About Us
Missing Piece is a south side Chicago-based musical ensemble who endeavor to commission new musical and artistic works, as well as collaborate with other musicians and organizations to provide transformative musical experiences through performances and educational programming. Through its multi-faceted work, the ensemble aims to inspire audiences to connect with their community, care for our environment, listen deeply to ourselves and others, and speak out against injustice. In a project-based approach, founders Dan Galat, violin, and Kelly Quesada, cello, often expand the ensemble to include other musicians and artists as collaborators. Missing Piece has commissioned and premiered over thirty new works, including standard notation, text and graphic scores, poetry, film, movement, and improvisation.
2025-2026 season highlights include performances of newly commissioned works by Louis Goldford, Liza Sobel Crane, Jonathan Hannau, Alex Taylor, Ilana Waniuk, and the students and faculty in composition at Tulane University. This season, Missing Piece has been invited to present their work outside of Chicago by nienteForte (New Orleans), the Johnstone Music Foundation (Columbus) and Music at Noon Series (Los Angeles). Missing Piece is a recipient of two Illinois Arts Council grants which supported 2025 commissioning projects which will bring scores, live performances, and recordings of 6 new works into the world.
Past and ongoing projects include Tonewood, a series of duos commissioned by Missing Piece on theme of the wood of our instruments, Composing the Climate, a series of new works on climate change in collaboration with pianist Cacie Miller, and Third Stream, an exploration of the intersections of jazz and classical music. Missing Piece formerly co-directed creative orchestra at Urban Prairie Waldorf School and presented the curriculum at the American String Teacher’s Conference.
Alongside music therapist April Hickey, Missing Piece co-founded Bridgeport Music Collective, a community music space which provides music education, music therapy, rehearsal space for local ensembles, and community music events and performances.
Kelly Quesada
Dan Galat
Mission
Missing Piece endeavors to commission new musical and artistic works, as well as collaborate with other musicians, artists, and organizations to provide transformative musical experiences through performances and educational programming. We believe presenting these works can unite various communities for the benefit of all, particularly on the south side of Chicago, where Missing Piece is based.
Values
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We believe collaboration transcends the individual artists, melding unique perspectives and skills into broader and more far-reaching ideas. Collaboration is central to our process, as we fuse diverse musical and artistic voices, genres, and techniques to breathe life into projects that reflect a tapestry of human experience and imagination. This cooperative process generates innovative sounds, deepens understanding, cultivates empathy, and fosters a sense of community among creators and audience. Harnessing the power of shared creativity forges connections that resonate across boundaries.
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Community is both the foundation and the amplifier of any expression and thus plays a pivotal role in our music making. We aim to inspire our audiences to engage deeply with the works and one another, sharing our lived experience which unites us. Within our musical community, we hope to educate the curious, platform new musical voices, and inspire seasoned creators. These interconnected networks foster a sense of belonging, encouraging dialogue and cultural exchange.
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Music invites us to consider relationships - between two or more pitches, our present and our past, ourselves and others, our bodies and our instruments, and within our environmental soundscapes. We as humans have been communicating with our sonic environment for tens of thousands of years; this is the history of music. We invite listeners to consider the sounds human beings produce and their intentions and outcomes, which have enormous power to illuminate, heal, and connect. We draw inspiration from the beauty of nature, stories of creation, and interactions between all human and non-human beings.
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As musicians, we are always choosing who we listen to and emulate. We challenge ourselves to hear from people and perspectives that are new to us. We want to examine who has access to musical expression and why, and amplify the voices of the disenfranchised and historically marginalized musicians. Our teaching, organizing, and musical work centers around these questions. We are always listening for the answers.