The Chicago River

The year is 1890. Chicago is the fastest growing city in the world. It has immense potential, but one, major liability — it's poisoning itself. An audacious idea arose...reverse the flow of the Chicago River. A 35-mile canal is built to direct the city's sewage away from Lake Michigan, sending it down the nearby Illinois River toward the Mississippi and Gulf of Mexico. The project, which makes modern Chicago possible, takes decades to complete. More than a century later, the city still depends on the canal. Nature has been bent.
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Orbert Davis' critically acclaimed, orchestral composition “The Chicago River”, performed by his Chicago Jazz Philharmonic, documents this historic reversal of the river as distilled through glass plate images from Richard Cahan and Michael Williams’s photobook "The Lost Panoramas: When Chicago Changed Its River and the Land Beyond”.

Davis was captured by the notion that while the river’s geography didn’t change, everything around it did: “When you look at the river, you see the water and the river itself, but even more so we see the reflections in the river that change over time. I make musical connections to the aspect of reflecting.”

Hailed as one of the greatest engineering feats ever undertaken, changing the river’s course greatly improved Chicago’s sanitation and public health, but it also had significant consequences on the natural environment and cultural landscape for other parts of the region.

The five-moment, third stream masterwork was commissioned by and premiered at Chicago's Symphony Center in May 2013.