Antonia Barnett-McIntosh is a composer, performer, sound artist, and freelance editor and curator with an interest in working across disciplines, particularly with speech and language.
Antonia’s work often challenges notions of hierarchy within the classical music context, and investigates fumblings and failures that occur in conversation and relationship; the question of how to perform a combination of techniques simultaneously; and, how these 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?
Her performances incorporate slippage and forced failure, improvisation, and the live space. Her works with words investigate speech as music: the pitches, rhythms, conversational overlaps of our everyday. In occasionally using elements of theatricality, she notates actions as a means to expose sound as the byproduct of those actions.
Antonia collaborates extensively with musicians, theatre and filmmakers, dancers, visual artists and poets. Her style of working across disciplines has raised important questions about audience expectation, the social and professional structures of respective disciplines, and artistic value. Through these experiences with the process of collaboration, she devises moments of tension, surprise, and also 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.