Miniature Compositions at an Exhibition

When the Brooklyn-based Unheard-of Ensemble finished its week-long residency in St. Louis workshopping and premiering new music by new music composers, they barely played as an ensemble at all. Works in Response to Art, performed twice on August 15 at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum on the campus of Washington University, featured musical miniatures responding to individual works at the museum, composed and performed for only one or two players in the Unheard-of quartet at a time.

This musical tour started in the underground lower level (museum keepers bristle if you call any of their exhibition space a “basement”). Jason Zhang composed Stolen Faces for solo electronic keyboard; there was no dragging a piano around the museum, though here Daniel Anastasio’s keyboard sounded quite pianistic, with a touch of ghostly electronic effects that suited the mood. Zhang responded to Annette Lemieux’s Stolen Faces, a triptych of photolithographs of soldiers and their disembodied faces, with a spectral piece of slow, spare, solo piano jazz. We were off to a slow start, but that was a good thing for looking at art underground on a blazing hot day in St. Louis.

Haibei Chen responded to Juane Quick-to-See Smith’s Cowboys and Indians, Made in America with another solo keyboard piece for Anastasio. Chen said she was struck by how the Cowboy and Indian in this collagraph—who are firing guns at one another—look so much alike. Chen’s Cowboys and Indians mashed up stereotypical cowboy riffs, including a cavalry fanfare, with the keyboard thumped like a big tribal drum. It sounded agreeably like a solo keyboard score for a vintage Western silent film.

Rather like leaving a darkened theater, we moved up into the light of the first floor for Emelia Ulrich’s Tunnels, a response to Eden Now by Ibram Lassaw. The composer said the welded metal alloy sculpture looked like molten lead had been poured down anthill tunnels. She wrote an aching solo clarinet line for Ford Fourqurean played against an industrial music bed that pulsed and throbbed under the understated emotions of the woodwind.

Alberto Burri’s Grande Ferro M3 is a hunk of welded iron with paint and nails. Max Edinoff composed a guided improvisation for solo cello with the same title as the sculpture. Edinoff guided Iva Casian-Lakošto bow her cello in keeping, he said, with “the wrinkles on the metal and the different colors,” all dark and gnarly. The cellist rose, or rather contorted, to the challenge.

Preston Posey chose to respond to one of the most magnificent works in the Kemper’s collection, a piece that alone justifies a visit to this free campus art museum, Willem de Kooning’s Saturday Night, an oil painting bursting with gestures, colors, shapes, personalities. Posey also wrote for Casian-Lakoš’ solo cello, compelling a cellist’s version of de Kooning’s riot of gesture: rhythmic bowing, thumping of bow on strings, dragging of bow, plucking of strings, doing all those tricky things almost at the same time.

Dayton Hare’s arrhythmia was an ingenious flight of imitative form for Matheus Souza’s solo violin (joined, at the end, with a folk song played from an old cassette). Hare responded to Marina Abramović’s Rhythm 2, a photo array capturing episodes in her psychiatric performance art. The artist took a medication that stripped her of bodily control, and then another that caused her to lose awareness of her surroundings. Hare asked Souza to mimic that structure, but on the violin, compelling another daring contortion to a challenge.

In Buffaloes crossing a river, Yeonsuk Jung tried to recreate what the scene depicted in Charles Ferdinand Wimar’s Buffaloes Crossing the Yellowstone might have sounded like, but Jung overwhelmed the pastoral lines he wrote for Fourqurean’s clarinet with samples meant to mimic wild nature. The over-reliance on electronics was a shame, because the other members of the ensemble standing around the gallery have the chops to sound like the twittering birds and snorting buffaloes imported too loudly via sample.

In Wood Interior, Yeeun Sim relied solely on a piece of wood with a resonant interior, a cello, and Casian-Lakoš’s nimble bowing. Sim responded to Narcisse Virgile Diaz de la Peña’s Wood Interior with a melancholy melodic coherence in keeping with the moody figurative oil painting. The cellist’s lyrical flight followed by a climb and slide down the cello neck enacted the painting’s dramatic high burst and downward flow of light.

This musical tour of the Kemper Art Museum closed aptly with Alex Brown’s (In) the eye of silence, a jubilant and adoring response to another of the Kemper’s must-see pieces, Max Ernst’s guano-crazy oil painting The Eye of Silence. For the first time in this traveling concert, we were treated to two musicians playing together, Souza’s violin and Fourqurean’s clarinet, and they played with and off one other delightfully with a sense of mischief equal to this glorious, phantasmic painting that is just too goofy to be creepy. The composer and musicians expressed a radiant joy in making music akin to Ernst’s exuberant joy in making figures and colors.

The only time the ensemble played together for these closing concerts was on Jeux d’eau, a movement in Christopher Stark’s Fire Ecologies, which they performed at the end of the first musical Kemper tour to also kick off the second tour. The Unheard-of Ensemble previously premiered and recorded Fire Ecologies, which was presented here as a response to Tomás Saraceno’s Cosmic Filaments, a site-specific installation made for the Kemper’s lobby atrium, where the ensemble performed. This bright, dynamic, surprising piece snapped with the vigor of musicians who love each other and have been listening to each other perform all day and are itching to play together.

Along with Liliya Ugay and Adam Maness, Stark worked with the nine composers whose pieces were workshopped and premiered all week in the Collaborative Composition Initiative that concluded with Works in Response to Art. The Unheard-of Ensemble has been taking this collaborative show on the road every summer, from city to city, from year to year, but they had so much fun in St. Louis, were so heartily welcomed by our creative community, and so ably hosted by Stark and Washington University’s Department of Music that they might be back—maybe even to stay. Let us hope so.

https://www.unheard-ofensemble.com/cci-2026 https://www.kemperartmuseum.wustl.edu//

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