficult to achieve for musicians in this country?

These are all questions the Ear Taxi Festival 2021 administrative team is asking. The 2021 festival will attempt salutarily to respond to them, if not exactly to answer them. Our response will doubtless be imperfect and inadequate, and we hope that we will all learn from our successes and failures. Know that we are trying to honestly assess the challenges, problems, and short-comings we face. Know, also, that we understand music to be a force that can change people’s minds. Know, finally, that we are fully aware of, blessed with, and overflowing with joy about the plethora of truly remarkable musicians in Chicago. We are, in short, working with excellent building blocks of a better world. 

• Michael Lewanski

Postponement Announcement

As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, Ear Taxi Festival, a presentation of New Music Chicago, is being postponed to fall 2021. The last six weeks of planning the festival have been an atypical double-process. The leadership team has been diligently working towards the October 2020 festival; we have been finalizing venues, going through proposals, solidifying PR and marketing, working with graphic designers, crafting messaging, engaging in dialogues with artists. At the same time, we have been examining the ever-increasing likelihood that we would have to postpone the festival. After careful consultation with our partners, it has become clear that it is not feasible to hold the festival as scheduled, given the multiple uncertainties we face. 

Three issues have brought us to this decision:

1. The safety of all involved as the COVID-19 pandemic remains a public health concern.

2. Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker’s five-phased mandate that requires that all large events, including festivals, be postponed until the final phase (“Phase 5 - Illinois Restored”) is reached. This would require that a vaccine or highly effective treatment for COVID-19 be made widely available to the public.

3. The opportunity to address the pervasive cultural uneasiness around mass gatherings and to consider further integrated paradigms for the concert experience, including hybrid live-performance/live-streaming and interactive possibilities.

The theme for Ear Taxi Festival will be HEAR CHICAGO, and the larger mission statement reads: 

HEAR CHICAGO is a call to engage with the vast multiplicity of styles and traditions that constitutes Chicago’s expansive musical identity in the 21st century. It expresses our firm belief in the vitality of Chicago’s musicians of color, and especially the contributions of Black musicians, as a significant part of the city’s complex history. As our society takes steps to heal from the multiple tragedies it is currently experiencing, as well as its centuries-long legacy of injustice, inequity, colonialism, and violence, it is most importantly an invitation to challenge, collaborate, and change together as artists and listeners. We remain committed to doing the steadfast work necessary to progress towards a just society.

We hope that you will look forward with us to Ear Taxi Festival 2021 when, hopefully, we will all make music in person and together again. Please stay tuned for future updates as we move forward, and do not hesitate to reach out to us with any questions you may have.

With our best wishes for your health, safety, and well being,   

- The Leadership Team of Ear Taxi Festival