Concert - To the Body by Nico Muhly

To the Body is an immersive soundscape created for the exhibition Yu Hong: Another One Bites the Dust, a site-specific installation at the Chiesetta della Misericordia 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.

Traveling from Venice to New York, on November 10, Works & Process and the Guggenheim’s Asian Art Circle, with support from the American Academy in Rome, will present the live performance iteration and premiere of To the Body. This concert will be the United States premiere of the work but a World Premiere of the live/concert version. Alexandra Munroe, Senior Curator at Large, Global Arts, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum moderates a discussion with Yu Hong and Nico Muhly.

To the Body by Nico Muhly is 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.

Nico Muhly, born in 1981, is an American composer who writes orchestral music, works for the stage, chamber music and sacred music. He’s received commissions from The Metropolitan Opera: Two Boys, (2011) and Marnie (2018); Carnegie Hall, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Tallis Scholars, King’s College and St John’s College, Cambridge, Wigmore Hall, and The Philadelphia Orchestra, among others. He is an avid collaborator, and has worked with choreographers Benjamin Millepied at the Paris Opéra Ballet, Bobbi Jene Smith at the Juilliard School, Justin Peck and Kyle Abraham at New York City Ballet; artists Sufjan Stevens, The National, Teitur, Anohni, James Blake and Paul Simon; and has written film scores for The Reader (2008) and Kill Your Darlings (2013), and the BBC adaptation of Howards End (2017).

Among his concerti are works for violin, (Shrink, for Pekka Kuusisto), organ (Register, for James McVinnie), viola (Nadia Sirota) He collaborates with the same artists as a composer and performer of chamber music. He has written vocal works for Iestyn Davies, Renée Fleming, and Nicholas Phan, has collaborated with artists Maira Kalman and Oliver Beer, and has created site-specific pieces for the National Gallery, London, and the Art Institute of Chicago, and written articles for the Guardian, the New York Times, and the London Review of Books. Recordings of his works have been released by Decca and Nonesuch, and he is part of the artist-run record label Bedroom Community, which released his first two albums, Speaks Volumes (2006) and Mothertongue (2008).

Tickets start at $15 and can be purchased at https://www.worksandprocess.org/calendar/works-and-process-at-the-guggenheim-tothebody-nicomuhly.