Seth Boustead, composer and cofounder of Access Contemporary Music – Chicago Reader

Seth Boustead is a composer, pianist, and arts manager. Raised by a single mother in Missouri and Arizona, Boustead studied composition at the University of Missouri, then moved to Chicago in 1995. In 2004, he cofounded the nonprofit Access Contemporary Music (ACM), where he still serves as executive director. ACM works to foster a public understanding of classical music as a living tradition open to new players and diverse voices, not a relic that belongs to dead white men in strange wigs. 

In 2015, ACM launched Thirsty Ears, Chicago’s only street festival devoted to classical music. This year’s Thirsty Ears takes place on Saturday and Sunday, August 23 and 24, on Wilson between Hermitage and Ravenswood. 

In September, ACM will open a venue called the CheckOut in a former 7-Eleven at 4116 N. Clark, which will also have rooms for private lessons. The nonprofit already operates music schools at three other locations (Avondale, Rogers Park, and Ravenswood) and produces concerts in Chicago and elsewhere, but the CheckOut will be its first dedicated live-music space, presenting chamber music, jazz, cabaret, country, and more. ACM has a 15-year lease on the building, and it paid for the build-out with a $250,000 city grant and a capital campaign that’s raised a comparable amount. A festival celebrating the CheckOut’s launch will run from September 13 till September 28.

In this interview, Boustead talks about the history of ACM, changing attitudes toward classical music, and what makes Thirsty Ears “magical.” 

As told to Jamie Ludwig

I heard a lot of punk music in the 70s, and I was into all of that. But I heard classical music on the radio [in the 80s,] when I was 15 or 16, and it really moved me. It spoke to me, and I thought the instruments were beautiful. I started going to the library and reading more about the composers, and I started playing [piano] a lot. 

When I went to college at Mizzou, I majored in anthropology and took piano classes as electives. Maybe that never would’ve gone anywhere, because I wasn’t a good enough pianist to be a piano major—I just wasn’t quite at that level. But this crazy thing happened. I met someone who said, “I’m a composer. I’m in the composition department.” 

I was like, “What are you talking about? Classical music is old—it’s been written.” He’s looking at me like I’m an idiot. “No, there are still composers today.” That just blew me away. So I went to a composition seminar and started writing, and I had this epiphany. I loved to make up music. I loved to improvise on the piano. I had such a skill for that—a very good ear—but that’s not really what they wanted in the performance department. I figured out I was in the wrong place, and that’s why it wasn’t really clicking. So I became a composer. 

Composing is an academic career. Most people get a doctor of musical arts or a PhD, and they teach. But I didn’t really want to do that, so I came to Chicago in ’95 and started playing piano for the Annoyance Theatre. It was improv comedy, and my job was to make up music every night. They were on Clark Street back then, across from the Metro, and there were all these other bars that had live music. I was 23 years old, and I could walk up and down Clark and play piano—I was in heaven. I did that for a few years, and then I went back to school at Roosevelt’s Chicago College of Performing Arts, where I finished my master’s degree. 

I really wanted to get back to my first love, composing. I wanted to write music for films, theaters, and concerts, but when I graduated—again, it’s such an academic pastime. It’s really hard to find groups that will play your music if you’re not actively associated with a university. That’s why I started Access Contemporary Music. 

I wanted all the wonderful stuff you get in the university setting, where everybody’s running around showing each other their scores and having concerts of their own music. I just wanted it outside the university, and I wanted people who didn’t really know anything about classical music to come to the concerts. That was really important to me; I wanted them to experience this music and strip away any pretense. [Classical] music isn’t better than other music. It’s just music, like anything else. 

So that’s become my career. I still play piano, and I write about 15 to 20 pieces a year. ACM is now this larger organization that produces a variety of different things.

[Accessibility and equity in classical music] is such a huge thing. I’m a white man, but I grew up with a single mother, and we didn’t have any money. If you look at a lot of people with successful classical music careers, they all have similar backgrounds, and they were able to take the whole summer and go to these expensive training camps. I had a paper route when I was 12, and I’ve had a job ever since.

So there’s lots of reasons people are left behind. It’s usually money, and sometimes it’s systematized racism and other things—but it doesn’t need to be that way. The music started in Italy or Germany or someplace as a kind of European art form, and this idea that you could notate sound and write it down so you could remember it later was a unique and very big change in musical history. But that’s all it was. Concerts in Beethoven’s day were these raucous affairs that the lower classes absolutely attended. They’d repeat a movement of a symphony, they’d clap in the middle, they’d sing along. If you went to an Italian opera in the 19th century, it was nuts—like going to a ball game. How did it go from being this joyful thing to being this joyless thing? 

Back when we had Tower Records and these big chain stores, they had full-on classical departments. That was amazing but could also be super overwhelming. Like, “I know Beethoven’s supposed to be good. Let me start there.” Then there’s five thousand recordings of the same symphony. Most people just go “forget it.” 

Or, “OK, I’ll get CSO tickets for 80 bucks.” But then you get there and you don’t know when to clap, and there’s so much information. 

That’s just the benign part of it. I’ve worked with major institutions where if you mention you think Prince or somebody is a musical genius, they’re like, “Well, Prince is very talented, but all the musical geniuses are gone.” Even if you just follow the European side of the tradition, that’s obviously false—some of the biggest names, like Stravinsky and Shostakovich, died in the 1970s. 

It’s also insulting. Although this art form started in Europe, it spread all over the world. By the 19th century, you had composers in South America. You had composers in China. But women and all these other people were kept out. 

The organizations today, they’re not racist. They’re not misogynistic. But they all have this big conundrum, because they’ve trained their audiences not to like new music. They’ve trained their audiences that geniuses used to walk the earth and they no longer do. So the audiences are like, “Look, I paid 80 bucks. I want to hear my Mozart, and you’re playing this new music?” 

The institutions have painted themselves into a corner, because if they’re not doing new music—because we systematically refuse to let a lot of people partake in this art form—they’re only playing old music. So they’re finding people like Florence Price, a Black composer who was ignored during her lifetime. She was amazingly talented, but she’s safe because she’s dead; it’s removed. They’re digging up these older people, but they’re excluding people who are very much alive, very much diverse, and who actually look like the audience they supposedly want to come to their concerts. All of that was driving me crazy. 

[Classical music] is a European art form, and it certainly benefited from colonialism, and there were certainly racist strains. But it’s bigger than that. The sense that there was a perfect time for music is a dangerous thing to fall into. There was no perfect time. These people were a mess. Half of them committed suicide. 

All I wanted to do was say, “Let’s just go back and listen to the music. Isn’t it interesting that a Chinese composer wants to put one of their Indigenous instruments, like the pipa, into the orchestra? Or isn’t it interesting that a modern-day composer who moonlights as a DJ wants to put turntables into it?” 

When I started ACM, if you were a contemporary classical music organization, [people assumed] you were these weird kids making weird music in a basement somewhere. But right from the beginning, my models were like Goodman Theatre and Hubbard Street Dance. We wanted ACM to be this really important institution that plays what I consider to be very important music. The attempts to ghettoize us or tell us we were doing this crazy thing were, frankly, hurtful and wrong. But that’s changed—there’s a lot of groups that changed that, like Eighth Blackbird. They memorized their music so they weren’t tethered to the music stands anymore and they could hire choreographers. They worked with Blair Thomas, who used to run the Redmoon puppet theater. Their shows were fun. 

New music in the 70s and 80s was these people who never smiled. They’d come out dressed all in black and play this crazy music. If you didn’t get it, you were just out. That started to change in the 90s and 2000s. As there are fewer orchestras—which is a sad thing—there are fewer opportunities for these highly trained musicians, so they have to create their own DIY things. So you see groups like Third Coast Percussion and Eighth Blackbird and our group, Access Contemporary Music, forming. And we can’t just go out onstage and not smile at anybody. We’re responsible for our own marketing. We have to learn the notes on the page, and we also have to market through our social media. And so we became fun. 

This is a really fantastic time for [classical music]. We used to call it the style wars—you were writing either really thorny, complex music or you were writing Philip Glass’s kind of minimalistic, repetitive music, and the two sides hated each other. When I was in school, that was still very popular, but younger composers don’t have to deal with that. The style wars are mostly gone, and we can just have fun. If you want to write a G-major chord, you can—it’s more about communication. Like, “G-major? It’s been done before.” Sure, but that’s like telling a painter that the color red has been done before; I’m using it as a tool in a very specific context to communicate an idea or an emotion. We’re back to that again and not trying to reinvent the wheel all the time. 

I always say that ACM couldn’t have happened in a different city. It’s so Chicago to me, from our storefront music schools to our film festival [Sound of Silent Film] to Thirsty Ears. Now we’re converting an old 7-Eleven into a music venue at Clark and Southport. It’s called the CheckOut and it’s opening in September. 

I remember, years ago, being at the Hideout when they used to do their block parties. I had a VIP ticket, and I was in the VIP area. These bands are coming in after their sets, and I had the best musical conversations with these guys. I’m telling them I’m a classical composer, and they’re like, “Wow. What are you working on?” That’s just so Chicago—I don’t care that they’re indie rockers. They don’t care that I’m a classical composer. We’re talking about music. 

The city is expensive, but compared to New York or LA, it’s really not, and there are all these opportunities to do things. That’s how Thirsty Ears started. I was at the German American festival with friends, and I was angry. I’d been going to that festival for years, and every year the bands were a little bit less German—they’re playing “Mustang Sally” and all the generic stuff you hear at every street festival. I was like, “Gosh, street festivals used to have all these different identities.” 

So I told my friends, “I’m going to start a classical music street festival.” Of course, they laughed, but I was serious. The alderperson in the 47th Ward at that time was Ameya Pawar, and he was really into classical. I wrote him and said, “I want to do a Chicago street festival with food trucks, craft beer, kid-friendly stuff, and vendor booths—but the music will all be classical.” And he said, “That’s amazing. Let’s do it. My office will help you wade through all the paperwork and get the permits and all of that.”

The people who come are largely from Rogers Park, Andersonville, Lakeview, Ravenswood, Uptown, and the surrounding communities. We work really hard to partner with a ton of different groups and neighborhood organizations to get people out, but also to diversify the audience and really bring a lot of different kinds of people out. The music ranges too. There’s people with period instruments playing music from the 17th century, and there’s hard-core electronic music from the 21st century. 

When we say “classical” these days, it’s a pretty big tent. By and large, it’s still notated music, but you can notate almost anything. So the festival is all over the map, and the vibe is really cool. A lot of people like it because it’s not a beer fest or anything—not to throw shade at the suburbs, but people aren’t coming from the suburbs just to get wasted. It’s a more friendly vibe. 

The church has a lawn, so people bring blankets and sit, and we put out about 200 chairs. The vendors are all community-based arts and crafts, mom-and-pop shops, independently owned [places] like CHIRP Radio and Nomadic Ant, a really cool jewelry shop on Western. 

In addition to the music, on Saturday, as per our tradition the last six or seven years, at sundown we put up a screen and do a version of the film festival that we do with the Music Box every year. We choose six or seven of our favorite [short] films, and we reprise them with live music on the street. It’s just magical. Last year it rained, and I have this picture of a hundred people or more with their umbrellas because they wanted to see this thing so much. And I’m like, “Oh my god, I love Chicago.”

We feel really grateful to the community who comes out year after year, and seeing how much they enjoy this festival. We self-produce it, meaning that we put up all the tents and we build the stage ourselves. It gets harder every year, but we do it because we love that everybody likes it so much. And I think that there’s this sense that this is a really magical event.