Performance-Installation By Composer Sandeep Bhagwati Comes to the MMFA

The Société de musique contemporaine du Québec (SMCQ) has joined forces with the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA) to present a performance-installation by internationally renowned composer Sandeep Bhagwati. Over the course of two days, Saturday and Sunday, April 21 and 22, the public is invited to wander throughout the Museum's contemporary art galleries to hear ten soloists from various backgrounds – split up at five different stations located throughout the galleries – and to interact with them. 

This immersive and interactive event is a sensory and participatory encounter between music and the visual arts that will stimulate both the eyes and ears, the mind and heart. Transcending temporal, artistic and cultural limits, this durational performance is meant to be a sensory exploration of the idea of our relationship with the various temporalities of life on earth. It underscores how important it is for us human beings to feel, to listen and to understand the planet's geological and biological rhythms, even when their transformations are slow and silent.

“The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts is delighted to be collaborating with the SMCQ for the first time, even more so because this event aligns with our desire to offer the public a polyphonic cultural experience. Moreover, by bringing together musicians from different cultural backgrounds to participate in this experience, the event affirms the unifying role played by the Museum,” adds Stéphane Aquin, the MMFA's Director.

An archipelago of musical islands to discover at your own rhythm

The ten performers of various backgrounds and traditions spend the entire day on an archipelago of musical islands made up of five stations distributed throughout the Museum's contemporary art galleries, relaying music back and forth between them. Visitors can dive into the various soundworlds of the soloists, some of whom play on little-known or ready-made instruments. In this durational performance, the audience is free to wander through each space without time constraints, at the whim of their wishes and musical affinities.  

Musical card games

Visitors are invited to participate in each performance by selecting one postcard from the twelve at their disposal and placing it before their chosen performer. Each postcard bears a different poem and tempo that can be added to the score. The musicians, surrounded by metronomes and timers, will slowly alter the tempo and style of their music. Thus, the audience's active participation and attentive listening will energize and transform this soundscape in perpetual evolution.

To get the most out of the experience, the audience is invited to experience this concert-installation more than once during their Museum visit, so as to hear it again all while perceiving the gentle modulations in the musical landscape. What has changed? The sounds, the speed, the mood, the timbres, the poetry?

This event is a co-presentation of the Société de musique contemporaine de Montréal and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. It has been made possible thanks to funding from the Government of Quebec, the Canada Council for the Arts and the Conseil des arts de Montréal.

This is the North American premiere of How to inhabit these different temporalities?, which was first performed at the Gropius Bau museum, in Berlin, in August 2020.   

To post a comment, you must register and login.