While waiting for a train at Union Station recently, Lia Kohl noticed an unexpected sound echoing delicately above the din of commuters and travelers. The station’s grand, high-ceilinged Great Hall was playing background music — not exactly Muzak, but about as tame, most of it sugary pop from the 2000s and 2010s.
“I’m really interested in this idea of background music. Like, what is that music for? Is it to make people happy, or calm? Is it just to fill up space? Is it a Spotify playlist?” Kohl wonders. “For me, it’s more of a spiritual question: Why is this here?”
Kohl is exactly the kind of listener to home in on sounds like these. The cellist and composer, 36, makes music out of noise others might wish to tune out: turn-signal clicks, a far-off tornado siren test, the hums of refrigerators. After noticing the music piped into the hall, she reached out to both Union Station and musical incubator Experimental Sound Studio to propose composing her own, performed live by herself and nine other roving musicians.
That project, “Union Station Music,” takes over the Great Hall in a onetime performance on May 15, during rush hour. Kohl isn’t expecting a rapt audience — that’s not really the point, she says. The composition will be open-ended enough for commuters to catch just a snippet before rushing off to their trains. Modeled on the same resonances and sound profile as the station’s generic pop playlist, it could even be tuned out entirely. The sounds of a busy Union Station? Kohl considers them just as much a part of “Union Station Music” as the score itself.
“Someone from the station very apologetically told me, ‘I’m really sorry, but the one thing we can’t do is cut out the train announcements.’ And I was like, ‘No, no, you don’t understand; I love train announcements,’” she says, gleefully.
Kohl’s current experimental mode may seem like a far cry from her classical training. In retrospect, though, there were always hints she would pursue the collaborative improvisational work for which she’s become known. After picking up the cello in grade school, in San Francisco, Kohl followed all the typical beats of someone destined for a classical career: She enrolled in Indiana University’s prestigious cello program and moved to New York, then Chicago, to pursue her studies further. (For a time, she even studied with John Sharp, the Chicago Symphony’s principal cellist.) Throughout, Kohl was drawn to the chamber repertoire above all else, despite a nagging feeling that she never quite fit in with her peers.
“I need some kind of collaborator, something where I don’t know what’s going to happen,” Kohl says. “Even as a quote-unquote ‘solo artist,’ I love the feeling of responding to something. I think that I need it.”
Kohl got her start doing just that with dancers from the soon-to-be-shuttered Links Hall. That grew into ever more venturesome collaborations: with the puppet company Manual Cinema, performance-art collective Mocrep, drummer Makaya McCraven, Finom’s Macie Stewart and fellow avant-garde cellist Katinka Kleijn, to name a few.
Among her beloved colleagues was Mars Williams, the prolific Chicago saxophonist who died in 2023. Later this month, Kohl will take part in two performances commemorating what would have been Williams’ 70th birthday and the opening of his archive, held in perpetuity at Experimental Sound Studio: a remount of Williams’ epic music-and-dance piece “The Devil’s Whistle,” on May 24, and a brand-new tribute of her own, “Mars Williams’ Toy Story,” on May 25. The latter will use Williams’ own massive toy collection, which he scavenged from trinket and pawn shops around the world. The toys now reside at ESS, in the Williams archive; when Kohl met up to chat at a North Side café, she arrived with an empty suitcase to cart more of them home.
“I got to spend a lot more time with Mars in New Orleans for the premiere of ‘Devil’s Whistle,’ just hearing about his life story,” Kohl says. “I think it’s very easy for someone of that generation to think, ‘I’ve established myself, and you’re nobody. Why should I talk to you?’ But he was always very interested in everyone else and what they were doing.”
Kohl was bracing for the experience of rummaging through Williams’ toys to be emotional. It has been — but not in the way one might expect. More often than not, on visits to the archive, she’s found herself giggling uncontrollably, taking the same delight in the toys’ goofy sounds as Williams once did.
“Some of them have price tags on them in Euros. Some are obviously old, made with that kind of old plastic that they don’t make anymore,” she says, with obvious delight. “I can feel his decisions; I can feel his humor. It feels like a collaboration between me and his brain. … I get to interact with my friend again.”
Like so many social musicians, Kohl struggled with introducing a feeling of collaboration — and the spontaneity it brings — while sequestered away during the pandemic. To replicate that, she began playing alongside staticky, portable radios. The radios pick up random snippets from live broadcasts, giving Kohl a broad and unpredictable palette to work with. The concept became the basis of her 2022 album “Too Small to Be a Plain” and many live performances since, both solo and ensemble. She’s performed with radios all over Western Europe, Scandinavia, the U.K. and Chile (which, she adds, “has amazing radio”).
“I didn’t think about this when I was starting to make work with radio, but every new city that I go to is a new landscape,” she says. “It’s always fun to be in a place where I don’t speak the language. I’ll have moments at shows where audiences will laugh, because I catch something on the radio that they think is funny. It makes me feel like a ventriloquist.”
“Union Station Music” and “Mars Williams’ Toy Story” won’t use live radio, but her forthcoming duo record with Chicago artist and synth player Zander Raymond, releasing next month, does. So does a new work Kohl will present alongside art by Ximena Garrido-Lecca on July 13, at the University of Chicago’s Renaissance Society.
Meanwhile, Kohl will be in residence at the Hungry Brain every Thursday in July, allowing audiences to take in the variegated facets of her music. What it might sound like? If Kohl’s work so far is any indication, the whole world is on the table.
- “Union Station Music,” 6 p.m. to 7 p.m. May 15 at Chicago Union Station, 255 S. Canal St., free, more at ess.org
- “In Transit” with Zander Raymond, out June 20 on the label Unjenesaisquoi
- “Music from Mars: A Celebration of Mars Williams’ 70th Birthday,” 8:30 p.m. May 24 at Constellation, 3111 N. Western Ave., tickets $25 in-person and $5 live-streamed, constellation-chicago.com
- “Music from Mars: Mars Williams’ Toy Story,” 2 p.m. May 25 at Rosehill Cemetery’s May Chapel, 5800 N. Ravenswood Ave., free, more at ess.org
- The 7 p.m. July 13 closing of “Germinations,” an exhibition by Ximena Garrido-Lecca at the Renaissance Society, 5811 S. Ellis Ave., 4th floor, free, more at renaissancesociety.org
- 9 p.m. Thursdays in July at Hungry Brain, 2319 W. Belmont Ave.; hungrybrainchicago.com
Hannah Edgar is a freelance critic.
The Rubin Institute for Music Criticism helps fund our classical music coverage. The Chicago Tribune maintains editorial control over assignments and content.
