Editor’s Note: Day 4 of The Selective Echo’s coverage of the Utah Arts Festival features the most intriguing large-scale musical installation ever to grace Salt Lake City. Tomorrow’s coverage highlights the world premiere musical commissions that will be held during the festival along with a feature about festival food. Stay tuned tomorrow as well with Twitter updates.

Bill Close is about to transform the space surrounding the City Library’s distinguished architecture into a large-scale musical installation, a giant Earth Harp that also has graced the architectural space of venues such as the Kennedy Center, Seattle’s Space Needle, the Detroit Institute of Art, Cirque du Soleil, the Philadelphia Central Train Station, and a verdant landscape just outside of Chicago.

Since 1999, Close, founder of MASS (Musical Architecture Sonic Sculpture), has created these gigantic harps – with strings running as long as 1,000 feet – that have, in some cases, transformed the interiors of buildings into a stunning state of musical resonance, creating a feeling almost as if one would be sitting inside an instrument (e.g. string bass).

The installation at the Utah Arts Festival will be as impressive as what Close has created for other venues. Incorporating technology familiar to those who navigate sailboats, Close will create a 700-foot harp fashioned with strings made from 15,000 feet of brass musical wire.

For the festival, two harps will be created with the library’s walls and the festival amphitheater stage serving as anchor points for the main instrument, while a “smaller” harp will be strung west to the festival Round area. This smaller harp will be the site for daily interactive performances and nightly jam sessions starting at 8 and going through 9:45.

The larger instrument will be featured in a performance Sunday, June 29, at 9:30 p.m. in which the audience will sit beneath the instrument, a rare opportunity to experience the mega-instrument’s vibrations. The harp, played with resin-gloved hands, can create a sound similar to a glass harmonica or the effect of rubbing a moistened finger around the rim of a crystal wine goblet.

Large-scale musical installations have been a major feature of the American music scene since the early 1960s. In 1968, David Tudor hung bells, resonant beams, dual metal transducers, and other resonating objects in a New Hampshire barn while audience members moved through the space interacting with the objects which were at ear level. Maryanne Amacher, in 1992, worked with “immersive aural architectures,” where the main audience space was connected to adjoining areas through specially designed loudspeaker arrangements – literally, a sonic theater in which sounds originate not from the loudspeakers but from the unique architectural features of heights and spaces inside the building. And, composer John Luther Adams has a permanent musical installation in Fairbanks, Alaska that, in part, draws its sonic tones and harmonics from the seismic activity in the region and from the dramatically changing seasons.

Close’s work is yet another profound example of music that is, in effect, created by the space which it occupies, the audience members, and by the planet itself. Music critic and composer Kyle Gann perfectly encapsulated the aesthetic philosophy of these large-scale musical installations:

“The poetry exists in-between: savoring the slow-changing forms with their rich detail of surface activity, being conscious of their relation to global processes, and learning to appreciate the time-scale, the lumbering sense of syncopation, of the planet on whose surface you scratch out your humble existence.”

Close’s life-affirming musical persona is an integral part of the MASS Ensemble. Performing dynamic instrumental and vocal music rich in classical, rock, ambient, jazz and Latin influences, the multi-talented ensemble incorporates a mix of traditional instruments like harp, percussion and violin in addition to the unique sonically compelling instruments built by Close. These instruments have ranged in size from a few inches to more than 1,100 feet.

And, to make the installation even more memorable will be a yoga and sound workshop Sunday, June 29, beginning at 9:30 a.m., before the festival gates open at 9 a.m.

During the 90-minute session at the Amphitheater Stage, participants will have the opportunity to blend their yoga movements with the resonance of live music from the giant harp. Andrea Brook, associate director of MASS, says the vibrating strings of the earth harp generate high-frequency healing tones and harmonics which accentuate the perfect state of focused yoga meditation.

Advance registration is required for the workshop and can be found, along with information about teacher training workshops, here.

The Earth Harp and MASS performances are included in the regular ticket admission for each festival day.