For solo cellist with interactive electronics.
Commissioned by Dots+Loops New Music for the NONSTOP Festival (Meanjin/Brisbane, Australia, 2021).
Program Notes
Alexa, Write Me Some Music (2021), written for solo cello and interactive electronics, is a piece which operates across a series of inversions: performance and rehearsal; human and machine; private solitude and bombastic external commercialism; instrumental virtuosity and verbal conversation. The work spans the narrative trajectory of a cellist completing their daily rehearsal, which comprises a series of sight-reading passages randomly-generated by their mobile-phone AI assistant (Alexa). Yet as the passages get more rapid and increasingly complex, Alexa also begins interrupting the rehearsal more frequently with advertisements. To continue practicing after each commercial, the cellist cannot sit back and wait for the ad to finish, nor click a “skip ad” button. Rather, the cellist must verbalise a phrase chosen by the advertiser; once this is recognised, the next passage is made available. The advertisements become progressively more frequent, longer, and more suspiciously targeted to insult the cellist and induce them to give up their rehearsal.
Eventually, Alexa suggests to the cellist that they should “simply quit,” before instructing herself to “play some music from a cellist who didn’t skip their practices.” Yo-Yo Ma’s rendition of Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 then begins to play, and the piece concludes. Beyond its technical proficiency, Alexa, Write Me Some Music foregrounds a typically private ritual – solo instrument rehearsal – and articulates the coincident practicality and frustration of everyday technologies. The work also satirises the incorporation of surveillance technologies into our daily lives, adopting a sardonic gaze to illuminate “smart” devices’ increasingly insidious ability to capture and interpret data for commercial purposes.
The software repository for Alexa is no longer being maintained, but is still available on GitHub. Please contact me for any further information, including for a demo (stable/fixed-media) version of the piece.