On the afternoon of Sunday, April 27, students from the DMA in Contemporary Music program at BGSU performed at the Sandusky Cultural Center in conjunction with the opening of its Here & Now exhibit. The concert was organized by Chris Harris, a percussionist from Fairfield, California who had just completed his first year in the doctoral program.

“Exploring the connections between art and music at the Cultural Center was such an awesome experience,” Harris says. “It was very fulfilling to curate an experience for the public alongside my colleagues.”

Following a meditative group improvisation, the performers—oboist Martha Hudson, saxophonist Sam Valancy, clarinetist Haley Harrison, percussionist Jacob Koch, and Harris—filled the intimate gallery with sound as attendees mingled and took in the exhibit’s new paintings and sculptures. The program included Erland von Koch’s Monolog No. 3 (clarinet), Jungyoon Wie’s Bagatelle for Ocean (vibraphone), Eric Dolphy’s God Bless the Child (saxophone; arranged by Valancy), Ivan Trevino’s Forgiveness (vibraphone), selections from Alyssa Morris’s Collision Etudes (oboe), and Louis Raymond-Kolker’s decomposing Satie (vibraphone). The concert concluded with Emma O’Halloran’s music for the small hours for percussion duo.

The April concert marked the third annual collaboration between BGSU’s DMA students and the Sandusky Cultural Center. The relationship began after horn player Rachel Constantino (DMA ’25) visited the gallery in 2023. She thought that the wide range of contemporary styles in visual mediums showcased by the Cultural Center would pair well with the DMA students’ equally broad contemporary repertoire. Constantino suggested to Charles T. Mayer, the longtime director of the center, the possibility of pairing music that aligned with the theme of each exhibit, and he enthusiastically agreed.

“Organizing the performances gave us the opportunity to play in a space with an audience standing a few steps away, allowing for a very intimate concert experience,” says Constantino, who curated the concerts in 2023 and 2024. “We opted to perform in front of art throughout the gallery rather than on a static stage, creating sonic and visual vignettes. The first year was an experiment, as we were unsure if the artistic community in Sandusky would be receptive to having music at the gallery opening, but the audience greatly enjoyed our work and requested we return in the following years.”

The Sandusky collaboration is one of a few that the DMA program enjoys with regional arts institutions. Its students have performed in BGSU’s Willard Wankelman Gallery as well as the Toledo Museum of Art, with whom the program partnered to present EAR|EYE: Listening and Looking–Contemporary Music and Art from 2015 to 2021. This popular series featured multiple concerts each year, which each taking place in a different gallery of contemporary art. DMA students continue to perform at the TMA; the next concert will take place in the Great Gallery of the TMA on Sunday, October 26.