Several years ago, composer Phil Acimovic and his wife were visiting Cold Hollow Sculpture Park in Enosburg Falls when he felt a twinge of inspiration.
The park, which artist David Stromeyer opened to the public in 2014 to exhibit his enormous sculptures, is a familiar haunt for Acimovic. A composer, gamelan musician and Yale University lecturer, he served as Cold Hollow’s inaugural artist-in-residence in 2018.
“I know the park so well,” Acimovic said recently by phone from his home in Massachusetts. On this particular visit, he noted, “I saw a new piece of David’s, and there was some kind of energy about it. I was drawn to it.”
He told Stromeyer how taken he was with both the piece, entitled “Potluck,” and the space around it. He added that he’d love to compose and perform music around it at some point. Six months later, he got a call.
“Well, do you really want to?” Stromeyer asked.
He really did. Acimovic will premiere that composition, titled “Tuning, Timing, Resonance,” this Saturday, August 15. Over the course of two performances, he and four other musicians will create a series of immersive sonic environments, all sited at the sculpture that so inspired him years earlier. The piece aims to evoke the movement and motion that Acimovic sees in Stromeyer’s work.
“I hope the piece sounds like a sculpture,” Acimovic said. “When you look at sculpture, especially David’s, time just sort of slows down. They seem static at first, but then you realize, in the hands of an artist like that, there’s so much movement and play. I wanted to tap into that and write a musical piece that appears to be slow, almost motionless at first, but is anything but.”
To do so, he took a more experimental approach than he’s typically known for. Acimovic trained with Javanese masters on the gamelan — a complex Indonesian percussion instrument with so many rhythmic and melodic components that it’s sometimes referred to as an “orchestra.” But rather than compose for that instrument, he put together an ensemble that includes percussionist Matthew Gold, bassist Chris Castro, composer and multi-instrumentalist Kyle Rivera, and pianist Julian Drummond. He also expanded the breadth of instruments at play, sometimes adapting them to fit his needs. For instance, he disassembled a harmonium and retuned it himself so that it could play larger intervals.
“I had a choice: Do I pick the loudest instruments possible, this being an outdoor performance, or do I choose to bring in musicians who I know I can wrap their heads around this score?” Acimovic said. “I went with the latter.”
Through each of the composition’s four movements, “Tuning, Timing, Resonance” defies easy categorization, Acimovic said, but is a rhythmically based piece full of melody and is meant to be interactive.
In advance of each performance, Acimovic will host a workshop at the park. In addition to lessons on alternate tunings, free rhythms and resonance, attendees can learn to become part of the performance itself. The piece contains four “climactic sections,” Acimovic explained, in which volunteers from the workshop will join in with resonant metallic pipes.
“Knowing something … about the music only enhances the beauty,” Acimovic said. “You don’t have to have that foremost in your mind while you play, but it builds into your intuition.” ➆
The original print version of this article was headlined “Experimental Music | Phil Acimovic Composes a Unique Score for Cold Hollow Sculpture Park”
This article appears in August 12 • 2026.
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