The mass shooting during Highland Park’s Independence Day Parade in 2022 is still fresh in the minds of those who were there that day. To honor the individuals who lost their lives and the survivors, and to help heal the community, composer Stacy Garrop wrote “Repair the World.” The Academy Orchestra of the Music Institute of Chicago will perform that piece during its 7:30 p.m. Feb. 21 concert at Nichols Concert Hall, 1490 Chicago Avenue in Evanston. Admission is free and reservations are not required.
Garrop said that she did research for this composition with Joanne Bernstein, a Highland Park resident who commissioned the piece.
They researched “the people that were at the shootings—from city organizers and first responders to witnesses and survivors,” Garrop noted. “We gathered a lot of information about what’s going to help heal a community.”
The composer explained that the role of the music she created was “to honor the victims and survivors. What really hit me in all the interviews was the inherent goodness of the people who jumped into action to save the people who were injured and who provided resources to people afterwards.”
The pair also visited a memorial site for the seven victims and a Kindness Rock Garden near the memorial, where people placed painted rocks with messages. They also looked through thousands of tags people had placed on a temporary memorial near the parade route.
Garrop said that one tag that caught her attention had Tikkun Olam (Hebrew for Repair the World) written on it. Below it, Repair the World was written in English. It occurred to her that you read Hebrew from right to left and English from left to right.
“The idea of something working backwards and forwards made perfect sense to my brain,” Garrop recalled. “I looked at the music I had been writing, and I could see where I had already started making things run backwards and forwards.”
The composer has created around 13 versions of the piece, which have been frequently performed in various versions. The Academy Orchestra will be playing the string orchestra version of the work.
Garrop will attend an Academy Orchestra rehearsal of “Repair the World” to give the musicians feedback and will also conduct a workshop for them. Additionally, she will introduce the piece at the performance.
She plans to tell the audience about a motif in the work. There’s a repeated note at the opening of the piece that audiences hear throughout the work, Garrop revealed. That note also ends the piece. She explained, “It shows that we still have work to do and that we have to keep working on healing the world.”
James Setapen, Director of the Academy, will conduct the Feb. 21 concert, featuring 25 musicians.
Setapen said that he chose to include “Repair the World” in that concert because, “I’ve known Stacy Garrop’s music for about 25 years. I consider her a really great composer. I had written to Stacy about another possible piece of hers that we were going to do, and she sent me recordings of two other pieces of hers.”
One of those was “Repair the World.” Setapen said he immediately wrote back to Garrop, telling her, “I want to do this piece right now.”
He said the piece “immediately spoke to me as her music tends to do. This piece grabs you from the very first note and holds you for its seven-minute duration. It’s truly moving, and the circumstance behind why it was written is very compelling and very germane to where we are here right now.”
The Music Institute of Chicago’s President and CEO Shalisa Kline Ugaz is a Highland Park resident. Her family usually attends the Independence Day parade, but missed it in 2022 for the first time.
“It was a terrible thing that happened, of course, and it’s a very difficult thing for people in Highland Park to talk about because it was so shocking,” Ugaz said. “Of course, terrible things happen all over the world, but when it’s right in your backyard, it’s different.”
She added, “It’s always about the victims and their family and I think it’s an amazing thing to be able to honor them. Music and the arts, in general, are a significant way of allowing people to heal and share feelings and emotions. I’m really glad to see that our orchestra will be performing that piece.”
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“We have a relatively small student body and we keep the level very, very high,” Setapen said of the Music Institute of Chicago’s Academy program for gifted high school pianists and string players. Twenty-five musicians will perform in the Feb. 21 concert. In addition to “Repair the World,” the program will include works by Ari Barack Fisher, Mexican composer Manuel Ponce, Gustav Holst, and Russell Peck, plus Bach’s “Concerto for Two Keyboards” by Chicago Duo Piano Festival Founders Claire Aebersold and Ralph Neiweem.
Myrna Petlicki is a freelance reporter for Pioneer Press.