Making big Plans

TORKE’S CATALOG The composer has also written urban-inspired pieces on Grand Central Station and his street corner in Manhattan.

In an era when arts funding is disappearing faster than white Ray-Bans on Division, sometimes kismet is the only expedient way to get the gig. For New York–based composer Michael Torke, a 2005 trip to see his sister in Chicago unexpectedly landed him an enviable Grant Park Music Festival commission—celebrating the centennial of one of the greatest feats of urban planning, Daniel Burnham’s 1909 Plan of Chicago. While traipsing through the then recently completed Millennium Park, Torke found himself in the midst of a Grant Park Orchestra rehearsal, shaking hands with artistic director Jim Palermo. “Two years later, he calls and says, ‘Hey, I have a project!’” Torke recalls.

If the name Michael Torke is unfamiliar, think back to the music of the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta. No, not Céline Dion singing “The Power of the Dream.” Torke’s Atlanta Symphony commission, Javelin, which was performed at the Games, remains one of the 47-year-old’s best-known works.

Like those of Olivier Messiaen, Torke’s compositions are influenced by one of the sexier “-esias”: synesthesia, in which a person “hears” color and associates certain keys with specific shades. Early-’80s works include titles like “Bright Blue Music,” “Purple” and “Ecstatic Orange,” after which his vanity label, Ecstatic Records, is named. As they burst with big brass fanfares and jaunty jazz rhythms, it’s not too much of a stretch to hear the colors the composer suggests.

More crucial to these pieces than the rainbow, however, was Torke’s notion that music is incapable of representing events and emotions, an idea the composer began to explore once he arrived in New York City in 1985, after graduating from Yale. “I had all these colleagues who thought the most profound thing they could write was when their cat died,” the Milwaukee native says. “Oh, aren’t they profound.” Torke bristled at the idea of writing as personal therapy for indulgent feelings, insisting that music was far more effective when not depicting Mr. Peepers’s unfortunate standoff with a Corolla.

And yet Torke soon realized the limitations of his own nonrepresentational music, and these days he’s given in and embraced narrative in his work. With Book of Proverbs, his 1996 opera which he describes as most like his upcoming Grant Park piece, Plans for Soprano, Tenor, Chorus, and Orchestra, Torke discovered just how hilarious an Old Testament excerpt could be. The text at the end of the baritone solo reads, “Such is the way of an adulterous woman: she eats, wipes her mouth, and says, ‘I have done no wrong.’” Torke says with a laugh, “We were at the piano rehearsal with [conductor] Edo de Waart when he finally understood what that meant, the X-rated meaning! He got so red he almost had to leave the room!”

Unfortunately, Burnham’s Plan of Chicago doesn’t offer a composer amusing maxims on adultery with which to play. Instead of mining the often dry, though important, 124-page doc for his libretto, Torke sought inspiration in Erik Larson’s best-selling The Devil in the White City. A quote attributed to Burnham—“Make big plans! What our sons and grandsons will do will stagger us!”—is segmented into titles for each of the five movements of the oratorio.

Torke’s Copland-esque harmonies and commitment to music that he believes “doesn’t require an intellectual filter” seem like a good fit whether you’re thinking petite sirah or Schlitz for Friday’s outdoor premiere by the Grant Park Orchestra and Chorus on the Pritzker stage. Or you can just confirm your childhood hunch that D major really is sea-foam green after all.

Hear Torke’s Plans featuring soprano Jonita Lattimore and tenor Bryan Griffin Friday 19 and Saturday 20 at Pritzker Pavilion.

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