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.