It doesn’t help that the Bauhaus’s denizens had varied, sometimes conflicting tastes. Paul Klee, an amateur violinist, adored Mozart; Lyonel Feininger, who created the woodcut cathedral that accompanied Walter Gropius’s Bauhaus manifesto in 1919, was known to play Bach fugues, and wrote some of his own. But there were also champions of the avant-garde, such as Wassily Kandinsky, who was close with Schoenberg, and Oskar Schlemmer, who used a piano-roll score by Hindemith for a version of his “Triadic Ballet.” In experiments with phonographs, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy prefigured musique concrète and the work of John Cage.

“Klee and Feininger were rather backward-orientated,” Steffen Schleiermacher, a pianist who has researched and recorded music of the Bauhaus, said in an interview. “Apart from Kandinsky and [Johannes] Itten — later also Moholy-Nagy — the Bauhaus masters may not have been up-to-date as far as contemporary music developments were concerned.”

Despite not having a definitive musical identity, the Bauhaus nonetheless had an appetite for what music could offer the worlds of art and architecture. Kandinsky described his works as compositions, using words like “rhythm” and “melody.” Scriabin was a house favorite for his synesthetic blend of music and color, which Gertrud Grunow, who taught at the Bauhaus in Weimar, echoed in her theories about the relationships between sound, color and space. Music, to her, was essential for creative energy. And Heinrich Neugeboren, in designing a monument to Bach by visualizing the lines of a fugue, attempted to make literal Goethe’s famous description of architecture as frozen music.

Neugeboren’s project was never realized in his lifetime, but he did document it in an essay for the Bauhaus Journal. (The issues of that publication, once accessible only in libraries and private collections, are now widely available in a facsimile recently released by Lars Müller Publishers.) He took four measures from Bach’s E flat minor Fugue from “The Well-Tempered Clavier” and represented them graphically, the melodic lines shown rising and falling, to reveal the piece’s architectural construction without traditional music notation or training.

Neugeboren then created a relief from the lines, cut at a 45-degree angle resembling a cross-section, and placed it on a pedestal — the music, he wrote, “made tangible as an immortal document of impalpable, incomprehensible genius.” (In the same essay, he claimed that this process wouldn’t work on the less precise compositions of Beethoven, and was skeptical about the potential of making Schoenberg’s dodecaphonic music “come alive” through sculpture.)

This unrealized monument is one of many missed opportunities in the Bauhaus’s musical history. During the school’s Weimar years, 1919-1925, Schlemmer repeatedly failed to collaborate with Schoenberg: first, in persuading him to teach at a nearby music school, then in having him write a score for the “Triadic Ballet.”