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Listening to the London Contemporary Orchestra for New Scientist, 1 November 2018<\/a><\/p>\n On All Hallow\u2019s Eve this year, at London\u2019s Barbican Hall, the London Contemporary Orchestra, under the baton of their co-artistic director Robert Ames, managed with two symphonic pieces to drown the world and set it ablaze in the space of a single evening.<\/p>\n Giacinto Scelsi\u2019s portentously titled\u00a0Uaxuctum: The legend of the Maya City, destroyed by the Maya people themselves for religious reasons<\/em>, evoked the mysterious and violent collapse of that once thriving civilisation; the second piece of the evening, composer and climate activist John Luther Adams\u2019s\u00a0Become Ocean<\/em>, looked to the future, the rise of the world\u2019s oceans, and good riddance to the lot of us.<\/p>\n Lost Worlds<\/em>\u00a0was a typical piece of LCO programming: not content with presenting two very beautiful but undeniably challenging long-ish works, the orchestra had elected to play behind a translucent screen onto which were projected the digital meanderings of an artistically trained neural net. Twists of entoptic colour twisted and cavorted around the half-seen musicians while a well-place spotlight, directly over Ames\u2019s head, sent the conductor\u2019s gestures sprawling across the screen, as though ink were being dashed over all those pretty digitally generated splotches of colour.<\/p>\n Everything, on paper, pointed to an evening that was trying far too hard to be avant garde. In the execution, however, the occasion was a triumph.<\/p>\n The idea of matching colours to sounds is not new. The painter Wassily Kandinsky struggled for years to fuse sound and image and ended up inventing abstract painting, more or less as a by-product. The composer Alexander Scriabin was so desperate to establish his reputation as the founder of a new art of colour-music, he plagiarised other people\u2019s synaesthetic experiences in his writings and invented a clavier \u00e0 lumi\u00e8res (\u201ckeyboard with lights\u201d) for use in his work\u00a0Prometheus: Poem of Fire<\/em>. \u201cIt is not likely that Scriabin\u2019s experiment will be repeated by other composers,\u201d wrote a reviewer for\u00a0The Nation<\/em>\u00a0after its premiere in New York in 1915: \u201cmoving-picture shows offer much better opportunities.\u201d (Walt Disney proved\u00a0The Nation<\/em>\u00a0right:\u00a0Fantasia<\/em>\u00a0was released in 1937.)<\/p>\n Now, as 2018 draws to a close, artificial intelligence is being hurled at the problem. For this occasion the London-based theatrical production\u00a0<\/em>company Universal Assembly Unit had got hold of a recursive neural net engineered by Artrendex, a company that uses artificial intelligence to research and predict the art market. According to the concert\u2019s programme note, it took several months to train Artrendex\u2019s algorithm on videos of floods and fires, teaching it the aesthetics of these phenomena so that, come the evening of the performance, it would construct organic imagery in response to the music.<\/p>\n While never obscuring the orchestra, the light show was dramatic and powerful, sometimes evoking (for those who enjoy their Andrei Tarkovsky) the blurriness of the clouds swamping the ocean planet Solaris in the movie of that name; then at other moments weaving and flickering, not so much like flames, but more like the speeded-up footage from some microbial experiment. Maybe I\u2019ve worked at New Scientist too long, but I got the distinct and discomforting impression that I was looking, not at some dreamy visual evocation of a musical mood, but at the the responses of single-celled life to desperate changes in their tiny environment.<\/p>\n As for the music \u2013 which was, after all, the main draw for this evening \u2013 it is fair to say that Scelsi\u2019s Uaxuctum would not be everyone\u2019s cup of tea. For a quick steer, recall the waily bits from\u00a02001: A Space Odyssey<\/em>. That music was by the Hungarian composer Gy\u00f6rgy Ligeti, who was born about two decades after Scelsi, and was \u2014 both musically and personally \u2014 a lot less weird. Scelsi was a Parisian dandy who spent years in a mental institution playing one piano note again and again and Uaxuctum, composed in 1966, was such an incomprehensibly weird and difficult proposition, it didn\u2019t get any performance at all for 21 years, and no UK performance at all before this one.<\/p>\n John Luther Adams\u2019s\u00a0Become Ocean<\/em>\u00a0(2013) is an easier (and more often performed) composition \u2013\u00a0The New Yorker<\/em>music critic Alex Ross called it \u201cthe loveliest apocalypse in musical history\u201d. This evening its welling sonorities brought hearts into mouths: rarely has mounting anxiety come wrapped in so beautiful a package.<\/p>\n So I hope it takes nothing away from the LCO\u2019s brave and accomplished playing to say that the visual component was the evening\u2019s greatest triumph. The dream of \u201ccolour music\u201d has ended in bathos and silliness for so many brilliant and ambitious musicians. Now, with the judicious application of some basic neural networking, we may at last be on the brink of fusing tone and colour into an art that\u2019s genuinely new, and undeniably beautiful.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Mark Allan \/ Barbican Listening to the London Contemporary Orchestra for New Scientist, 1 November 2018 On All Hallow\u2019s Eve this year, at London\u2019s Barbican Hall, the London Contemporary Orchestra, under the baton of their co-artistic director Robert Ames, managed … Continue reading ![\"LCO_Barbican_311018_156\"](\"https:\/\/images.newscientist.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/11\/01182202\/lco_barbican_311018_156.jpg\" "\\"\\"")
<\/p>\n\nMark Allan \/ Barbican<\/h3>\n<\/div>\n