To Listen Deeply
Original Sound Compositions
This exhibition includes two original sound compositions by Dickinson College student Zuzu Black `25, who double-majored in Music Theory and Composition and English during her time at Dickinson College. Each composition was created in response to a work in the exhibition. Click on the tracks below to listen to each and read, in Zuzu's own words, about her creative process.
Resonation Chamber
Resonation Chamber draws on the poetic implications of Utagawa Kunisada’s print Listening to the Sounds of Insects on an Autumn Night (1853) and how nature and sound are linked emotionally. The soundscape of the crickets underscores a haunting, harmonic progression that implies the resonant chamber that allows the body of a cricket to produce its sound through rubbing its legs together. It is the anatomical function inherent in the body of the cricket that creates the poetry of their natural music. In this triptych, this sonic poetry is implied in the figures distributed across the three prints. Looking across the three panels, the viewer meditates on the sonic atmosphere surrounding the scene, such as the flowing water, the dark weather looming in the background, and the imagined conversations among the people in the scene. All of these elements are represented in Resonation Chamber, such as the atmospheric quality of the music and the rain that accompanies the sound of crickets.
Radial Juncture
Radial Juncture is inspired by the abstracted riot of contrasting colors and multi-directional black lines in Vassily Kandinsky's Composition IV (1955). While these disparate elements convey a sense of motion, they are distributed across the print at a seemingly balanced pace. The shifts in melody heard in this composition outline a sharp high register, which, combined with the division into sections of rhythmic patterns, resonate with the variations of hue and value in the print. At the same time, Radial Juncture maintains a steady sonic space, which resonates with the all-over qualities and rhythmic passages of Kandinsky’s print.
