World premiere of Nico Muhly's commission responding to Yu Hong's exhibition 'Another One Bites the Dust' in Venice, 6 June

16 May 2024

To the Body by Nico Muhly
World Premiere
6 June 2024 at 5pm
Chiesetta della Misericordia, Cannaregio, Venice

To the Body is an immersive soundscape 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.

The piece will play every hour, on the hour, for the remainder of the exhibition's duration.

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.

About Nico Muhly
Nico Muhly (American, b. 1981) is a composer who writes orchestral music, works for the stage, music for film, choral music, chamber music, and sacred music. He has received commissions from The Metropolitan Opera–Two Boys (2011) and Marnie (2018)–among numerous other organizations, and collaborated with choreographers Benjamin Millepied at the Paris Opera Ballet, Bobbi Jene Smith at The Juilliard School, and Justin Peck and Kyle Abraham at New York City Ballet; and with musicians Sufjan Stevens, The National, Teitur, Anohni, James Blake, and Paul Simon. He is the coauthor, with Xavier F. Salomon, of Paolo Veneziano's Coronation of the Virgin (Frick Collection, 2022).