Let’s hope the day comes in our lifetimes when Ravinia’s Breaking Barriers Festival, running July 21-23, doesn’t need to exist.

Maybe, someday, women performing music at the frequency the Chicago Symphony Orchestra is seeing this summer — on nearly every residency program — wouldn’t be newsworthy, and certainly not the basis of a three-day festival-within-a-festival. That day is not today, says Marin Alsop, Ravinia chief conductor and Breaking Barriers curator.

“Orchestras still don’t want to hear about this stuff. They’re kind of doing it (thinking about gender equity), but it’s not driving the mission. Since I’ve lived it, it drives my mission, because I have to deal with it every day,” Alsop says. “I’m always being asked to do an all-women’s music concert, so that orchestras could tick that box, or feeling that I was pushing a boulder uphill to get anything programmed in the main season by women. Those two things have accompanied my career always.”

Last year’s inaugural Breaking Barriers Festival focused on women conductors, pegged to the centenary of pioneering Chicago Symphony Chorus Director Margaret Hillis. This year, the focus on women composers expands beyond classical music, including singer-songwriter Natalia Lafourcade (July 22) and bandleader Maria Schneider (July 23) as headliners.

But at Breaking Barriers, concert lineups are only half the story. As it did last year for conductors, the event this year will transform the Ravinia grounds into a mini-summit for women composers, with panels, luncheons and an orchestral workshop of new compositions featuring the Chicago Philharmonic and six Taki Alsop Conducting Fellows. So, the initiative’s most important reverberations may not be felt in the Ravinia Pavilion. Instead, they’ll rumble behind the scenes through intergenerational, cross-cultural dialogue between artists.

“It’s trying to start a little garden of discussion, an open forum,” Alsop says.

That orchestral workshop on July 23, based on a New Music USA call for scores, will allow audiences to hear works-in-progress by three Chicago-based composers across a spectrum of experiences and styles: Kari Watson, a grad student at the University of Chicago named by the Washington Post as one of its “23 for ‘23” musical talents to watch; Amy Wurtz, a mainstay of the contemporary classical community here as both a pianist and composer; and Gillian Rae Perry, a newcomer to the city tapped as Chicago Opera Theater’s next Vanguard Initiative Composer.

Watson and Wurtz both abbreviated existing longer orchestral works for the workshop: Watson’s “Diving into the Wreck” (premiered by the Civic Orchestra of Chicago earlier this year) and Wurtz’s “Emome” (premiered by the Chicago Composers Orchestra in 2021). Perry had long been mulling over the concept for her piece “I’m Sorry to My Body,” but the call for scores, she says, “lit the fire under me to finish it.’”

“I’d really wanted to write a piece that’s an apology to my body. I was thinking about the orchestra as a body and about how physical sounds like breathing or heartbeats could manifest within the orchestra,” Perry says. “It starts from this place that’s very visceral and disjointed, with chaotic box-notation material and two keys happening at the same time, and we move into this more spiritual, unified place by the end. It’s a journey from feeling very disconnected to yourself to feeling at peace.”

Local eminences Augusta Read Thomas and Clarice Assad will sit on the panel for the orchestral readings of Perry, Watson and Wurtz’s pieces — a full-circle moment for Assad, since Alsop conducted her first-ever orchestral piece at the Cabrillo Festival nearly 20 years ago. The scarcity and expense of symphony orchestra commissions mean the Breaking Barriers workshop presents an all-but-unheard-of opportunity for the three selected composers, Assad says.

“There aren’t that many chances for people to hear what they write for orchestra. These (composers) can really benefit from having this heard. It’s probably going to be a mind-blowing experience for them going forward,” she says.

Consider, statistically, the odds stacked against composers who aren’t men — a 2022 Institute for Composer Diversity report placed works by women at around 11.7% of total repertoire performed in North American orchestras, a marked improvement from recent seasons — and the notion of a full-orchestra reading becomes all the more precious. Assad remembers attending a disheartening panel early in her career in which a panelist lamented that his music was rarely played. Fair enough — except the panelist in question was John Corigliano, for decades one of the most frequently programmed living composers.

“He still said that, as John Corigliano!” Assad says. “New music is difficult for everybody, no matter what the gender … But as a woman composer, I was like, ‘What do I do now?’”

Fortunately, Chicago’s tastemaking institutions have long been anomalies on the gender equity front. For decades, women have either run or held esteemed appointments in two of the city’s juggernaut composition departments, at the Chicago College of Performing Arts (Roosevelt University) and the University of Chicago. More than half the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s composers-in-residence have been women, as well, starting early with Shulamit Ran’s appointment in 1990. Those precedents fly in the face of broader trends, in which women and other gender-marginalized composers are far less likely to be tapped for highly visible appointments than their male counterparts.

That’s partly a pipeline issue. In a niche where credentials and pedagogy are still prioritized, it’s still far from guaranteed that composition programs and studios will build cohorts with an eye toward gender equity — or that those cohorts will be hospitable to women, as was roundly discussed in the field after a probe into Juilliard’s composition department last December. That story, first broken by classical music publication VAN, detailed sexual harassment allegations and claims that Corigliano did not recruit women into his studio at Juilliard; Corigliano denied the accusations.

Perry, one of the workshop composers, is well-acquainted with the challenges of being one of the very few women in a composing seminar.

“I was often the only woman standing up to present my work, and I found out later that some of my grad school classmates just referred to me as ‘the hot composer,’ which felt gross,” she says.

Hence why Breaking Barriers’ real work happens behind the scenes. Cultures as trenchant as the ones surrounding classical music are under no obligation to change on their own. They require sustained investment, strategic planning and — for a lick of heat against the glacial pace of season programming — enough urgency to see them through.

“People were blaming COVID for this lack of interest in classical music, or whatever. But it’s been a long time coming,” Assad says. “I think, finally, people are waking up to the fact that music needs to keep evolving.”

“Breaking Barriers,” July 21-23, Ravinia Festival, 201 Ravinia Park Rd, Highland Park; admission is free to $130 for single-ticket events, or $100-$125 for a day pass; full schedule available at breakingbarriers.ravinia.org with performances as follows:

• “Gabriela Montero Plays Her Latin Concerto with the CSO,” 8 p.m. July 21, Pavilion; tickets $17-$95
• “Celebrating Women in Chamber Music” with the Ravinia Steans Music Institute, 2 p.m. July 22, Bennett Gordon Hall; free
• “Natalia Lafourcade: De Todas Las Flores,” 8 p.m. July 22, Pavilion; tickets $38-$130
• “Maria Schneider Orchestra,” 7:30 p.m. July 23, Pavilion; tickets $33-$95; admission grants access to a set by pianist Alexis Lombre and her ensemble, 6 p.m., Carousel

Hannah Edgar is a freelance critic.

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