Sax in the Motor City

SWEDE EMOTIONS In 2000, the American-Scandinavian Foundation granted Rönmark an award for establishing valuable relationships between Sweden and the States.

During our phone chat with Swede-turned-Michigander Erik Rönmark, we await the inevitable Detroit bashing, but it never comes. Rönmark is surprisingly optimistic about his city and its new-music scene. “There’s something in the mentality of a Detroiter that, no matter how shitty things get, they can work themselves out of it,” he says. The classical saxophonist, who can’t imagine living anywhere else, even wishes he could spend more time downtown than in his comfy suburban home in Birmingham. Clearly, a city perpetually on the down needs more people like Rönmark.

An artistic manager and new-music specialist at the Detroit Symphony, where he works with maestro Leonard Slatkin, Rönmark is also a founding member of the independent collective New Music Detroit (NMD). The 32-year-old has lived in the States for 12 years, the Detroit area for five. Despite a thriving underground scene in electronica, hip-hop, DJs, noise and jazz, the city’s classical music is an afterthought outside of institutions like the Detroit Symphony and Michigan Opera Theatre, according to Rönmark. As a holder of a doctorate in music arts from the University of Michigan, he felt he could transfer the thriving music scene at his neighboring alma mater, just 40 miles away, to Motor City. So far, it’s working. With the help of Ann Arbor’s best—like his wife, Adrienne, who plays violin in the Detroit Symphony—along with grads from Juilliard and various Boston academies, he’s making new music accessible to Detroiters who had nowhere to turn.

By cultivating relationships with area art institutions like the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, NMD was quickly able to present shows to like-minded locals in affordable spaces. Its inaugural gig was an ambitious 12-hour marathon dubbed “Strange Beautiful Music” at the Contemporary Art Institute of Detroit. With few expectations, more than 200 people spilled in between noon and midnight. It helped that Rönmark could get musicians to do it for next to nothing. “Give them $50 and a gift card, and call it a day,” he jokes. New York composers Nico Muhly and Alexandra du Bois even dropped in.

When Rönmark comes to Chicago on Sunday 19 for a guest appearance with the University of Chicago artists-in-residence Pacifica Quartet, he’ll perform a rousing new work from Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, the first female composer to win the Pulitzer for music. The piece is unmistakably contemporary; some of the rhythms sound as if they were written for an Argentine dance hall. Rönmark’s varnished solo lines play hide-and-seek with the string accompaniment, never dominating or dissipating.

The work’s immediate beauty makes us wonder why the sax is terminally associated with jazz. Rönmark knows there are disadvantages that come with an instrument not normally associated with chamber music or symphonic music. “I’m so over the standard repertoire with the Glazunov and Ibert concertos,” he says. “Those are good to see where the instrument comes from, but we need to play music that is written now.” Rönmark claims many composers today are dying to write for the instrument and many instrumentalists are dying to play it, but the relationship isn’t fully exploited. Leading by example, he’s commissioned 30-plus works for sax.

Still, playing classical saxophone full-time in Detroit is virtually impossible, so Rönmark’s grateful for his day job. “I live in a city that’s obviously struggling in a state that’s in trouble in a country that’s in a depression,” he says. “So how cool is it that I work in the arts and I don’t have to teach to play?”

Rönmark sits in with the Pacifica Quartet at Mandel Hall on Sunday 19.

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