Artists as Gardens Commission Concert by Gryphon Rue

Cave Rainbow in Negative Color
Artists as Gardens Commission Concert by Gryphon Rue
Saturday, March 21
Two performances: 5:30pm & 7:21pm
$65; members $50

We launch the Artists as Gardens series on Saturday, March 21, with our first commissioned concert by musician, composer, and artist Gryphon Rue. This concert marks the first in a sequence of commissioned works Rue will be presenting at Calder Gardens over the coming months.

The Artists as Gardens series invites contemporary artists, working across a wide range of disciplines, to think of their practice as a garden that changes with the seasons and other natural cycles. For the inaugural program, Rue offers his concert following the spring equinox. The concert takes place twice, at 5:30pm and at 7:21pm—when the sun sets—in the main gallery space. Seating is specially arranged to create a dynamic, immersive soundscape, with musicians positioned throughout the gallery in conversation with Calder’s works. This program offers a rare chance to experience live contemporary music in direct dialogue with modern masterworks—an encounter that invites close listening, looking, and shared contemplation.

Cave Rainbow in Negative Color is a sonic portrait of artist and composer Gryphon Rue, featuring solo and trio works with musicians Julia Den Boer and Odetta Hartman. The concert explores how time is felt, remembered, and distorted, seeking to stretch and replenish our tactile, lived experience of its passage. The first part of the concert is a heterogeneous piece; the second, a slower, meditative work.

Cave Rainbow in Negative Color, 2026 (world premiere)

• Gryphon Rue, composer & performer

Conceived as a sound collage for modified tape machine and electronics, Cave Rainbow in Negative Color draws from Rue’s reservoir of field recordings—captured locally in Calder Gardens and along the Schuylkill River, as well as from ethnographic archives and obscure corners of the internet. Drawing on natural processes such as cycles, feedback, and emergence, the piece moves between notated cues and improvisation. Electronic and acoustic sources entwine, seep through each other, and morph in color, gathering like a private weather system. This concert is the world premiere of Cave Rainbow in Negative Color.

Motore Immobile & Ananta, 1978

• Gryphon Rue, organ, voice, arrangement 2026
• Julia Den Boer, organ & piano
• Odetta Hartman, violin
  
  A new spatialized setting of Motore Immobile & Ananta, obscure jewels of spiritual minimalism composed by Giusto Pio (1926–2017). Gryphon Rue will be joined by organist/pianist Julia Den Boer and violinist Odetta Hartman.

Motore Immobile refers to Aristotle’s concept of the “prime mover,” the cause of all the motion in the universe, which itself is not moved by any prior action. “Perfectly beautiful, indivisible, and self-contemplative with an active intelligence.” (Metaphysics, Book 12)

First performance
Doors open: 5pm
Concert: 5:30pm

Second performance
Doors open: 6:50pm
Concert: 7:21pm

Buy tickets here; please select the performance you wish to attend.

Seating is offered on a first come, first-served basis.

Gryphon Rue is an artist, composer, and musician. His 2025 album, I Keep My Diamond Necklace in a Pond of Sparkling Water, was selected for Best Field Recordings on Bandcamp. “A conjuror in stereo” (Electronic Sound) who “plays with sonics in a way that a visual artist might manipulate light” (The Quietus), Rue brings to his music “restless energy, offering up bright, sweet packet-sized servings of electroacoustic crispness” (The Wire).

Julia Den Boer is a member of the quartet Yarn/Wire. She has recently performed at the Donaueschingen Festival, Bergen International Festival, Time:Spans Festival, and Festival d’Automne. She has performed with Longleash, International Contemporary Ensemble, Wavefield Ensemble, and Wet Ink. She is a recipient of the Solti Foundation Award, the Prix Maurice Ohana Award, and the Mikhashoff Trust Fund for New Music Pianist/Composer Commissioning Prize.

Odetta Hartman is a multi-instrumentalist, singer-songwriter, and educator born and based in downtown NYC. She is also a cofounder of Ladybug Land, a healing homestead and artist retreat center in the Catskills, NY.

Artists as Gardens is a series that commissions established contemporary artists, working across a wide range of disciplines, to think of their practice as a garden that changes with the seasons and other natural cycles. Over an extended period of time, artists conceive a series of time-based programs such as performances, healing practices, screenings, workshops, and discursive events, working in collaboration with local communities. Just as gardens invite us to notice how nature transforms itself while responding to different seasons, these artists explore new and evolving ideas aligned with their own rhythms and cycles.

Programming at Calder Gardens is generously supported by Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz, Donna Green, and Michael Sternberg.