Make University of Chicago Presents more innovative, inclusive and interdisciplinary and more connected to other facets of the university and the city beyond. That was Sarah Curran’s aim when she took over in June as executive director of the classically based music series.
UChicago Presents “is rooted in what we know of as Western classical music, but even from the beginning it had an edginess to it,” she said.
“And maybe in terms of reputation, that got lost somewhere along the way. But I think we can restore that and restore a sense of excitement and energy around it,” added Curran, a California native who grew up on the East Coast and got to know Chicago’s culture scene when she did a yearlong fellowship here right after college.
After graduating from Princeton (N.J.) University in 2002 with a major in religion and minors in theater and dance, she came to Chicago and helped organize a performing arts department at North Lawndale College Prep High School on the West Side. She also served as a volunteer coordinator at the Chicago Humanities Festival, and worked at Genesis House, which assisted women involved in sex work.
“I got to know the real city,” she said of her time in Chicago. “It definitely staked a claim in my heart. I always thought I would come back here at some point.”
She’s doing so with a music series that began in 1943 as the University of Chicago Chamber Music Series, and it quickly brought some heavy-hitters to campus like pianist Artur Schnabel, composer Arnold Schoenberg, violinist Isaac Stern and the Budapest Quartet.
While that original series, now known as the Classic Concerts Series, still forms the backbone of UChicago Presents’ offerings, it has added six additional sub-series.
Classical music, both historical and contemporary, remains the series’ bread and butter, but it also features a 12-year-old jazz line-up and a set of world-music offerings under the auspices of the Music Without Borders sub-series.
With 26 events in its 2023-24 line-up, UChicago Presents is one of the largest and most high-profile such fall-to-spring series in the Chicago area.
Curran came to the University of Chicago in October 2019 as curator of its campuswide Experimental Performance Initiative, which pivoted to all online during the COVID-19 shutdown. Offerings included a 2021 collaboration with Court Theatre, the professional company in residence at the U of Chicago, and the New York-based OpenEndedGroup. Titled “Theatre for One: Here We Are,” it consisted of eight “microplays,” written and directed by BIPOC playwrights.
She then took over as interim executive director of UChicago Presents in October 2021, when Amy Iwano left. Curran transitioned into the role permanently last year.
“Sarah is someone who brings an incredible mix of experience working with a dynamic and diverse range of artists, a passion for music but also a real understanding of how music interacts with a wide variety of other art forms and [insight into] how one can invite those artists into both a university community as well to engage the many communities around us on the South Side and in Chicago,” said Bill Michel, executive director of the University of Chicago’s Logan Center for the Arts.
About two-thirds of UChicago Presents events take place in the sleek, acoustically rich 474-seat Performance Hall at the Logan Center, which opened in 2012. Most of the rest are held in Mandel Hall, an ornate venue that is more than a century old and has a maximum seating capacity of about 875.
A native of Santa Monica, Calif., Curran, 43, moved with her family to Connecticut when she was 3, and tried her hand at music, dance and theater growing up. “I was always involved in something in the arts,” she said.
She spent nine years at Stanford (Calif.) University, where she worked to build the quality and quantity of the school’s arts offerings, and two posts at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn., including director of its multidisciplinary Center for the Arts.
Curran praises UChicago Presents’ longtime place in the city’s musical scene, and she wants to raise its ambitions and tie it more closely to the rest of the campus.
At Wesleyan University, she said, the arts are embedded into the daily lives of every student. “How can UChicago Presents become that as well,” she said, “become an essential part of the UChicago experience for each student who is there?”
One step in that direction was the establishment in November 2022 of a six-member student advisory committee.
At the same time, UChicago Presents has put more emphasis on its Sponsor-a-Student program, in which 25 students receive free tickets to each of the series’ offerings. The initiative is funded through the UChicago Arts Pass Program and private donors.
The results of these efforts have already shown up in a big way. According to Curran, UChicago Presents had five times higher average student attendance in 2022-23 than it had in the season before.
“She has done a great job of getting more university students excited about coming to concerts in a terrific way,” Michel said.
Curran also wants UChicago Presents to think bigger and collaborate more often with other entities on campus.
“How can UChicago Presents be a driver of a larger-scale, university-wide ambition around the arts?” she said. “How can we work hand in hand with [Arts] Core, the Logan and Smart Museum [of Art] to do a kind of collective vision for what the arts can be at the university?”
She wants to work more with some of the “incredible” artists elsewhere in the city like Eighth Blackbird, a pioneering, Grammy-Award winning sextet that focuses on contemporary music. In September, UChicago Presents teamed with Court Theatre to present the ensemble in “composition as explanation,” a hybrid theatrical work based on an essay by Gertrude Stein.
In October, the series teamed with a host of other campus entities to present a multifaceted program that included a commission, “BlackLetter,” featuring the OpenEndedGroup, violinist Tom Chiu and dancer Jodi Melnick. This live 3D cinematic work incorporated projections of Martin Luther’s texts using AI imaging technology.
While Curran makes clear that UChicago Presents will always remain a music-based series, she does want to cross more frequently into other genres. “Why would they have hired me?” she said. “I think that was part of the goal. I have this experience in other areas. How can we marry it and push a little on the edges of strictly music?”
