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Music from Agatha Gothe​-​Snape's Rhetorical Chorus

by Megan Alice Clune

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A live recording of music created for a multi-layered performance work by Agatha Gothe-Snape.

Programme notes:

The 2017 iteration of Rhetorical Chorus is a verbal, instructional score based around 5 notes (a, d, e, c, b) for 6 voices and electronics. These intervals were chosen for their spatial proximity, which echoed the space between each fingertip of my right hand. Instead of traditional notation, the music has been shaped from extensive recordings of improvisation exercises and responses to the gestures of Lawrence Weiner. All sounds, including the noise-like, granular textures, are taken from these recordings as a way of both including the process in the work and to explore the malleability of memory. The musical score mirrors the way we each comprehend gesture uniquely by deliberately leaving room for the vocalist’s own interpretation, and an integral part of this composition becomes the vocalists themselves. Each with their own diverse practices, the work would be vastly different without each of their contributions - for which I am very grateful.
-Megan Alice Clune

Rhetorical Chorus takes as its starting point the inadvertent and unconscious output of American artist Lawrence Weiner, known for his large-scale graphic text based works and poetic gravitas. (THIS & THAT) PUT (HERE & THERE), OUT OF SITE OF POLARIS is held in the permanent collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales and is a joint acquisition of that institution and the Museum of Contemporary Art. The work often appears installed in its original site: on a large, inaccessible wall above the escalators at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Weiner has been undeniably influential to me and his “conceptual” [I didn't name anything] practice continues to have currency internationally. He is aware of this project. [IT SHALL COME TO PASS.] I have imagined him as mythological. His place in a canon is so secure. In a way this canonisation is dehumanising, as the space between artist and artwork merge­—the artist becoming an object of history, and in turn history conflates an artist with their output.

For this reason, I was confused when I coincidentally bumped into Weiner in 2009 at LAX airport, during a period where I had been researching and compiling video footage of his hand gestures. [And when those worlds collide it just makes a little bump.] For a moment, as we spoke and I showed him the research I had been doing into his gesticulations, the sense of hierarchy that I had inherited and so willingly accepted­—centre/periphery, old/young, male/female—dissolved [if there is no hierarchy there is no logic]. This was replaced by the reality of physical, temporal and visceral proximity: hair, bones, skin, sweat, aeroplane smell. [Not one on the top and one on the bottom.]

Much of my work has used strategies of appropriation of the Western art canon to try and undo some of the assumptions we inherit, whether it be through recalling and writing artists’ names, in Every Artist Remembered (2009-ongoing), remaking an Australian late modernist sculpture, Late Sculpture (2013) or through re-imagining public monuments such as Naissance Bronze by Arthur Sherman in Here, an Echo (2016). Rhetorical Chorus (2017) collects and classifies the hand gestures and incidental utterances of Weiner and uses this lexicon as the foundation of a score for performance.

From these fragments of Weiner’s output I have created a somewhat absurd proposition. It is possible to create an autonomous system that begins with Weiner’s inadvertent output (the physical reality of his humanness). Through processes of our embodiment we transmit and ultimately transform Weiner’s rhetorical delivery into new forms. [We cannot understand things we cannot understand.]

Composer Megan Alice Clune has developed an instructional score for six voices alongside an electronic drone composed of live vocal experiments responsive to Weiner’s gestures. Choreographers Brooke Stamp and Lizzie Thomson have taken my drawn notations of Weiner’s hand gestures as the premise of a physical and verbal score. Brian Fuata and Joan La Barbara have allowed my poorly-transcribed script of Weiner’s half-formed utterances to infiltrate their being, transmitting and ultimately transforming the logics embedded within his language.

These agents have been placed within a field [All things are happening at the same time in the same place.] They begin to inform and feed off each other producing new responses, feelings and meanings. [It didn't happen by accident.]

I wish to neither critique nor pay homage to Weiner, and yet I remain entranced by the magnitude of his, and other canonical artists’ influence. [It’s not about telling, its about showing.] At the same time, I seek to reconfigure its logic, and find a language that acknowledges lineage while exploding its authority. [WATER FINDS ITS OWN LEVEL.]

I do not know what the work does yet, or even what questions or answers it may proffer. [You only make art if you are not happy with the configuration of the world as it is presented to you.] My joy comes from the sense we have found working together, the new language we have discovered and that we now share, in the act of departing from an old one. [Gesture becomes langua…]
-Agatha Gothe-Snape

credits

released March 1, 2019

Recorded, mixed and mastered by David Trumpmanis

Lead Artist
Agatha Gothe-Snape

Composer and Musical Director
Megan Alice Clune

The Rhetorical Chorus
Rainbow Chan, Eugene Choi, Adam Connelly, Alyx Denison, Sonya Holowell & Marcus Whale

Sound Designer
Benjamin Carey

The Transmitter
Joan La Barbara

The Prologue
Brian Fuata

The Left Hand
Brooke Stamp

The Right Hand
Lizzie Thomson

Movement Consultant
Brooke Stamp

Dramaturg
Sarah Rodigari

Set and Costume Consultant
Anna McMahon

Systems Consultant
Ella Barclay

Costume Designer
Anna Hubble

Research Assistant
Mitchel Cumming

Rhetorical Chorus was presented at Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art by Performance Space, Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, and Carriageworks, Sydney 2017

Photographs courtesy of Performance Space and Document Photography.

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Megan Alice Clune Sydney, Australia

Megan Alice Clune is a musician, composer and artist.

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