Nico Muhly's To the Body, commissioned by Works & Process with support from the American Academy in Rome and the Guggenheim’s Asian Art Circle, will premiere on June 6 at Chiessetta della Misericordia, Venice.
The immersive soundscape was created for the exhibition, 'Yu Hong: Another One Bites the Dust', on view concurrently with the 60th International Art Exhibition—La Biennale di Venezia. It is a work in ten sections, played without pause and repeated without seam, in which fragments of Dietrich Buxtehude’s Membra Jesu Nostri (1680) appear, but are themselves disembodied from their original context. A soprano sings a line drawn from the original cantata over a bed of electronically manipulated sounds, Renaissance and Baroque instruments, and other voices. The primary musical and emotional elements are memory, contortion, and recontextualization; these act hand-in-hand with Yu Hong’s work, as well as in counterpoint to them.
'Yu Hong: Another One Bites the Dust' is organized by Alexandra Munroe, Senior Curator at Large, Global Arts, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and is a program of the Guggenheim Museum’s Asian Art Initiative that is supported by the museum’s Asian Art Circle.
Find out more here.
