Sound Art

For music composition doctoral student Zheng Zhou, it sounds like the Grand Canyon. Zhou was one of 10 students who participated in the U’s School of Music composition program writing works inspired by art at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts. He composed a piece called Echo after pondering this painting—Landscape, a mid-nineteenth-century scroll painting by Chiang Ta-Lai. “By gazing at the artwork with Grand Canyon’s natural beauty in my mind, the painting’s landscape seemed to come alive with movement in my imagination,” he says. “The resulting composition describes both authentic and imaginary sounds and images presented in the Grand Canyon and Chiang’s painting.”

Listen to his and the other art-inspired works.

IMAGE ABOVE: CHIANG TA-LAI (CHINESE), LANDSCAPE, CA. 1824-1949, INK, PAPER, SILK, GIFT OF DR. MARCUS JACOBSON