By Carol Badaracco Padgett
Renowned artists William Close and the Earth Harp Collective will perform at SCADshow on the Savannah College of Art and Design’s Midtown Atlanta campus on Thursday, Dec. 18, 2025, at 7 p.m.
The distinctive performance will be both a musical one and an immersive experience, where the audience is wrapped within the sonic signature of the holidays.
When asked what the audience can expect from his interdisciplinary performance, Close teased, “I studied music and sculpture and architecture [at the Art Institute of Chicago]. And I also grew up on sailboats.”
Georgia Entertainment sat down with Close, a 2o12 finalist on NBC’s “America’s Got Talent,” to learn more about the Earth Harp experience he has taken around the globe and Atlanta’s own upcoming holiday performance.
GE: You are both a musician and an installation artist. Tell us about that and how the instrument itself is a one-of-a-kind element of the performance.
Close: I started creating instruments in my early 20s and, at this point, have developed over 150 new musical instruments. I’ve often thought about scale–not just musical scale but physical scale.
So I started seeing how long I could run a string. I started off in my apartment in Chicago, running a 20-foot string, then a 40-foot string and then figuring out how to play them. So I discovered a technique to play these giant strings where you wear gloves and [use]violin rosin … kind of run your hands along the strings and it produces [the sound].
I was very inspired by artists like Christo and sculptors like Alexander Calder and architects like Frank Lloyd Wright. And so I started to think of the instruments like architecture or installation–installation architecture.
For the first major installation of the Earth Harp, I mounted the chambers on one side of a canyon and ran the strings clear across to the other side. So, when you’re asking about me as an installation artist, I feel like that really planted a flag for me as an artist, working on a bigger scale.
GE: Did you have any inkling early on that you would combine disciplines in this way?
Close: I did not realize that until I started to build some structures. And sound design was a cool way to go back then, because we were just getting into recording on computers, and we were still working with analog tape.
So, we would have to set up these analog tape loops that went from one side of the room all the way to the other, and then come back and through the tape machine. And again, thinking about scale … that was really interesting to me.
GE: Was the harp always one of your preferred instruments?
Close: With the Earth Harp, there was definitely a series of experiments that brought it into light. What’s great about the instrument—which you’ll see when we perform in Atlanta–is that the chamber will rest on the stage and the strings will go out and attach into the architecture and literally turn the building itself, or that space itself, into a musical instrument.
It’s not just a metaphor. It’s the real deal. And that’s one of the things that’s so fabulous about it.
GE: What’s the experience of performing on the Earth Harp like, for you as a musician and performer?
Close: The quality of the sound is sort of symphonic and beautiful … it’s very uplifting and it can be very emotional. There have been times where I’ve been performing an Earth Harp piece and I look out in the crowd and see a bunch of people crying. Wow.
I think that’s what’s exciting about bringing this experience through the holiday season—it’s the emotion of it.
GE: Does this musical experience, as an artist, take you back to growing up on a sailboat in some way?
Close: I come from a long line of sailors, and so growing up we were always on boats. My mother and her husband lived on a sailboat. And so that became a real place of inspiration for me.
I’ve always seen a sailboat almost like a musical instrument. You’ve got the mast and then the stays or the cables that come down to hold it in place, and the rigging … and all that makes sound. And then the boat structure itself, the hull of the boat, is like the resonating chamber of an instrument.
So if you’re down below, anything that happens up in the rigging transfers into the boat itself, sound-wise.
It’s amazing.
Tickets for William Close and the Earth Harp Collective at SCADshow on Dec. 18, 2025, are available here.
