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Quartet
2023
Electronic Keyboard
Fixed Media Audio
Organ
Theremin
Violin
- Program Notes
- "In the spring of 2023, while in the midst of great physical uncertainty and suffering, I wrote a concerto for player piano, video, and orchestra. While settling into and starting to become comfortable with a newly disabled identity, I found myself increasingly artistically interested in the idea of cyborgs, artificial environments, bodypolitics, and how the full range of human emotions -- from hope, love, and joy to horror, suicidality, and existential grief -- can be supercharged by modulating and distorting them through lenses of artifice and technology-dependence. Media is a weapon and a place. We dream with it and kill with it. These ideas form the backbone of an aesthetic I'm calling body/politics, as well as zebrahood, or the experience of rarity within society and otherhood within the self. A little after the premiere of this cyborg player piano concerto, Emma and I were talking casually about her interest in George Antheil's music. I brought up my recent extension of the player piano from the world of mechanism and into the world of AI. We talked at length about questions of authorship and gender as they might play out in the burgeoning scenario of machine learning and artificial intelligence. We found a shared interest in the period of Italian, German, Russian, and French futurism terrible that birthed so much of the art we find fascinating and yet had this violent, hypermasculine sheen, ever adjacent to fascism and industrialization. We began to think about how there might be a feminist and/or queer humanist lens that could be applied to the same concepts of futurism, a lens that would contextualize the machines on which we grow ever dependent to be our slaves as a new limb growing from our social body. Over the summer, as I began to concretize some of my thoughts on zebrahood and cripborg body/politics, I found myself increasingly thinking about Hedy Lamarr. A Jewish refugee in Hollywood, reluctant sex symbol, inventor, activist, celebrity. A troubled woman who died alone. A celebrated beauty whose face and body were sold for millions. A high-class identity whore harboring a secret brilliance for engineering. She was the perfect foil to Antheil, the brash, confident, and wildly misogynistic American galavanting about Europe, sowing chaos and enjoying dissent. They famously worked together to use Hedy's inventive brilliance and idea for frequency hopping and Antheil's knowledge of the player piano to create a technology, U.S. Patent No. 2,292,387, that, although not used by the military during WWII as intended, was later the basis for GPS, WiFi, and a host of other essential technologies the entire world uses on a daily basis today. After completing their invention to only a lukewarm response, Antheil went back to writing music --everything from the avant-garde to musicals -- and Lamarr went back to getting ogled by cameras, pimped by type-casting agents. But I'm certain she knew that no matter what other directions her life had taken, her legacy would now be that which was most important to her -- her inventions. This piece, the second movement of an upcoming concerto for Emma being paired with Antheil's rarely heard Violin Concerto on a prospective album, puts the spotlight on Hedy the inventor. When AI becomes sentient, it will be an omnipotent newborn. Lamarr, unlike the domineering Antheil, would have asked questions like: will it cry? Will it need a mother? Will it want a teacher, a carer, a guardian, a deity, a creator god to worship? Will it wonder all the things human beings wonder when they gain consciousness: who am I, what am I supposed to do with my limits, who made me, and why am I here? This piece seeks to pivot the conversation around AI in the arts from the lineage of masculinized power-hungry womb envy and labor-exploitation to the female or non-binary perspective of guardianship: that we are what we create, and that we should care for what we create so that it grows to represent who we want to be. This movement is a berceuse electronique, a study in artificial natality. With a cyborg chorus creating a halo around Hedy's acoustic voice in the solo violin, the AI sings itself a lullaby as it cries, just like every human child, for its creator. -Maya Miro Johnson October 1 6th, 2023
- Performer Credits
- Emma Meinrenken, violin; Leigha Amick, synthesizer; Maya Miro Johnson, theremin; Isabella Isza Wu, organ
- Publisher
- Ciphers&Constellations
- External Links