Lita Grier

Lita Grier: Two musical hats, one singular woman

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By John von Rhein

Tribune music critic

December 25, 2005

For the noted Chicago composer and radio producer Lita Grier, 2005 was a year of tenacity and triumph.

Born and raised in New York, she has been writing music, mainly as a hobby, since childhood, when she would improvise songs at the piano. Her exceptional talent was recognized early on when she won first prize in a composition contest sponsored by the New York Philharmonic.

That was the 1950s, when serialism and thorny modernist styles swept the classical world, throwing into disfavor any composer (Grier included) who adhered to tonal harmony. Despite her degrees from the Juilliard School and UCLA, she abandoned composition in 1964 to pursue a safer career in artists management and, later, public relations at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

She discovered the world of classical radio after marrying broadcast executive Dean Grier, who until 1987 directed the CSO's national and international radio syndication for WFMT-FM 98.7. He later formed his own production company, InterContinental Media, with his wife as vice president. She took over the business following her husband's death in 1997.

Meanwhile, the increasing demand by performers for Grier's early chamber works -- combined with the return of a less dissonant, more accessible musical grammar in American composition -- brought her back to writing music. A 1996 commission to compose a flute concerto for the Illinois Philharmonic marked the first time she had touched pen to score paper in 30 years. Since then, new works continue to issue from her pen.

Grier's spacious Lake Shore Drive apartment contains two studios, one for composing, the other being the command post for her radio activities. Her company produces the weekly series of Vienna Philharmonic and Salzburg Mozart Week programs airing locally and nationally. She considers it a coup to have persuaded the British actor Jeremy Irons to host the series.

And, thanks to her initiative and that of WFMT vice president Steve Robinson, there's much more Mozart to come.

Robinson put together a consortium of stations -- WFMT, WQXR in New York, KMZT in Los Angeles and XM Satellite Radio -- to carry live broadcasts of the Mozart Week concerts to be given next month in Austria commemorating the composer's 250th birthday. Since XM Satellite Radio has 20 million subscribers worldwide, Grier and Robinson are right to claim that theirs will be the largest distribution for any block of live classical music programming, ever.

It's comforting to know that Grier and WFMT are so deeply committed to live classical music over the airwaves and Internet at a time when neither the CSO nor Lyric Opera has a live voice in any electronic medium.

Grier's busy life behind the scenes of classical radio fortunately hasn't stifled her muse. She's hard at work composing a second set of songs to poems from Edgar Lee Masters' "Spoon River Anthology" on commission from Ravinia, following the success of her earlier batch of "Spoon River" songs, which the festival presented last year. She also has written "To Be an Eagle," a music theater piece for young performers that is scheduled to receive its local premiere next year in two Chicago public schools.

"It's a good time now to be an American composer because the stylistic climate is so much more open," Grier says. "I can write what I love and it gets performed -- and people relate to it. It's just an amazing turn of events."

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jvonrhein@tribune.com