Unspoken: it’s what it’s about
5-channel sound installation, 6:21, speakers arranged equidistantly at ear height. Created in residence (May/July 2023) and commissioned by Bundanon Art Museum, New South Wales for ‘The Polyphonic Sea,’ 8 July–8 October 2023.
5-minute performance version for the exhibition opening on 8 July 2023.
Photographs by Zan Wimberley + Artist statement / Wall text extrapolation.
Wild Fabrics
Excerpt, ‘you couldn’t really tell’, from film Wild Fabrics, adapted from a live performance due to Covid lockdown.
Excerpt from Theatreview by Kosta Bogoeivski: “Wild Fabrics is a film that begins with cityscapes, urban gardens, abandoned sites, and graffiti, captured with a touristic gaze. Steady hands and slow pans like one’s eyes would when people-watching in a new place. I suspect, in Antonia’s case, a contemporary composer with an ear for/on everything, she’s used this time indoors to listen for the musicality of her itinerant life she captured before lockdown. Travel seems so far away to all of us, the images become content to look at from a distance, literally but also contextually. I think this is why the work is called Wild Fabrics.
The film jumps from travel log to screen-recorded typed text and then back to travel log. The travel log is decontextualized enough for us to people/site watch (and listen) with Antonia almost objectively. There’s musicality in the editing of the quotidian scenes and strategic blank space (seconds of looking at an empty screen between shots) and silence for pauses and reset. The typed text works in a way that intercepts the film’s flow. In a similar way this middle section eludes interpretation as sentences and statements trail off or segue before ever reaching a point. Antonia’s voice is layered over the text. There is a discrepancy between voice and typing, both chase each other in an attempt to transcribe or relay lofty information. Before long we are listening to the composition of colloquial speech with a backing track or percussion or ASMR of typing. When we’re back to the travel log we’re on the plane, looking at the sky, clouds, returning home, it seems. The song here is of being alone, which is the sound of the everyday white noise, some more relaxing than the others e.g. engine rumble of a plane vs. wind against leaves rustling in a bush. A brief ending. The subject is back on Antonia, alone again, reminding us of her isolation. She addresses the viewer directly, in the form of a personal email, typing “I miss you” and wishing us the best for the festival. Sincerity... dissolving distance between audience and author in a delightful, modally-dynamic way.”
Presented at Tiny Fest, Ron Ball Studio, Ōtautahi, 27 November 2021.
Drawing Attention
Drawing Attention is a work for eight players tasked to interact with each other in real-time, questioning the hierarchical notion of instruments within an ensemble and pointing to the privilege that the human brain instinctively gives to speech with meaning, and the human voice, over other sounds. A musical conversation of sorts, it was commissioned by BIFEM with funds from Creative New Zealand.
Performed by Argonaut Ensemble at BIFEM, 6 September 2019.
Kontaktlinsensuppe
A text piece written while travelling, notes taken down in Notes, and composed, making particular use of repetition.
Performed at Hunter Council Chamber, Te Whanganui-a-Tara, 22 August 2018, and at Audio Foundation, Tāmaki Makaurau, 15 September 2023.
‘travelling, travelling’
Excerpt from Under The Radar review by Stevie Kaye: “...local composer Antonia Barnett-McIntosh (whose work I'd last seen at both Essential Experimental and Vox Fem concerts) perform a solo piece drawing on her work with instructions / chance / cut-ups, and on the deep dive into Kiwi vocal and linguistic inflections that her time in England had illuminated. Her glossolalic, logorrheic web of seemingly every single aphorism or proverbial phrase produced in this country both dredged up half-remembered from great-aunts-and-uncles in Golden Bay ("rattle your dags" / "thumb up your bum") and those I'd never heard ("sick o'lick" for six o'clock?). Plus, her readings of random books in the room included what appeared to be a guinea pig Pride & Prejudice.”
Performed at PORTALFEST, The Fiction Room, Pegasus Books, Te Whanganui-a-Tara, 2 February 2019.
Transciption Piece
Transcription Piece is a solo performance experiment, which sits at the intersection of my interests in composition, performance, field recordings, speech, and interview transcription. A recorded element (interviews, readings, stories, music, and field recordings) plays through speakers, which I transcribe live. This performance transforms the original material through the body of the composer and the transcribing machine; hesitations, mistakes, rewinds, stops and starts become embedded into the rhythm of the resulting piece.
Performed at Raze Ramparts, Officina Neukölln, Berlin, 19 May 2017, HOFFNUNG3000, Berlin, 24 August 2017, and Performance Art Week Aotearoa, play_station space, 17 November 2018 (pictured).Things are things
Things are things, aren't they? Things are things. This really low-key, subtle sexism where my hand is never shaken first. Always trying to have conversations in your head about it, aren't you? Trying to think what you think. You know, policies. When you start to unpick it, that capacity, and to actually give women the vote was actually done so fulsomely by going around talking to other women, making women want to have the vote. Has much changed for us in the last 125 years? Are we still ladies in lavender? Well, kind of, no.
sound installation, 12:17, + 5-minute performance version for the exhibition opening, Music From Her, Thistle Hall, 10 October 2018.
Things are things was a commission for Music From Her, an exhibition at Thistle Hall Gallery and part of Suffrage 125, which ran 9-14 October 2018.
Untitled [Accordion]
This work for solo accordionist looks at the instrument from the perspective of sculpture, as a physical object, a being in its own right, and explores how gesture, theatricality, and gentle manoeuvring or guiding can be used to create a sonic landscape as a result of composed actions. Created in collaboration with Filip Eraković.
Performed at impuls Akademie in Graz, Austria, 19 February 2017.
Breath
a piece for alto fluteExploring the concept of breath as musical rest and breathlessness as a form of exhaustion, Breath requires the performer to utilise each in- and out-breath in the creation of sound.
Read Michael Baldwin's take on the piece in his Better Know A Weisslich article here.
Performed by Ilze Ikse at Wellcome's Hubbub Late Spectacular, 4 September 2015, and at Weisslich Vol.8, Hundred Years Gallery, London, 23 July 2016.
none sitting resting
a piece for string quartetAn investigation into the qualities of sound at rest in music and music notation.
Part written out music notation and part instructions-based, the score asks the players to respond to the sounds around them in the space as well as using musical rest, performed rest, pauses, gaps, breaks (“take a sip of water”), audible breath, bodily rest (“slouch a little”), one bow length as one breath, the scrapes and scratches that happen inadvertently between sounds, the whiteness of the page, silence, in order to contextualise sounds.
The duration of the piece can be anywhere between 12 and 18 minutes. An instruction from the performance directions states: “Take your time. It doesn’t matter if it seems like you’re out of time. There’s no such thing.”
Also performed by Aurora Orchestra at Radio 3's Why Music? at Wellcome Collection, 26 September 2015.
Shades
Shades is a little piece for percussion trio, performed behind a screen with projected light, and explores the juxtaposition of soft sounds with big gestures and loud sounds with small gestures in order to create visual and sonic relationships between three percussionists.
Performed by NorthArc on a tour of Iceland and Scandinavia in March / April 2012, and by DieOrdnungDerDinge at Theater Aufbau Kreuzberg, Berlin, 23–26 June 2016.
Black Sand
Black Sand started out as an investigation of possible cello sounds and their variations. I composed them into a solo line using a devised compositional system, balancing initial conscious choices with chance elements. I utilised an aleatory process to generate material for the rest of the ensemble by treating the possible gestural fragments in a number of categories (dynamics, articulation, instrumental technique, and orchestration). Underpinned by a rotational pitch structure, and due to the severe limitation on pitch and sonority, Black Sand unfolds as a bare and very atmospheric piece.
Commissioned by Riot Ensemble, and performed at Guildhall School of Music and Drama, 21 October 2010.
Dry Shadows
Dry Shadows draws on the idea of fragmentary colouring, and the trajectory and resonance of these fragments that emerge when blending different combinations of the instruments. It inhabits a sparse world of very specific material and gestural flow. Intentionally discontinuous, Dry Shadows explores the sound relationships between and across the instruments. Sudden loud and spiky punctuations in the music, as well as the numerous more delicate colours and shadowy sonorities in between these interjections, give rise to a sense of mystery in the music.
Two Pianos
The fundamental idea behind Two Pianos was to create a ‘mega instrument’: two pianos sounding as one composite instrument. The relationship between the two pianos and two players is on one hand about fusion and cohesion, and on the other about moving and shaping the other part, sometimes through interjection as a form of subtle interplay between the two. The piece contains delicate sonorities, harmonies, and special techniques that are never employed gratuitously and form a natural part of the musical vocabulary of the work. On a micro level, I was concerned with constructing a kind of focussed simplicity of sound, the essence of which was precise and clear, and used very little material. Then, on a macro level, the repetition (or re-presenting) of the gestures each time slightly differently fabricates a more ambiguous sense of musical direction.
Recorded by Maija Väisänen and Becky Wiles at Guildhall School of Music and Drama, August 2010.