Performance of Nico Muhly's 'To the Body' at the Guggenheim Museum, NY, 10 November

24 October 2024

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On Sunday 10 November, The Guggenheim Museum presents 'To the Body' an immersive soundscape by Nico Muhly created for the exhibition 'Yu Hong: Another One Bites the Dust', on view concurrently with the 60th Venice Biennale. 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.

'To the Body' was commissioned by Works & Process with support from the American Academy in Rome and the Guggenheim’s Asian Art Circle.

'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.

Works & Process Commission: To the Body by Nico Muhly
Sunday 10 November, 7pm EDT
Peter B. Lewis Theater, 1071 Fifth Avenue, NY

Find out more via Works & Process

Portrait of Nico Muhly. Photo by Heidi Solander.