During her residency, composer Heather Stebbins (CRF 2025), collector of sounds, found herself recording both the Castle’s natural soundscape and the human-made sounds of her fellow Fellows. Struck by the complexity of the natural sound environment, she woke up one morning at 4 AM to record the sounds of the emerging day, especially the changing type and density of bird calls over three hours. Another day she captured the sounds of visual artist Vian Sora (CRF 2025) at work on a large-scale painting, “mixing pigments, spraying brushes, even walking on the gravel in the castle courtyard as she traversed her large canvas.” As Stebbins explained, although many of these sounds are small and seemingly insignificant, “when isolated, they reveal themselves as textural, rhythmic, and resonant.”
When making the work Stebbins’ recorded, Sora also found the environment seeping into her process – the castle architecture post-earthquake, the earth-tones, the birdsongs. In her recent presentation at the Castle, she described her work while in residency as grounded, as landscapes marked by ruins, layered like Umbrian civilizations (“I build up then bury, reveal then obscure”), and characterized by thoughts about the sacred and the mythic (“my gestures became less urgent, more contemplative; I began to see the canvas as an altar”).
An edited, manipulated version of some of the Civitella sounds Stebbins captured will be played over a multichannel speaker system, alongside live music and dance, as part of a project premiering in Fall 2026 in collaboration with movement artist and choreographer, Erin Landers, and the TAK ensemble.