Adrian George Takes Us Through the Making of Orchestral Manoeuvres - Men's Folio
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Adrian George Takes Us Through the Making of Orchestral Manoeuvres

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Adrian George Takes Us Through the Making of Orchestral Manoeuvres
Orchestral Manoeuvres is quite a gem of an exhibition and not just because it’s done by the good people behind the ArtScience Museum or because it’s the kind of exhibition that will start popping up on the ‘gram. It’s quite radical because it challenges one of our senses that often doesn’t get engaged in exhibitions: your sense of hearing (however, it can be said that our daily life is an exhibition itself as we hear an average of millions of them everyday).

Be it an exhibition that is pin-drop silent, one that has a piano that plays without a player or an art piece that vibrates to sounds (trust us, it’s actually quite radical), here, Adrian George, the Director of Exhibitions and Museum Services takes us though its makings.


Mel Brimfield, 4′ 33″ (Prepared Pianola for Roger Bannister), 2012, sound installation. Courtesy of the artist. © Crown copyright UK Government.

In 2001, I produced an exhibition for Tate Liverpool, in the UK, around performance art, its history and how it has been embedded in museum collections. As part of that, I included a reconstruction of Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo’s Intonoramuri – or sound-making objects.


That research inspired me to explore further into the relationships between sound and art and that was how Orchestral Manoeuvres was born!

I wanted to include as many sound-artworks as possible in Orchestral Manoeuvres. A huge challenge in a gallery like ours that has high, curving ceilings that bounce sound around and allow it to spill between the rooms. I had to accept there would be some sound-bleed and come up with a way of trying to manage it so that it didn’t become a cacophony.

Adrian George Takes Us Through the Making of Orchestral Manoeuvres
Rage Fluids, 2021, by Hannah Perry in Orchestral Manoeuvres (credit to Marina Bay Sands and the artist)

Most of us are swimming in an ocean of sound, a lot of which we tune out. But sometimes taking a moment to stop and listen to the sounds around us can bring us closer to nature or reconnect us with sound-memories.

So, we decided to work with the sound-bleed instead. It would have been impossible to sound-proof all the spaces. To some extent, the title of the exhibition came from the fact that we had to ‘orchestrate’ the visitor experience in terms of walking through, and listening through, the nine different spaces.


Christine Sun Kim, The Sound of … series (2016 – 2017), courtesy of the artist and WHITE SPACE Beijing; Chen Zhen, Chair of Concentration (1999), courtesy of de Sarthe Gallery, Hong Kong; Hsiao Sheng-Chien, a selection of six kinetic sculptures (2016-2019); Zul Mahmod, Resonance in Frames 3 (2018), private collection, courtesy of the artist.

Facilitating these loans during a pandemic was also a huge challenge for everyone.  It was only after many discussions, willingness to collaborate and through mutual trust that we were able to deliver Orchestral Manoeuvres as it is now.


dunia tak akan mendengar, 2007, by Phil Collins at Orchestral Manoeuvres (credit to Marina Bay Sands and artist)

I see Orchestral Manoeuvres as a whole, with each artwork in dialogue with the others. I wouldn’t have brought all these works together if they weren’t all my absolute favourites! If any one of them were absent from the show the story would have been very different. Having said that, Janet Cardiff’s work The Forty Part Motet, is very special to me. It is absolutely core to Orchestral Manoeuvres. The work had an incredible impact on me when I first encountered it in 2001.


I installed it at Tate Liverpool in the UK in 2002 and I experienced it again in Tate Modern in 2017 just before I left the UK. I knew then that I had to find a way to bring it to Singapore.  It’s a deeply emotional work with layers of meaning. It’s a choral piece for eight choirs of five voices – that has a sort of physical presence in the space. When all 40 voices come together in harmony, the experience is profound and often brings people to tears.


Samson Young, Muted Situation #5 Muted Chorus, 2016, at Orchestral Manoeuvres (credit to Marina Bay Sands and artist)

My favourite instrument of all is the human voice. The original sound-making instrument.  It can do so much, expressing so much from sorrow to joy and the entire spectrum of emotions that sit between.  At one moment a voice can be loud and bawdy, and in the next moment, angelic and sublime.  What a wonderful gift to be able to sing.

There is also something incredibly powerful about choral singing. We’ve not heard live choral singing in Singapore for almost two years due to the pandemic restrictions! I think a lot of people have come to realise just how important group singing is to our collective well-being. When different voices come together, it is a reminder for us that as human beings we can achieve wonderful things and create great art when we work as one.


I feel that I’ve collaborated with all the artists and/or the lenders to the exhibition. They have all been generous and incredibly flexible in allowing us to work with them to overcome so many challenges of the pandemic.

I would not have been able to pull the project together without the incredible support of my colleague Amita Kirpalani, who has asked pertinent questions, she both challenged and worked alongside me to shape and deliver the exhibition in its current form.

Adrian George Takes Us Through the Making of Orchestral Manoeuvres Copies of early scores from The Schøyen Collection (Credit to Marina Bay Sands and The Schøyen Collection, Oslo and London)

I wanted to explore forms of writing music that existed before the Western musical score. So, in Orchestral Manoeuvres we’ve included an image of the oldest known written score, which is in the form of a clay tablet with cuneiform script. The cuneiform score only gives partial instructions for performing music, but it references a diatonic scale and that the music was set in harmonic thirds. We don’t know much more about it than that.

We also have a reproduction of a score by Luigi Russolo – all that remains of the music he wrote that was intended to be played on the Intonoramuri.


I hope visitors will think about music and sound in a different way after visiting Orchestral Manoeuvres. I’d also like visitors to consider a different approach to music and they are encouraged to explore different ways of making music and sound.

Take the works of Zul Mahmod as an example. With his Resonance In Frames works, he has programmed a series of small motors to tap metal rods against a complex series of copper pipes. Has Zul composed a new piece of music? No, not really. Is it a musical instrument? Yes, you could say it is, but it’s a very unusual one as well as being a work of art. Zul’s work collides so many ideas of sound, percussion, repetition, and chance as well as the noises that connect us in our daily lives.


My number one song on Spotify is a strange one I’m afraid. What Power art Thou from Henry Purcell (1659-1695) Baroque semi-opera King Arthur (1961).

I first encountered this work in a documentary about the German countertenor Klaus Nomi – who was part of an avant garde performance scene in New York in the late 70s and early 80s. The version I’m listening to is by Théophile Alexandre who is a French countertenor and a contemporary dancer.

Orchestral Manoeuvres will be running till 2nd January 2022 with tickets being available for sale here. Once you’re done with this story, click here to catch up with our October 2021 issue!