Cleveland Uncommon Sound Project

A FREE evening of happenings – music, art, performance – at the Akron Art Museum!Warm, bright, and energetic – exactly what a February night in Akron, Ohio calls for and what this annual Museum celebration of art, music, and community brings!

This evening of creative happenings delights with performances, interactives, and tasty snackings: perfect for friends, couples, family, and fellow creatives to gather, discover, and remember.

CUSP (Cleveland Uncommon Sound Project) will curate music performances at a designated stage in the Museum’s lobby.

6:00pm A FREE evening of happenings – music, art, performance – at the Akron Art Museum!Warm, bright, and energetic – exactly what a February night in Akron, Ohio calls for and what this annual Museum celebration of art, music, and community brings!

This evening of creative happenings delights with performances, interactives, and tasty snackings: perfect for friends, couples, family, and fellow creatives to gather, discover, and remember.

CUSP (Cleveland Uncommon Sound Project) will curate music performances at a designated stage in the Museum’s lobby.

6:00pm MouseVision is a collaborative movement/sound collective, informed by Butoh, Deep Listening practices, and improvisation. It consists of Laura Swedenborg (Butoh dance), Kristen Ban Drake (Butoh sound), and bbob drake (sound)

7:00pm Work for interactive electronics and acoustic instruments with Stephan Haluska (harp) / Leia Hohenfeld (flute) / Torstein Johansen (upright bass) / Liam Battle (cello)

8:00pm Horses 4K, Jacob Trombetta (pedal steel guitar) Robin Guiler (synthesizer), Ambient project for pedal steel and electronics

Melanie Emig performs Morton Feldman’s “Three Voices” (1982), to commemorate Feldman’s 100th birthday. “Three Voices” is a composition for voice and pre-recorded tracks. Written in memoriam to his friend and poet, Frank O’Hara. The work is mostly sung without text, however the few fragments of text are from O’Hara’s 1957 poem “Wind.”

WIND
to Morton Feldman
Who’d have thought
that snow falls
it always circled whirling
like a thought
in the glass ball
around me and my bear
Then it seemed beautiful
containment
snow whirled
nothing ever fell
nor my little bear
bad thoughts
imprisoned in crystal
beauty has replaced itself with evil
And the snow whirls only
in fatal winds
briefly
then falls
it always loathed containment
beasts
I love evil
(CP 269)

Melanie Emig is a performance curator, musician, and educator whose work blends music with visual storytelling. She is a 2025 recipient of the Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award in Interdisciplinary Art.
Melanie produces interdisciplinary music performances that integrate strong visual and narrative elements. As a curator, she has been awarded the Neighbor Up Action Grant and the Quire Cleveland Community Grant. Alongside frequent collaborator Naomi Columna, they received the Satellite Fund through the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts to create their original performance work What I Meant… [DANCINGBANANA_gif].
As a vocalist, Melanie has performed with Apollo’s Fire, Quire Cleveland, and the Trinity Cathedral Chamber Choir.

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J. Tracy Mortimore, double bass/composer
Lenny Young, oboe/English horn/composer
Double bassist J. Tracy Mortimore and oboist Lenny Young have been working together both as a duo and as collaborators in larger projects for two decades. On a technical level, they focus on conceptual structures to create improvised music and the implementation of the novel color possibilities of their instruments. On an esthetic level, they explore ways to sustain a musical dialog between two melodic instruments. The music they make ranges from delicate spectrally tinged textures to complex polyphony to theatric and absurdist gestures.