THE AEOLIAN HARP: CAPTURING THE HARMONICS OF MOVEMENT AND SOUND

My latest mixed media piece involves lines, implied movement, and sound — jet trails, a flock of birds flying in formation, a lone Verbena bonariensis, string suspended between rocks, and real string that form a facsimile of an Aeolian Harp.

​​My goal as an artist has never been to just recreate nature, per se. Rather, I attempt to assemble things that are somehow related in some way by color and shape, but also and most importantly, express the awe and the oddness of nature and reality itself.

​As with virtually all of my work, these parables, narrations and events could actually take place.

This work is dedicated to one of my favorite composers Henry Cowell, whose work The Aeolian Harp was an influence on me as a painter. In pieces such as Aeolian Harp (1923) and The Banshee (1925), performers play directly on the piano strings, which are rubbed, plucked, struck, or otherwise sounded by the hands or by an object. 

The Aeolian Harp, 22" x 28", ©Tom Gehrig

My first exposure to classical music was a concert by the Oakland Symphony which featured two works that stayed with me forever: Mahler’s First Symphony and a work by Henry Cowell, which was full of dissonance—notes that seemed wrong but resolved into something so right. Some years later while studying multimedia at Mills College, I took a class in 20th Century Music from Nathan Rubin—the concertmaster of the Oakland Symphony from that very same evening!

An Aeolian Harp is a type of box zither on which sounds are produced by the movement pitch of wind over its strings. The strings are all tuned to the same pitch. In the wind they vibrate in equal parts (i.e., in halves, thirds, fourths…), so that the strings produce the natural overtones (harmonics). In this work, I am conceptually suggesting the sound of the wind, the Verbena bending in that wind as the birds fly by. There is a lot of movement and sound being suggested in this frozen moment.

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"The Aeolian Harp" is available for sale directly through Tom Gehrig Studios. CLICK HERE for more info and additional images.