Resonance: Interpreting Dark Rapture in Sound and Music

Dark Rapture may well be the most fascinating portrait of James Baldwin ever created.

Dark Rapture
(1941) Oil on masonite
Collection of halley k harrisburg and Michael Rosenfeld, New York
© Estate of Beauford Delaney
by permission of Derek L. Spratley, Esquire,
Court Appointed Administrator
Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY

In July 2025, Les Amis published an article exploring the many scholarly interpretations of Dark Rapture presented in Amy J. Elias' Speculative Light: The Arts of Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin (2025).

Today, the Wells International Foundation is presenting the first known musical interpretation of this work.

A few weeks ago, we published “Washington Square I,” an original composition and video created by George Henry for the Resonance program that we are developing as part of The Beauford Delaney Project.

“Dark Rapture” is Henry’s second original composition for Resonance: Art & Sound in Conversation.

For Henry, the painting became an exploration of the tension between distance and presence, nostalgia and melancholy, and the surreal and the human. Beginning with a warm, nostalgic piano, they layered field recordings made around Delaney's former studio at 181 Greene Street with strings, brass, choir, synths, and guitar. Familiar sounds are transformed through pitching, reverb, and other processing, creating an atmosphere that is at once grounded in everyday experience and distinctly otherworldly.

Throughout the composition, Henry was also drawn to the idea of breath and human presence. Ghostly vocal textures, environmental recordings, and a shimmering reverb that makes the music seem to breathe contribute to their effort to capture the humanity and essence of the person at the center of Delaney's surreal portrait.

Listen to them express these sentiments and more in the Studio Notes they recorded for the composition.

Henry is hard at work on their third composition, which is inspired by another of Beauford’s paintings of Washington Square.