A Mussorgsky multimedia masterpiece
Sometimes art inspires music. Other times, music inspires art. In the case of Jennifer Hayghe’s project “Pictures at an Exhibition: a multimedia experience,” this creative process comes full circle: In an iterative initiative that began in 2012, Hayghe recorded Modest Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition” and collaborated with her mother, artist Michele Tremaine, who created paintings to represent the musical composition—ultimately culminating in an animated multimedia project.
Hayghe has performed the work many times throughout her professional career—she started working on it as an undergraduate student, then recorded it in 2006 for Centaur Records. The piece was even programmed on her first Faculty Tuesdays concert when she started working at CU Boulder in 2015. “That performance was part of an early multimedia program—‘The Art of Music … and the Music of Art’—that was awarded the Provost’s Faculty Achievement Award in 2021,” she recalls.
Art answers music
The original composition was inspired by the artwork of Russian artist Viktor Hartmann. He died young, and Mussorgsky wrote “Pictures at an Exhibition” to honor him and his art. While a meaningful tribute, Hayghe and Tremaine thought the piano masterpiece needed vibrant, dynamic paintings to accompany the music. “As my mother is an artist, we’ve always talked a lot about the links between art and music,” Hayghe says. “And she said the same thing I did—this piece needs new pictures!”
Hartmann’s original 1874 memorial exhibition featured 400 drawings, designs, watercolors and sketches from which Mussorgsky composed 10 distinct musical movements representing 11 selected artworks. Tremaine painted over 50 original works reimagining the original Hartmann works for “Pictures at an Exhibition.”
“There are so many different motifs that suggest different images or different actions,” Hayghe explains. “We needed extra paintings for those.
“Also, some of the movements are three or four minutes long, and nobody is going to be engaged staring at a painting for that long.”
From slide carousel to silent film
In 2012, the first iteration of the project was born: Hayghe’s husband, Robert McGaha, photographed Tremaine’s paintings and strung them together into a synchronized silent film that Hayghe accompanied on piano. She explains, “An idea from the earliest days of dreaming about this project was a slideshow where my mother would paint new paintings, and we would put them in a slide carousel and click through them during live performances.
“My husband photographed all the paintings and then used Final Cut Pro to create a silent film that was synchronized so that I could perform the piece live while the film was showing.”
While that version of the performance was presented many times, they knew the project hadn’t achieved its final form. In 2018, they started talking about a video version that could align the visuals and audio in a way that couldn’t quite be achieved in performance. The logistics for this project never seemed to fall into place, so there it sat—finished, yet unfinished.
Animating art
In 2024, Hayghe was asked to perform ”The Art of Music” program—including “Pictures at an Exhibition”—at Boulder’s Academy Mapleton Hill. In the audience for that performance was gReg Silvus, member of our College of Music Advisory Board and chair of the Artist Series Advisory Board.
Silvus had taken piano lessons with Hayghe; he’d also been working on video creation and animation under the name UltraVioletIdea since he retired from a career in engineering. In the past, he’s created video introductions to Hayghe’s concerts with Professor of Collaborative Piano Alexandra Nguyen—as he’ll do for their Nov. 3 Faculty Tuesdays recital—so he’s no stranger to using visuals to enhance a musical experience. When Hayghe asked him to be involved in the final video creation of the project, it was an immediate “yes.”
“Even now that it’s finished, I’m really excited about the project,” he says.
Upon re-photographing Tremaine’s paintings, Silvus pulled together all of the pieces into a YouTube video comprising Hayghe’s new audio recording and the photographs set to animation and movement that emphasize the smaller details of the art.
“I took Bob’s [Robert McGaha] initial video as a guideline, because he had constructed a really great story,” he says. “But there were places where—because I can do these fancy things on the computer—I enhanced that story.”
Layers of collaboration
Through his process, Silvus found visual themes and commonalities and used editing to tie them all together. The fermata in the first painting shares the same shape as the doorways in several paintings, the shells of the chicks and the grand bells near the end.
“I’d ask myself—‘how can I make that an arc? How can I tie that back to the beginning?’ And then a lot of the other things just answered themselves,” Silvus says.
This iteration of the project also included a behind-the-scenes video of Hayghe and Tremaine talking about the project—walking through the piece and describing the themes or the inspiration behind each painting. Hayghe says it was a lot of fun to reflect on the process and describe the details they’d been thinking about for years.
Adds Silvus, “Figuring out ways to spotlight the conversation between two people who so clearly love each other—and who so clearly love the project they’ve sewn together over years—was wonderful,” he says. “I wanted to pull people in. I wanted them to feel the warmth.”
Hayghe hopes viewers will feel inspired and motivated by their layers of collaboration. “My mom and I had always said that we hope more people would do things like this, and feel like they could create these collaborations. This one is elaborate, but they don’t have to be—just to have more collaboration among the arts and arts communities would be great.”