It was a snowy weekend in February when I first arrived in Chicago. The year was 2013, and I had just graduated midyear from my undergraduate school, which had very much left me jaded about classroom teaching, and looking to do something different with my life. Mid financial crisis and a statewide teachers’ strike, grad school sounded far more appealing and like the smarter choice than working for a rural school district for 15k a year.

I made my way up I 90 for the first time, disbelieving at the way people were driving, even though I had learned to drive on the DC Beltway. I missed several exits on Lakeshore drive, and my printed Mapquest directions were not tremendously helpful once I left the established route. But I fell in love immediately with Chicago, with the hot dogs, with the energy of the city, with the way the river looked in winter from the El.

That night, I saw the Chicago Symphony for the first time. I had heard excellent, amazing orchestras before. But I think hearing that sound was what would really cement in my mind that I HAD to move here. When they tuned, I was struck by the sound of the woodwind section, by the mellifluous cacophony of As and noodles of sound. Now, after more than ten years of hearing that orchestra, I only remember that they played Dvorak’s The Water Goblin and Sibelius 1, and I left the concert knowing I had to move here and listen to them as much as I possibly could.

There have been some concerts that have stood out to me since – Michael Tilson Thomas throwing cough drops into the audience between movements of Mahler 9, Beethoven 7 at the Teacher’s Union Headquarters, Conrad Tao playing Gershwin concerto in F, and almost crying from the joy of being in front that orchestra for the first time in his career, and most recently, Mahler 7.

I was maybe 3 weeks from performing Mahler 7 myself, with the Arkansas Symphony in Little Rock. The music director flew into Chicago to be able to hear the CSO play the work live. It was one of the most interesting and fulfilling experiences I’ve had with a symphony lately – to hear one of the orchestras I reference often play a piece live in such close proximity to doing it myself. Mahler is dramatic. His parts are littered with notes to the players to “not rush,” to “hold back,” to note something about the sound quality. When the Chicago Symphony plays this music, it is obvious they are not only honoring every detail of the score, but the technical challenges sound easy. They sound relaxed. The highest notes in the trumpet part sounded like the easiest thing in the world, and I believe that is not actually the case.

I have not always had the relationship I have with the Chicago Symphony the institution that I do now. I stayed away for almost 2 years when they refused to program any music written by women in 2015. I saw them a few times on visits back to Chicago while we were living in Kansas City, and I felt regret about leaving Chicago. I started to try to manifest a move back, and in a way, I succeeded. But we all need great art in our lives, and it almost seems like the orchestra has always been there in the capacity I needed as a musician, as an audience member, and I hope, in an era of NEA cuts, that they always will be.