Composition for Mouths (Songs My Mother Taught Me) I & II
Oliver Beer
Exploring ideas of cultural memory and ‘inherited music’, Oliver Beer asked singers to recall the earliest songs they remembered from childhood, incorporating the melodies into new compositional forms. Joining their lips in a tight seal to create a single mouth cavity, the singers explore the resonant frequencies of each other’s faces as acoustic vessels. They blend their voices to create rhythmic microtonal harmonic interactions known as ‘beats’ whilst combining adapted forms of their remembered music.
In Composition for Mouths (Songs My Mother Taught Me) I, a tenor singing an Aboriginal Australian song learned from his aunts as a child is juxtaposed with another singer’s earliest musical memory, the children’s hymn, ‘Two Little Eyes to Look to God’.
In Composition for Mouths (Songs My Mother Taught Me) II, two sopranos merge an Indian classical raga and a melody by eleventh-century composer Hildegard van Bingen.
2018 - HD video, colour, sound. 4’10” & 4’ 05”
Courtesy of the artist and Thaddaeus Ropac gallery.
Commissioned by the Biennale of Sydney with the generous support of Thaddaeus Ropac gallery, the Sydney Opera House, and the British Council.
Performers: Clive Birch, Tim Moriarty, Alyx Dennison and Sonya Holowell
Oliver Beer
°1985, Prembury, UK
Oliver Beer works with sound as his material, turning this invisible force into painting, film, installation and architecture. His practice grows from a rare perceptual gift: an ability to hear the harmonic character of spaces and forms. His films and performances reveal the relationship between sound and form. In caves, vessels, or even the body, a single note can set space into vibration. Beer’s art uncovers the harmonies that bind people, spaces, and cultures together. Oliver Beer’s work are held in major public and private collections including the Centre Pompidou and Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, the National Museum of Art, Osaka, the Arts Council England Collection and the Fondation Louis Vuitton. His practice has been the subject of major solo exhibitions and commissions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (Vessel Orchestra, 2019), the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, and London Mithraeum Bloomberg SPACE (Albion Waves, 2023), and the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) in Tasmania (permanent acoustic pavilion). He was included in the 59th Venice Biennale (2022) and has also presented work at the Centre Pompidou, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Palais de Tokyo, Château de Versailles, MoMA PS1, WIELS and the Sydney Opera House. His practice has also featured in the Sydney, Istanbul, and Lyon Biennales, and in the landmark British Art Show 9.
Oliver Beer lives and works in London and Paris, and is represented by Thaddaeus Ropac gallery (Salzburg, Paris, London, Seoul) and Almine Rech (New York, Shanghai, Brussels).
Photo: Oliver Beer at his London studio. Courtesy Ocula. © Alastair Levy