“I think he was a genius,” Sean Connors says as his quartet Third Coast Percussion wraps up a rehearsal of music by Bruce Goff, which they will perform at the Art Institute of Chicago on January 29 in association with the exhibit “Bruce Goff: Material Worlds.” While visiting the exhibit, Connors had been struck by Goff’s artistic output in various mediums: abstract paintings; the music Third Coast is rehearsing; and, most famously, idiosyncratic homes and buildings that include unconventional materials such as coal, rope, cast-off glass chunks, and sequins in imaginatively shaped structures. 

“He’s like Leonardo,” Connors continues, Da Vinci being another artist who dove into disparate fields with a curious, restless mind. 

But by the twentieth century, when Goff worked, such a multi-talented “Renaissance man” had become far less common as fields – perhaps especially architecture and classical music – specialized. Nevertheless, Goff was an outlier, and not just in his singular architecture. He didn’t have formal architectural training, beginning an apprenticeship at an architectural firm in Tulsa, Oklahoma at age twelve. Goff followed the advice of his admired correspondents Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright to forego architectural school.  

He was also mostly self-taught as a composer, learning about modern classical music as well as  music theory and harmony from his childhood friend Ernest Brooks. In the early 1930s, he composed several pieces for the self-playing player piano, hand-punching the holes that trigger individual notes on the rolls that go inside the piano. It’s these pieces that Third Coast are performing at the Art Institute, having transcribed and arranged them for percussion.

“[Goff] said he stepped away from trying to be a composer to be an architect,” says Sidney K. Robinson, an architect and scholar who has lived in Goff’s Sam and Ruth Van Sickle Ford House in the western Chicago suburb of Aurora since 1986. After the Ford House received a spread in Life magazine not long after it was built in the late 1940s, a traffic cop had to direct the long lines of visitors who came to see the “round house” every Sunday afternoon. 

Robinson rediscovered the piano rolls while preparing for a previous exhibit on Goff at the Art Institute that he co-curated in 1995. He found the rolls amongst “a pile of stuff, and I use that word advisedly,” in the room of a patron of Goff’s in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. Robinson arranged for them to be recorded on a player piano in the collection of The Sanfillippo Foundation of obscure musical machines in Barrington, and included the recordings in the 1995 exhibit. He believes that the rolls had been heard “not very much at all, if at all,” in the decades since Goff had presented them at a concert in Chicago in 1936. “Nobody knew where they were,” Robinson says.

Robinson met the members of Third Coast when they performed at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin home in Wisconsin. “We hit it off talking about music and architecture,” says Third Coast’s David Skidmore. “It became a really huge area of interest for us.” Robinson joined their board and commissioned a piece inspired by Wright from Skidmore, while the quartet has performed in other notable architectural spaces, like Wright’s Unity Temple in Oak Park. 

“I just think they have a lot to inspire one another,” Skidmore says of architecture and music. Whereas in architecture “literally they’re making structures,” in music structure is important, “but we’re reaching towards what architecture has,” he says: the solidity of a clearly articulated, obvious form. “The idea of structure in a piece of music is much more abstract.” 

On the flip side, architects sometimes “reach for things that music can do, like a fluidity and a lack of the concrete and the practical. And that’s why I love Goff so much, because he would really play and take big chances,” says Skidmore.

So Third Coast jumped at the chance to transcribe some of Goff’s player piano pieces and perform them back in 2014, including in Goff’s Ford House. When the new Art Institute exhibit was being planned, Robinson connected Third Coast and the curators and underwrote the transcription of the remaining Goff works, some of which were only sketches. The less complete piano rolls gave the members of Third Coast the opportunity to take “more of an interpretive approach,” Skidmore says, drawing on Goff’s visual sense, obvious even in the piano rolls, to realize them.

“We like finding connections between any music we play and other modes of thinking or artistic expression,” Skidmore says. The Grammy-winning quartet often works directly with living composers, demonstrating various sounds, instruments, and techniques in their studio in an old industrial Chicago building that composers can then incorporate into the pieces they write and sometimes perform with Third Coast. 

“It feels very personal,” Skidmore says. “We get to know the creators who are working for us and we know the full context of their life. So when we’re playing music by someone we never got to meet” – like Goff, who died in 1982 – “at least we know a ton about his creative output and his perspectives and his creative driving forces.” 

Goff himself drew on music in his architecture, both physically – as in the use of piano rolls as decorative cabinet screens in the Myron Bachman Residence in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood – and philosophically, as Benjamin R. Levy argued in an essay. A lover of Claude Debussy, Goff included an essay by the French composer in a class he taught, frequently arranged musical listening sessions for architectural students, and worked on but never finished a textbook that would apply musical concepts to architectural design. 

Conversely, Skidmore discerns Goff’s architectural style in some of his music, “a formal cohesion to them in spite of all the playfulness.” Like some of Goff’s more creative houses, some of the pieces feel wilder, an experiment or idea that Goff wanted to explore. “It just goes completely off the rails to the point where you’re not sure what was the beginning and the middle and the end,” Skidmore says.

In pieces like these, fragments are manically juxtaposed, riffs frenetically rush up and down the keyboard, and independent layers sometimes snap into place and sometimes proceed with no regard to other lines. While Third Coast rehearses one of these and figures out how the parts fit together, Robert Dillon asks exactly what everyone is playing at a specific moment. He gets his answer and then announces to another member, “I’ll ignore them and I’ll follow you.” 

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