Antonia is a composer, performer, sound artist, editor, and curator with an interest in working across disciplines. She lives in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand.
Antonia has collaborated extensively with musicians, dancers, visual artists, poets, theatre- and film-makers, performance artists, and software developers. Her performances incorporate slippage, improvisation, and the live space. Antonia's recent works have centred around the materiality and musicality of everyday speech, in varying formats, to loosen expectations around 'final product’: from text piece, transcription piece, installation, live approximation of performance, performance of an artist talk, to instrumental concert, all of which gently tap on the borders of speech and music, performance and rehearsal, authorship and collaboration, composition and writing, and which juxtapose the formalities of presentation and the aesthetics of failure. Her works with words investigate speech as music: the pitches, rhythms, intonations, conversational overlaps of our everyday. And when incorporating elements of theatricality—lighting, images, props, gesture—she notates actions as a means to expose the everyday as sonic/artistic material in musical time.
Antonia’s style of working across disciplines raises important questions about audience expectation, the social and professional structures of respective disciplines, and artistic value. She devises moments of tension, surprise, and humour to create communal experiences whereby spectators are welcomed as participants in a compositional process. This implies that listening in itself is active: audience members are not mere recipients of music as finished form, but drawn into the piece’s compositional questions where listening and spectating can be viewed as a form of composition.
Antonia challenges notions of hierarchy within the traditional classical music context, and investigates fumblings and failures that occur in relationship and conversation; the question of how to perform a combination of techniques simultaneously; and, how everyday moments can be articulated in exploring ideas of “virtuosity”. How can a performer’s virtuosity be embodied and showcased in very ordinary ways to create a new form of expression, a new relationship with an audience?
Antonia has a Master of Music in Composition from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, a Bachelor of Music with First Class Honours in Composition, and a Bachelor of Arts in History from Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington.
Along with Samuel Holloway, Antonia is co-editor of BLOT. She was on the Committee of Te Rōpū Kaitito Puoro o Aotearoa—Composers Association of New Zealand 2019–2022, during which time she was Editor of Canzonetta (2019–2021), Secretary (2020–2021), and President (2021–2022).
Antonia has presented work in Europe, Aotearoa, Australia, and the States: with Aurora Orchestra, Phaedra Ensemble, Bastard Assignments, DieOrdnungDerDinge, Chroma, Red Note Ensemble, Riot Ensemble, NorthArc, SoundPlay, Stroma, and Tudor Consort; at the Wigmore Hall, Barbican, Kings Place, Café OTO, Wellcome Collection, Spike Island Gallery, Robin Howard Dance Theatre, Traverse Theatre, Chisenhale Dance Space, Theater im Aufbau Haus (TAK), DAAD Galerie, ausland, Studio8, Galerie Pleiku, Strahler Berlin, Hannah Playhouse, Thistle Hall, The Pyramid Club, and Audio Foundation; at HOFFNUNG3000, City of London Festival, Taste Festival Berlin, Festspillene i Nord-Norge, Capital Fringe Festival Washington D.C., 4 Days at Arnolfini Bristol, Performance Art Week Aotearoa, Suffrage 125, BIFEM 2019, and as part of Weisslich concert series, Kammer Klang, and BBC Radio3's Hear and Now concerts for 'Why Music?'; as Artist in Residence with Hubbub Group, Wellcome Collection, London, England (2014–16), at Morni Hills, Chandigarh, India (2017), Te Kōkī-New Zealand School of Music (2018–19), Q-O2, Brussels, Belgium (2019), Bundanon Art Museum, New South Wales, Australia (2023), and the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Centre (EMPAC), Troy New York, U.S.A. (2023–24).
image © Leena Kangaskoski
i wrote my name with the moon
in a desert in morocco