# HERE ON TOUR: Cleveland Museum of Art

By [Niles Luther](https://paragraph.com/@nilesluther) · 2023-02-16

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Dear reader,

Welcome back to my tour within a tour, where I set out to score paintings found in museums around the country. The resulting compositions will be recorded with the orchestra I’m on tour with, and pressed to the blockchain as NFTs. These entries will document my process from observation to tokenization. Lets begin this adventure in earnest, with the work that inspired it all!

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### Painting tl;dr

1.  `CITY:` Cleveland, OH
    
2.  `MUSEUM:` [Cleveland Museum of Art](https://www.clevelandart.org/)
    
3.  `PAINTING:` [Mount Starr King, Yosemite, 1866](https://www.clevelandart.org/art/1922.684)
    
4.  `ARTIST:` [Albert Bierstadt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Bierstadt)
    
5.  `OBSERVATION DATE:` Oct 28, 2022
    

### Music tl;dr

1.  `CITY:` Philadelphia, PA
    
2.  `SINEPRINT:` Wyndham Philadelphia Historic District
    
3.  `AUDIO SKETCH:` [Improv on G Drone](https://gallery.manifold.xyz/0x278246a8239f998ddcdd347b2eb8bcdd2a69841e/1)
    
4.  `COMPOSER:` [Niles Luther](https://nilesluther.com)
    
5.  `CREATION DATE:` Nov 10, 2022
    

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The Museum
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Entering the halls of Cleveland Museum of Art had me slightly dumbfounded; I struggled to comprehend how such a gorgeous institution could exist within a city that so seemingly lacked the social culture to support it.

![Atrium at the Cleveland Museum of Art ](https://storage.googleapis.com/papyrus_images/208f0614c2e87d6bcfa147fbca142ddd0b0cf1bc05ee74d2d7676126cbe7c778.jpg)

Atrium at the Cleveland Museum of Art

The contrast of downtown Cleveland’s uninspiring gray streets with the pristine white marble of the museum’s atrium was stark. Perhaps that’s what induced such a strong feeling of awe as I gazed at paintings for the first time since I started the Les Misérables national tour. Awe, the perfect and only word I would use to describe how I felt as I entered the galleries. The building reflected the paintings, and the paintings were masterworks. “How is it that a human being created this?” I said to myself as I carefully gazed at them one after the other.

It was almost painful to be surrounded by such potent beauty, coming from the increasingly monotonous nature of performing in a national broadway tour. The paintings, suspended in time though they were, inanimate and still though they were, stayed my unraveling psyche. They anchored me.

[https://nilesluther.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Cleveland-Museum-of-Art-1-of-1.mp4?height=200&width=200&autoplay=true&loop=true&muted=true](https://nilesluther.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Cleveland-Museum-of-Art-1-of-1.mp4?height=200&width=200&autoplay=true&loop=true&muted=true)

Often I think to myself, _“What does great art point to?”_. I ask that question with the preconception that, yes, for art to be great it must be pointing to something. This further begs the question of: _“Wherein lies the directionality with which this art points?”_, as well as, _“How clear is this artworks representation of the thing which it points to?”_

Les Misérables for instance, pointing to Great Redemption, Forgiveness, Resilience of the Human Spirit, Sacrifice. These grand concepts must be symbolized, parsed, and ultimately diluted in order for the masses to digest them within the course of 3 hours. And what else could be done? A lifetime could be spent on the learning of sacrifice alone.

The neutering of these ideas causes them to sit just below the surface of our proverbial lake of knowledge. Digestible yes, but lacking in the requisite depth to catch a glimpse of the Lord himself, from whom we know these themes arose.

What I mean to say, is that in almost every painting I see so clearly, and feel so deeply, the hand of the divine. It was clear to me in Cleveland that the vision sought to be expressed by each artist was true, and for the sake of truth over commerce, they attempted to capture it.

The Painting
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My love for the Hudson River School endures. Albert Bierstadt’s landscape here, a depiction of the West, is the most honest choice to launch the category of _‘paintings which touch my heart,’_ as it is in the mountains of the West where I feel a deep sense of peace and fulfillment. Translating the content of this landscape into song should be an unlabored endeavor… I’m curious to hear the music myself.

![Mount Starr King, Yosemite, 1866 - Oil on Canvas - Albert Bierstadt (American, born Germany, 1830-1902)](https://storage.googleapis.com/papyrus_images/8147cbf3f436fa34fe212555200311a4290c1ee3256a00988e31469bf0f5e786.png)

Mount Starr King, Yosemite, 1866 - Oil on Canvas - Albert Bierstadt (American, born Germany, 1830-1902)

> During the summer of 1863, Bierstadt visited Yosemite Valley in California and made numerous sketches. Back in his New York studio, he used them to produce many majestic paintings, including this view of the distant granite peak Mount Starr King. Such scenes thrilled East Coast audiences and helped encourage early movements to safeguard natural wonders. In 1864 President Lincoln signed a bill preserving Yosemite as public property; it became a national park in 1890.
> 
> Bierstadt included two Native Americans with a packhorse in his composition, and their presence references the fact that Indigenous peoples had inhabited or seasonally visited the region for millennia. Over time, various government and military agencies dispossessed them of these ancestral lands. Although no longer residents in the national park, descendants of the seven Indigenous nations with ties to Yosemite persevered to live in neighboring areas.
> 
> Hinman B. Hurlbut Collection 1922.684
> 
> > _Wall text for Mount Starr King, Yosemite. Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio_

Musical Response
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The following music NFT is my initial response to Albert Bierstadt’s 'Mount Starr King, Yosemite’, recorded on Nov. 10, 2022 via voice memo at the Wyndham Philadelphia Historic District in Philadelphia, PA.

In this improvisation I am trying to capture the feeling of paradox I have as I gaze at the painting: admiration for the beauty of such a landscape and sadness at the knowledge of its dispossession from the Native Americans who once inhabited it.

[https://opensea.io/assets/ethereum/0x278246A8239F998dDcDD347b2Eb8BCdD2A69841E/1](https://opensea.io/assets/ethereum/0x278246A8239F998dDcDD347b2Eb8BCdD2A69841E/1)

This audio sketch and future sketches contain the melodic/harmonic/rhythmic content that will underpin the final art music composition. Each audio sketch will be airdropped to the wallet of the individual who collects the final NFT.

The cover art is a screenshot (edited for transparency) from GLM, a software for Genelec’s SAM monitors. My 8330 SAMs calibrate by playing a sine wave of the audible frequency spectrum and then measuring reflections off of nearby surfaces. This in turn generates a graph of the room’s frequency response. I like to think of these graphs as the _sineprints_ from each hotel room around America wherein my creative process began.

Thats all for now.

Most sincerely, Niles

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### About the Artist:

[https://nilesluther.com/](https://nilesluther.com/)

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*Originally published on [Niles Luther](https://paragraph.com/@nilesluther/here-on-tour-cleveland-museum-of-art)*
