Sound Thoughts on Art

The arts can engage all our senses, but it’s in the crossover between them that things really get interesting. When we listen to music, what do we see in our mind’s eye? When we look at a work of art, what do we hear?

Sound Thoughts on Art, a podcast from the National Gallery of Art, explores the intersection of sight and sound. Hosted by musician and journalist Celeste Headlee, each episode focuses on a work of art in the National Gallery’s collection. Learn about the work and its context and hear a musician respond to that work through sound, creating a dialogue between visual art and music. Sound Thoughts on Art tells the stories of how we experience art and how it connects us.

Season 2

A young woman with pale, peachy skin and flushed cheeks sits facing our right in profile as she plays a guitar in this horizontal painting. The scene is painted with blended strokes, giving it a soft look and making some of the details indistinct. At the center of the composition, the guitar rests against the woman’s shoulder so it almost spans the width of the painting. The instrument has a caramel-brown body, and the dark brown neck lightens to slate gray by the sound hole. The woman’s eyes are lowered as she looks toward her left hand, her long fingers pinning the strings along the fretboard. She plucks the strings with her other hand. Her hair is covered in a red headscarf tied at the nape of her neck. One end rests on her left shoulder, farther from us, and the other hangs down her back. A low, flat-topped, black, brimmed hat sits atop the scarf. The woman’s features are delicate, and her pink lips are parted. She wears a gold chain with an oval pendant around her neck. Her jacket is gold with a pattern loosely painted with dabs of lapis blue, butter yellow, and rose pink. A yellow ribbon or band is tied to the neck of the guitar and slung over her shoulder. The indistinct space behind her is painted with strokes of moss green, goldenrod yellow, and a few swipes of marigold orange near her face. The artist signed and dated the painting in brown in the lower right corner: “Renoir.98.”

Episode 8 :  Sonia De Los Santos and Auguste Renoir’s “Young Spanish Woman with a Guitar”

Guitarist Sonia De Los Santos hails from Mexico, where as a child she was exposed to different musical influences. In Auguste Renoir’s Young Spanish Woman with a Guitar De Los Santos sees echoes of her younger self. Her song "Sueña" is an ode to dreams.

A six-story, narrow building stands alone in an otherwise unoccupied lot under the deck of a high bridge, with a river and cityscape in the background in this horizontal painting. Dozens of people, small in scale, are each painted with a few swipes of black and some with peach-colored faces. They gather at the foot of the building and around a fire to our left, near the lower left corner of the composition. The fire is painted with a dash of orange, a few touches of canary yellow, and a smudge of gray smoke. Several more people stand and sit against the building, which has a streetlamp near its entrance. The back end of the building angles away from us to our right, so we see the narrow, front entrance side to our left. Each of the six floors of the building has two windows with fire escape ladders on the narrow side we can see. Some strokes in red and white on the lower levels of the long, flat side of the building suggest signs or posters. The top story glows a warm sienna brown in sunlight, while the rest of the building and the scene below are in shadow. More people walk along a grayish-violet fence that encloses the lot beyond the building. The ground is painted thickly with slate gray, pale, sage green, and one smear of white to suggest snow. To our right and a short distance from us, a white horse pulls a carriage near the foot of the bridge. The ivory-white, concrete piling rises up and off the right edge of the canvas and supports the deck of the bridge above. Only a sliver of the brick-red underside of the bridge is visible, skimming the top edge of the painting in the upper right corner. Two twiggy, barren trees grow up beyond the muted purple fence, and the landscape beyond is bright in the sunlight. A terracotta-orange building rises along the left edge of the painting, with the area between it and the lot under the bridge filled with thickly painted patches of butter yellow, amethyst purple, and sage green. Beyond that, an ice-blue river flows across the composition. The shore beyond is lined with patches of beige and tan paint that could be buildings. A black tugboat puffs bright white smoke in the river. The sky above is frosty white. The artist signed the work with dark blue in the lower left corner of the painting, “Geo Bellows.”

Episode 7 :  Maria Schneider and George Bellows’s “The Lone Tenement”

Maria Schneider composed Bulería, Soleá y Rumba in the wake of a cancer diagnosis. Inspired by American artists such as Robert Henri and George Bellows, Schneider discusses “art for life’s sake” that tells a story of people—like the evocative figures in Bellows’s The Lone Tenement.

Episode 6 :  Delfeayo Marsalis and Hawkins Bolden’s “Untitled”

This work reminds jazz trombonist Delfeayo Marsalis of the proud, hard-working generations that raised him. A history of struggle may suggest the minor key, but Marsalis ultimately chose upbeat music to celebrate those who fought and made it work. 

A naked man with ghostly white skin sits upright in a canopied bed set in a narrow room in this tall, vertical painting. Wearing a black cap, he looks to our left in profile toward a skeleton who comes through a door along the left edge of the composition. The man gestures at the skeleton with one hand and, with the other, toward a bag of money held up by a small demon next to the bed to our left. The skeleton wears a white shroud and holds an arrow. A winged angel kneels next to the man in the bed, one hand on the man’s shoulder and the other lifted to gesture at a crucifix hanging in the window over the door. A small devil on the canopy above looks down onto the bed. At the foot of the bed, a man wearing a green robe and headdress drops coins into a sack held by another demon. Three more demons crawl about and hide under the chest. Pieces of armor and weapons lie on the ground to the right in front of a stone ledge in the foreground. Two pieces of clothing drape over the ledge to our left.

Episode 5 :  Peter Sheppard Skærved and Hieronymus Bosch’s “Death and the Miser”

Violinist Peter Sheppard Skærved and National Gallery director Kaywin Feldman discuss Hieronymus Bosch’s Death and the Miser and its symbolism of contrast: light and dark, life and death. Skærved plays a 17th-century violin sonatina that echoes similar contrasts of sensuality and fatality, beauty and mortality.

A young man sets out in a golden boat on a river that winds from the bottom right corner of this horizontal painting across a lush landscape and into the distance before disappearing beyond two rocky outcroppings far off to our right. Hazy in the distance, the jagged peaks of a barren red mountain rise into an almost cloudless blue sky. To our left, a semi-transparent, white palace looms above and beyond the mountain, filling most of the upper left quadrant of the composition. Hills and valleys leading from the mountain and palace are dotted with trees and carpeted with grass. A winged and haloed angel wearing a white robe stands on the bank of the river under a towering palm tree in the foreground, in the bottom right corner of the canvas. The angel has pale skin and long golden hair. One hand is lifted toward the palace or a young man in a boat in the river nearby. The small boat is angled away from the riverbank to our left and toward the palace. The boat is ornately decorated and at its bow, a winged, golden figure holds an hourglass aloft above her head. The young man has pale skin, shoulder-length brown hair, and he wears a red and gold tunic. A profusion of flowers and trees line the riverbank.

Episode 4 :  Daniel Ho and Thomas Cole’s “Voyage of Life” Series

Musician Daniel Ho spent much of his childhood on the water, so he relates to Thomas Cole’s river paintings. Ho responds to Voyage of Life with an original suite. Starting with simple harmonies to represent childhood, he gradually introduces complexity.

Episode 3 :  Sa-Roc and Margaret Burroughs’s “Sleeping Boy”

Rapper Sa-Roc’s music speaks to different aspects of Black experience, including the vulnerability of many Black kids—similar to the boy in Margaret Burroughs’s linocut, who hides himself. Her song Forever invites listeners not to hide, but to shine and share their “inner light” with the world.

Close to us, six people, all nude with light skin, stand or lie intertwined with snakes on a bank of rocks in this horizonal painting. Beyond them, the deep, distant landscape has a brown horse, tiny in scale, headed for a city of stone buildings beneath a vivid blue sky filled with twisting white clouds. The people’s bodies are sinewy and elongated, and their skin is painted in tones of ivory white, warmed with peach highlights and streaked with deep gray shadows. At the center, a man with a white beard and white, curly hair lies back on the charcoal-gray rock with his knees bent and his shins splayed out. With his body angled away from us to our right, he holds the body of a long, silvery-gray snake in his left fist, on our right, down by his hip. The snake curves behind the man’s body and he grips the snake behind its head. The man has high cheekbones and sunken cheeks, and rolls his eyes up and back to look at the snake, whose wide-open mouth nearly touches his hair. To our left, a cleanshaven young man stands with his body facing us but he arches back, holding an arcing snake in his hands. The young man’s right hand, on our left, bends at the elbow so he can grasp the snake’s tail and his other arm stretches straight back, holding the snake’s body as it curls around so its fangs nearly reach the young man’s side. To our right, next to the older man, a second, dark-haired young man lies on the rocks with his head toward us. His feet are on the ground, so we look onto the tops of his thighs. He lies with one hand resting on the ground, overhead. Three people seem to float, feet dangling, alongside the right edge of the painting. The person closest to us looks onto the writhing people in profile, back to us. A second person just beyond also looks to our left. A third head turns the opposite direction and looks off to our right. In the distance, the golden-brown horse is angled away from us, one front leg raised, on a path that moves from behind the rocky outcropping to the far-off town. Nestled in a shallow valley, buildings in the town are mostly painted with rose pink and red walls and smoke-gray roofs. The land dips to a deeper, green valley to our right, lining the horizon that comes two-thirds of the way up the composition. The standing people are outlined against the sapphire-blue sky and knotted, gray and white clouds.

Episode 2 :  Jenny Scheinman and El Greco’s “Laocoön”

In Sand Dipper, jazz violinist Jenny Scheinman creates an abstract and overwhelming world. This music, Scheinman says, sounds how El Greco’s painting looks. And it feels like the question on Laocoön’s face as he looks up for the last time. 

Created with tiny, colored stones and glass, this mosaic shows groups of people along and near the edge of a brilliant, topaz-blue body of water with a large, lemon-yellow, stylized sun in the sky in this horizontal composition. The aquamarine blue and vibrant yellow along with lime green, lilac purple, oyster white, and teal used in the people and landscape give this work a shimmering look. A pair of people recline together under a tree in the lower right corner. A sheep stands nearby, and a bird perches in the tree above. Beyond the tree and to our left, a cluster of box-like forms suggests a city in the distance. Larger in scale, so seeming closer to us, a man wearing a lapis-blue toga and a yellow cap holds a stringed instrument, a lyre, in front of his body. To the left, at the center of the composition, a trio of women each wearing amethyst-purple, magenta-pink, or lapis-blue dresses stand close to each other. They have long, dark hair and their bodies and garments are outlined in black. Between them and the large sun to our left, a winged horse with a buttercup-yellow body and turquoise-blue wings rears up. Near the upper left corner, the stylized sun is represented by a disk surrounded by pointed peaks, surrounded by a larger disk outlined with another ring of triangular points. A winged person holding a set of pan pipes flies above the sun to our left, over a small crescent moon below. Near the lower left corner, two groups of people gather around a body of bright blue water occupied by two fish. The artist signed and dated the work in the lower right corner: “MArC ChAgAll 69.” The mosaic is displayed outside in front of a screen of trees, with a band of bushes with green and orange leaves below.

Episode 1 :  Dom Flemons and Marc Chagall’s “Orphée”

Orphée depicts many tragedies, but songwriter Dom Flemons finds the joy in it: it resolves in the beautiful scene of two lovers embracing. Flemons pairs it with the tranquil Blue Butterfly. The instrumental song helps the emotional weight sink in. 

Season 1

Bonus Episode :  Celeste Headlee and James Van Der Zee’s “Couple, Harlem”

In this photograph, journalist and musician Celeste Headlee hears Lenox Avenue, a suite her grandfather William Grant Still named after Harlem’s main street. This portrait captures the pride of Black Americans achieving success during the Harlem Renaissance despite systemic injustice. 

Episode 10 :  Christian McBride and Roy DeCarava’s “David”

In an improvised musical conversation, jazz bassist Christian McBride introduces himself to David. Connecting over McBride’s walking bass line, they meet David’s friends, splash by the fire hydrant, play stickball. Through David, McBride recalls his own childlike innocence.

Three young Black girls lie on the grass in this closely cropped, sepia-toned, circular photograph so their faces roughly line up near the center. At the bottom of the composition, one girl lies on her back and looks up into the sky. Her head, torso, and right arm are visible. She wears a floral-patterned dress and holds her right hand up to the top of her head. The second girl reclines on her right side behind the first, so she is angled to our left. She props her head in her right hand and looks steadily at us. Her face hovers at the center of the composition. She wears a white t-shirt and a garland encircles her head. The third girl, at the top of the composition, seems to prop her body up on her left elbow. She wears a floral dress and looks down and to our right. Grass and paving rocks fill the space behind her.

Episode 9 :  Nathalie Joachim and Carrie Mae Weems’s “May Flowers”

Composer Nathalie Joachim sees her childhood memories in May Flowers. The photograph also evokes the uniquely spiritual experience of recording a church choir in her family’s Haitian village. Joachim has lovingly woven their song into her composition.

Episode 8 :  Rafiq Bhatia and James Turrell’s “New Light”

Musician Rafiq Bhatia feels compelled to capture his improvisations—fleeting moments of sound—in recordings. Like sound, light is transient. But James Turrell’s works, which inspired Bhatia’s composition, contain and present light, allowing us to forge a deeper relationship with an ephemeral substance.

Episode 7 :  Vijay Iyer and I.M. Pei’s “National Gallery of Art, East Building”

Composer-pianist Vijay Iyer describes the East Building as a work of art that does what music does: invites you in—to inhabit, explore, and be among others. He responds with pieces that balance pattern and structure with leaving room to wander.

Three buffalo tumble off and down the side of a cliff into canyon in this nearly square black and white photograph. We see the buffalo straight on, as if we are suspended next to the cliff face. The animals are in focus as dark silhouettes against the paler, slightly blurred background. The steep cliff face runs up the left edge of the composition. Cut off by the upper left corner, one animal atop the cliff has lifted its front hooves as it pitches down, following a buffalo already falling head-first, its legs brushing the sheer face of the canyon. The third animal falls freely, also almost head-first and legs flailing, near the bottom center of the composition. The only other dark object in the photograph is a scrubby tree that grows from the cliff face beyond the animals. Flat-topped cliffs extend into the background, and a tree-lined river snakes through the floor of the canyon, deep in the distance. Low hills rise from the riverbank to our right, and the horizon is about halfway up the composition. A few wispy, hazy clouds float through the indistinct sky above.

Episode 6 :  Emily Wells and David Wojnarowicz’s “Untitled (Falling Buffalos)”

Composer/producer Emily Wells sees us as the buffalo: frozen before downfall, but still alive—which is why she includes so much breath in her song. Wells, whose work deals with the climate crisis, looks to David Wojnarowicz’s AIDS activism for lessons.

Rectangular fields of magenta pink, black, and a band of flame orange nearly fill this abstract, vertical canvas. The narrow edges around the fields are sky blue. The magenta rectangle takes up the top third, and the black field below takes up most of the rest of the canvas. The narrow band of orange lines the bottom edge. The edges of the pink and black are blended, giving the forms a blurry look.

Episode 5 :  Kamala Sankaram and Mark Rothko’s “Untitled”

Great art shifts your way of seeing the world. When her sister was dying, composer Kamala Sankaram was drawn to the intensity of Mark Rothko’s painting.

Episode 4 :  Jasiri X and “Untitled (Man)”

Hip-hop artist Jasiri X looks at Kerry James Marshall’s woodcut almost like he’s looking into a mirror. It captures the experience of a Black man: resilient but restrained from being his authentic self. Jasiri responds to the work through two songs that reflect on his internal struggle.

A lightweight, sheer, coral-peach robe hangs from a wooden dowel over a color television screen in this sculptural piece, which hangs against a white wall. The robe has long sleeves extending horizontally along the dowel, which extends a bit past the cuffs. The robe has a narrow, cream-white collar and ties to one side over the chest. It flares slightly below the arms, creating a bell shape. The rectangular video screen that hangs within is partially obscured, but looks like at least two people in a brightly colored setting.

Episode 3 :  Bora Yoon and “Ommah”

Composer and multi-instrumentalist Bora Yoon considers whether we carry the sounds and memories of our people within us. In her response to Nam June Paik’s video sculpture, she brings together both traditional Korean instruments and eclectic electronic music.

Episode 2 :  Daniel Bernard Roumain and “American Gothic”

Composer Daniel Bernard Roumain works with performance poet Lady Caress to respond to this iconic photograph with a combination of music and poetry. In the ebb and flow of his composition, DBR hopes to capture pain, legacy, enduring hope—and the rhythm of the subject’s life.

Made with mostly square or rectangular pieces of patterned paper in shades of asparagus and moss green, sky blue, tan, and ash brown, a man with brown skin sits in the center of this horizontal composition with a second person over his shoulder, in the upper left corner of this collage. The man’s facial features are a composite of cut-outs, mostly in shades of brown and gray, as if from black-and white photographs, and he smokes a cigarette. He sits with his body angled slightly to our right and he looks off in that direction, elbows resting on thighs and wrists crossed. His button-down shirt and pants, similarly collaged, are mottled with sky blue and white. One foot, on our right, is created with a cartoonish, shoe-shaped, black silhouette. The paper used for the other foot seems to have been scraped and scratched, creating the impression that that foot is bare. A tub, made of the same blue and white paper of the man’s suit, sits on the ground to our left, in the lower corner. The man sits in front of an expanse made up of green and brown pieces of paper patterned with wood grain, which could be a cabin. In a window in the upper left, a woman’s face, her features similarly collaged, looks out at us. One dark hand, large in relation to the people, rests on the sill with the fingers extended down the side of the house. The right third of the composition is filled collaged scraps of paper patterned to resemble leafy trees. Closer inspection reveals the form of a woman, smaller in scale than the other two, standing in that zone, facing our left in profile near a gray picket fence. She has a brown face, her hair wrapped in a patterned covering, and she holds a watermelon-sized, yellow fruit with brown stripes. Several blue birds and a red-winged blackbird fly and stand nearby. Above the woman and near the top of the composition, a train puffs along the top of what we read as the tops of trees. The artist signed the work in black letters in the upper right corner: “romare bearden.”

Episode 1 :  Lara Downes and “Tomorrow I May Be Far Away”

For classical pianist and activist Lara Downes, Romare Bearden’s collage is a puzzle full of questions and unfinished business. In response, she brings together different musical sources, overlaying sounds to create both harmony and tension.