Terra Memoria

Art and Music with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra

📍 This event takes place at Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis

Tuesday, May 19, 2026, 7:30pm Get Tickets

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Program

Additional artists to be announced.

Melody McKiver Let the Stain Remain
Kevin Puts Home
Kaija Saariaho Terra Memoria
George Walker Lyric for Strings (Lament)

About this Concert

Musicians from the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra present a powerful program at CAM exploring the convergence of music and contemporary art. This musical selection takes inspiration from CAM’s spring/summer exhibitions, And I Saw New Heavens and a New Earth: The Partnership, Art, and Activism of Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore and Andrea Carlson: Endless Sunshine to explore themes of memory and erasure in our relationships to place, land, and home. How does music allow us to honor our connections to the people and places of our past, as well as the fullness of joy and pain they hold?

Doors open to explore the galleries at 6:30pm. Bar open 6:30–7:30pm.

Tickets are $20 for general admission or $10 for students and artists.

- Musician and composer Melody McKiver, a member of Obishikokaang Lac Seul First Nation, is known for integrating electronics with Western classical music to shape a new genre of Anishinaabe compositions. Her work Let the Stain Remain was commissioned as the test piece for Canada’s prestigious Eckhardt-Gramatté National Music Competition (known as the E-Gré) in 2024.
- Kevin Puts, who serves as the SLSO’s Composer in Residence this season, gives witness to the European refugee crisis through his string quartet, Home. On the work’s composition, Puts writes: “The work begins in what is essentially C Major, or with a tonal center of ‘C,’ which I intended as a sonic representation of ‘home’ and one which is abandoned after the idyllic atmosphere of the work’s first several minutes in search of new and unfamiliar harmonic terrain.”
- Terra Memoria, written in 2007, is Kaija Saariaho’s meditation on remembrance. Saariaho’s luminous harmonic language and evolving textures create a sound world that is both intimate and timeless, offering what she describes as a “tribute to those departed” while also reflecting on the traces they leave within us.
- Lyric for Strings began as the slow movement from George Walker’s first string quartet entitled “Lament,” but as a standalone work for full strings, it has become an orchestral standard. Written while he was a graduate student at the Curtis Institute of Music, Walker had just started to compose this piece when he learned that his grandmother, a formerly enslaved person, had passed away. The resulting work was created in memory of her.

Artists

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Musicians of the SLSO

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St. Louis Symphony Youth Orchestra

May 31

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Experience the convergence of music and contemporary art in a performance inspired by CAM’s current exhibitions, featuring powerful meditations on memory and home from Melody McKiver, Kevin Puts, Kaija Saariaho, and George Walker.