Geek music
In this era of synthetic beings, augmented reality, AI, chatbots that answer the telephone, Siri who can guess our thoughts, cars that drive by themselves, Deep Blue that beats us at chess and at go, and data mining anticipating our wishes and our votes, it is time to conquer our fear of this emerging future that is both fascinating and terrifying by using the last specifically human characteristic, as professed by Rabelais, and Aristotle before him: laughter.
There is something Rabelaisian in the work of Bernard Cavanna (1951). An earthy and iconoclastic composer, he boldly mixes popular and academic culture, loquaciousness and folly. In Geek Bagatelle, he takes
what is most 'sacred' to any music-lover, Ode to Joy from Beethoven's Symphony No. 9, and uses a choir of smartphones to play it. This bagatelle with orchestra is participatory so the audience, given prior training on how to use downloaded apps, play like musicians in an orchestra and follow the conductor. Thus deformed, the European hymn delivers this secret: joy, feelings and the soul's elevation are still part of man, while the machine is merely an entertaining diversion of our humanity. To close the festival, the Geneva Chamber Orchestra are performing this concert as part of the programme of Geneva Sunday Concerts (25 March, Victoria Hall).
Marc Texier - director of Archipel
