Nouvel Ensemble Moderne
Lorraine Vaillancourt – conductor
old people in the wrong house (dancing with robots) has a relationship with E.T.A. Hoffmann’s eerie and meandering short story, ‘The Sandman’ (1816). In the story a young man falls in love with a robot girl. Hoffmann’s creation seems prophetic today, two hundred years later, when young men’s capacity to be engulfed by affection for mechanical algorithms is metonymic for masculinity itself. If the imagination can become attached to automatized systems, however, at least imagination is not always automated. The musical patterns here repeat while absorbing errant sounds, trying to find some sweet spot of meditative oblivion, dancing uncomfortably close to mechanized spirits. A border is discovered between the meditative and the mechanical. What is inside and what is outside? And meanwhile, who is that laughing at us?
wronghouse.art 