Oliver Beer
United Kingdom b.1985

Composition for Mouths (Songs My Mother Taught Me) I & II 2018
Performers: Clive Birch, Tim Moriarty, Alyx Dennison, Sonya Hollowel
Two single-channel videos, colour, sound, ed. 3/3 (+ 2 A.P.)
Composition for Mouths (Songs My Mother Taught Me) I: 4:10 minutes
Composition for Mouths (Songs My Mother Taught Me) II: 4:05 minutes

Breath and song, cultural memory and musical inheritance are closely woven together in Oliver Beer’s Composition for Mouths (Songs My Mother Taught Me) I & II 2018.

Shot in tightly framed close-up, couples join lips and share childhood songs. In the first performance, bass singer Clive Birch delivers the children’s hymn ‘Two little eyes to look to God’ into the mouth of Yanyuwa man Tim Moriarty, as he sings an Indigenous song learnt from his aunts as a child. A similar intersection of cultures is found in the second video, in which sopranos Alyx Dennison and Sonya Holowell merge an Indian classical raga with a melody by twelfth-century German Benedictine abbess and polymath composer Hildegard of Bingen.

The intermingling voices create rhythmic, microtonal harmonic interactions which register as a subtly modulated humming. The effect is raw, visceral and almost unbearably intimate. The performers’ faces and bodies become resonant vessels. This exchange of breath and song is emblematic of the myriad ways we share memories and sustain each other.