Negative Space

Name: Negative Space
Start: 2025-06-15T14:00:00-04:00
End: 2025-06-15T16:30:00-04:00
Location: Detroit Institute of Arts

Negative Space

June 15, 2025 2:00 pm - 4:30 pm Detroit Institute of Arts 313-833-7900 313-833-7900 View Venue Website

Tickets

Event is free with museum admission. Visit dia.org or call 313-833-7900 for details.

Details

The program of Negative Space highlights music that explores space, absence, and the power of what’s left unsaid. Hannah Kendall’s Vera builds and unbuilds a musical structure using a twelve-tone row, creating a sense of shifting texture and hidden emotion. Ravel’s Piano Trio showcases his signature clarity and color, carefully balancing sound and silence to shape each moment. Michi Wiancko’s Fantasia for Tomorrow offers a heartfelt tribute to connection and hope, imagining a future that is just out of reach but deeply felt in the present.

ARTISTS
Kimberly Kaloyanides Kennedy, violin
Che-Yen Chen, viola
Dillon Scott, viola, Sphinx apprentice
Paul Watkins, cello
Jack Walters, clarinet
The Paddington Trio, Shouse ensemble

Piano Sponsorship: The use of pianos throughout the Festival is sponsored by Andrea & Woody Leung.

Program

Michi Wiancko: Fantasia for Tomorrow
(b.1976)
Kennedy, Chen

Hannah Kendall: Vera for string trio and clarinet
(b.1984)
Walters, Kennedy, Scott, Watkins

Maurice Ravel: Piano Trio in A Minor
(1875-1937)
Modéré
Pantoum. Assez vif
Passacaille. Très large
Final. Animé
The Paddington Trio

Program Notes

The most fundamental principle of design and form: an attention not to what is there but to what is not. Music is often colloquially understood (though there’s something much deeper behind the impulse) as an art of density: phrases like pitch space indicate a loose acoustic architecture, while textural thickness or harmonic richness signify gradations of saturation. And silence, of course—Cage proposed it most succinctly—is the absence that gives access to such a presence as constitutively identifiable at all: the empty space at the beginning and end and in-between movements of the work are as much a part of the music as the notes. Read more…