Inspiration becomes backdrop

The result was a five-movement string quartet, “The Course of Empire.’’ It’s been played once since it was composed, on an NEC composition recital, but Cohen has always envisioned a performance in the presence of the artworks themselves. That opportunity will come tomorrow, courtesy of a weekend festival called “Inspired by the Land’’ at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem. The paintings will be on display, and Cohen’s piece will be heard twice, played by four members of the string orchestra A Far Cry.

Created between 1833 and 1836, Cole’s five large-scale canvases depict the rise, perfection, and destruction of civilization in the Romantic landscape style of the Hudson River School. The declinist narrative of the sequence is clear, yet even in the final two paintings, “Destruction’’ and “Desolation,’’ there is a sense of aesthetic beauty that softens the sense of moral decay.

Cohen has written a number of other pieces based on works of visual art, and said that in approaching these projects, “on a fundamental level, I try to make the music an expression of my own experience of looking at my paintings.’’ That can mean using textural effects to convey a mood. Or it can mean using specific visual objects as triggers for musical elements. In each of the Cole paintings, a cliff with a boulder on it is visible, the unifying thread indicating that the five scenes actually occur in the same place. So Cohen assigned the cliff its own musical leitmotif, which crops up throughout the piece in various guises.