Pondering the algo-rhythms

On an episode of Da Ali G Show, Sacha Baron Cohen’s satirical persona asks a panel of bewildered experts: “Tech-mo-logy — what is that all about? Is it good or is it whack?”

The Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra would put the question in more serious terms, but it goes to the heart of its Winnipeg New Music Festival this year at a time when technology has more of us wanting to prod and troll the tech experts leading the so-called artificial intelligence revolution.

“What is going to be left for the human? I mean, we’re just casually stepping aside and ceding the world to this thing. Humanity is prepared to render itself obsolete,” says Harry Stafylakis, the WSO’s composer-in-residence and co-curator of the festival.

Maybe it’s better for our humanity to resist “progress” — and stay just a bit more stoo-pid, as Ali G would put it — than gorge on this Tree of Knowledge’s low-hanging answers for everything.

This year’s New Music Festival runs Jan. 21-29 and includes six events. The concerts take place at the Centennial Concert Hall, New Media Manitoba’s StudioLab xR (201 Portage Ave.) and at the University of Manitoba’s Desautels Concert Hall (150 Dafoe Rd. W).

The first event, Showcase: Launchpad, highlights contemporary classical’s new ambassadors with six premières by emerging Canadian composers (including Winnipegger Chris Byman) at a free concert.

“It’s a great opportunity to just check it out, in a low-stakes environment — casually dropping in, in your jeans, and enjoying a variety of sounds,” says Stafylakis.

On Friday evening during the Sunrise concert event, the festival introduces one of its leading men, the eminent Greek-American composer and Stafylakis’s former teacher, Christopher Theofanidis, with the performance of Theofanidis’s Rainbow Body, alongside three works by others.

“For people who aren’t familiar with his language, his music, it’s extremely lyrical. Being of Greek background, it feels like it’s channelling ancient Greek melodicism,” says Stafylakis, who is also of Greek descent and lives in New York City.

At Lisa Pegher: A.I. Rhythm Evolution on Jan. 24, the festival broaches its technological theme in a pointed way. The concert features 11 pieces, though its centrepiece is Pegher’s Fate Amenable to Grace.

Created in collaboration with New York’s Iceberg New Music ensemble, the concert integrates instruments, video, electronics and generative AI within its musical narrative.

“AI is the object of our gaze,” says Stafylakis.

In some ways, classical music may be insulated from the extremes of the AI revolution, Stafylakis says, noting it centres live experiences and largely relies on an orchestral palette that reached maturity before recordings and electronic music.

For now, it’s a lot easier for AI to replicate digital sounds and to compose in pop styles that lean toward the generic. Much of what makes classical music special may be so antithetical to AI as to partially escape its grip for now.

And yet Stafylakis, while rebelling against AI, insists he’s not a reactionary.

Born in 1982, he identifies jokingly as an “elder millennial” and says he came of age under the spell of Star Wars and its “information age” optimism.

He’s a natural fit within the WNMF’s trajectory. From its origins 35 years ago under composer-in-residence Glenn Buhr and conductor Bramwell Tovey, the festival is one of Canada’s torchbearers of artistic modernism and all of the developments that have flowed from this avant-garde movement with its injunction to “make it new.”

Stafylakis, for his part, loves mixing electronics — heavy metal guitars especially — with orchestra. Of his three pieces at this year’s festival, two use electronics.

“I’ve always embraced technological innovation, but AI feels different,” he says. “We’re all very sensitive to these buttons that are being pushed, and hopefully we can bring something productive with this year’s festival.”

The remaining concerts — Beyond Horizons, CC Duo: Hyperfocused, and Theofanidis & Stafylakis: Sunset — feature a combined 18 pieces, with a handful by Winnipeg composers including Neil Weisensel and Gordon Fitzell.

Beyond Horizons includes the Canadian première of Theofanidis’s A Thousand Cranes; Hyperfocused features Stafylakis’s Focus (Van Tilberg Remix); and Sunset features the Canadian première of Theofanidis’s Indigo Heaven and the world première of Stafylakis’s Symphony No. 3.

It’s Stafylakis’s last year as the WSO composer-in-residence, so he quips about having a little more leeway, which he used to write a big old symphony.

“I’ve written symphonies and symphonic song titles and concertos and works for metal bands and orchestra and all sorts of things,” he says. “And, really, for this final thing, we wanted to go out with a bang and write one big, monumental piece for orchestra that’ll close the festival and my beautiful decade with the WSO.”

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