World Premiere of SF’s New “Silent Bells & Organ Pipes” Sound Sculpture (Grace Cathedral)

Alina Dennis

Please join us for the world premiere opening of 2026 Artist in Residence Bill Fontana’s project, Resonance, created especially for Grace Cathedral as the central event of his residency.

Resonance is a sound sculpture created with our silent bells and organ pipes. Fontana has created works with the bells of Notre Dame and the Vatican, among others. This is his first bell project in the United States.

San Francisco artist Bill Fontana is internationally recognized for his pioneering experiments in sound. Since the late 1960s, he has consistently used sound as a sculptural medium to interact with and transform our perceptions of visual and architectural spaces. Applying his knowledge of composition, he draws out patterns of sound from natural and constructed worlds to create sound works that have the potential to conjure up visual imagery in the mind of the listener. Many of Fontana’s works create live listening networks that collect information from sources as diverse as the slowly vanishing sounds of Japan, the Bosporus River in Istanbul and its cisterns, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the Millennium Bridge in London, the sounds of the sea of the Normandy coast, fog horns in San Francisco, old growth forests, hydroelectric turbines, diverse urban and marine environments, the silent bells of both Notre Dame and the Great Bell of the Vatican; the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula, rain forests from three continents, and the melting Dachstein Glacier in the Austrian Alps.

Disclaimer: Please double check event information with the event organizer as events can be canceled, details can change after they are added to our calendar, and errors do occur.