Last year, American composer Gunther Schuller, whose music has won both a Pulitzer Prize and a Grammy, turned 80 years old. After being honored with a series of concerts in Boston, he showed up here in Washington at the Library of Congress to accept the honor of being named a Living Legend.

Last night he was back, this time at the Phillips Collection, as part of the museum's latest Artful Evening, this time to draw attention to its exhibit on Paul Klee and America. This took place in the fancy new auditorium in the museum's renovated wing, a nice place to hear a lecture but not yet without some technical kinks. After extensive pre-lecture sound checks, which held up the sizeable crowd from entering, there was still feedback during the introduction of the speaker.

The connection between Schuller and Klee is the former's work based on the latter's paintings, Seven Studies on Themes of Paul Klee (1959). Gunther Schuller, among his many musical activities, is a university professor, still teaching classes and seminars around the United States. He approached the topic of his own piece with academic acumen, giving an exposition of the history of the relationship between painting and music and then thoroughly explicating four of the seven movements with slides of the corresponding paintings. Schuller and Klee may represent the apex of the intertwining of painting and music: the composer was an avid painter in his youth who leaned toward music, and the painter remained an active amateur musician after he had chosen art as a career.

For each painting, Schuller explained, he analyzed the visual forms and assigned musical ideas that could express them, in many cases quite directly. For the irregular pattern of colored blocks in Alter Klang (Antique Harmonies, 1925), he created blocks of sound, made up of the old, fundamental intervals of Western music, 4ths and 5ths. For the rows and rows of shapes representing the world of nature in Pastorale (1927), he layered up overlapping rhythmic ostinatos. For the three quirky and abstracted musicians in Abstraktes Terzett (Abstract Trio, 1923) -- the only painting featured in the piece that is actually in the Phillips exhibit -- he selected a chamber assortment of four instrumental trios, giving them all jagged melodies.

The most famous movement of the seven, The Twittering Machine (1922), was explained by Schuller as a "parody of serialism," the aviary of birds creating the sound that Klee's strange bird machine cannot produce. All the instruments create a 12-tone fabric of sound, an ingenious image for the mechanization of composition that is often criticized in the 12-tone style. Schuller was quick to point out, however, that his parody is mostly a good-hearted joke, since he has used the 12-tone style in his own work. We heard recorded examples of each movement after Prof. Schuller had introduced them.

In a grand gesture that says a lot about the state of classical music audiences, he gave his listeners permission to laugh at the silly sounds of the Twittering Bird movement, the one piece that has become truly famous of the seven. And laugh we did, as Schuller's piece described the turning of the machine's crank, the ever faster whirring of the birds, the phonograph-like winding down of the machine's internal machinery, and the final gasp after a quick second cranking.