Articles

At the 2017 Hyde Park Jazz Festival, Joey Brink climbed the 271 stairs leading up to the University of Chicago’s Rockefeller Chapel’s tower, sat down in front of a 100-ton instrument called the carillon, and opened his “Bell Jazz” performance with this Antonio Carlos Jobim composition.

Rockefeller Chapel has been anointed, and not in the typical sense: There were no denominational ceremonies, no baptisms. No priest was present. Instead, what descended over the chapel was of a different profundity. On Saturday night, the music of two ethereal voices filled the depths of the space, echoes reverberating through its cavernous hall. The source of it all: the Canadian identical twin duo known as Tegan and Sara.

Video by WGN-TV and S.E.E. Chicago

Airing on Sunday, August 27, 2017, University Organist Thomas Weisflog showcased the grand E.M. Skinner organ to host of S.E.E. Chicago's Dawn Jackson Blatner, presented by WGN.

On Saturday, April 29, 7:30 pm, the University of Chicago’s soaring Rockefeller Chapel welcomes celebrated composer Augusta Read Thomas at a concert dedicated entirely to her music, with 2017 Grammy-winning Third Coast Percussion and Grammy-nominated Spektral Quartet.

By Hannah Edgar at Chicago Classical Review

Sunday afternoon on the University of Chicago campus, the Rockefeller Chapel Choir performed an epic and engrossing St. Matthew Passion—just not the one you’re thinking of.

When Simone Browne told her friends and family she had decided to give the carillon a try, they were puzzled. The second-year had stumbled across a Facebook post offering carillon lessons taught by members of the University of Chicago Guild of Carillonneurs at Rockefeller Chapel, and opted to give it a shot, intrigued by the fact that few knew what a carillon was, let alone how to play the instrument.

Some 1,600 people packed the University of Chicago's Rockefeller Chapel Wednesday evening to hear a lecture by legendary radical feminist and academic Angela Davis.

Randy Weston: 11 p.m., Rockefeller Memorial Chapel. 90 apparently is the new 70, judging by nonagenarian pianist Weston's expansive performance. Playing solo in cavernous Rockefeller Memorial Chapel, Weston offers a freewheeling lecture-recital intertwining his philosophies on the origin of music with his larger-than-life pianism.

“Concrete Traffic” was initially conceived for a two-person show in 1970 at the Museum of Contemporary Art. True to its form, it was on display in a public parking lot at the corner of East Ontario and St. Clair streets (the current site of The Arts Club) for several months, accumulating a fair share of parking tickets, or so the story goes. (The MCA insists that its parking was paid for by the institution for the entire run of the exhibition, but sources at the University of Chicago say otherwise.) The still-young institution was not yet building a permanent collection, so the MCA knew the artwork had to find a more permanent home. The artist and the museum agreed to gift the item to the University of Chicago.

WFMT's Relevant Tones features Augusta Read Thomas introducing the carillon at 22:34, followed by a recording of one of University carillonneur Joey Brink's compositions.