‘I shall in due time be a poet,” wrote Ada Lovelace. And now she is, if having your words set to an evening’s worth of music counts, thanks to this instalment in the Barbican’s Life Rewired series, curated by composer Emily Howard.
It was Charles Babbage, who, in 1837, designed the analytical engine, an unbuilt machine anticipating the first computer; but it was Lovelace, a mathematician with an artist’s imagination, who could see and articulate where her colleague’s invention might lead. Lovelace is the patron saint of any composer using artificial intelligence in their work, and we heard five pieces by four such disciples here. They framed a panel discussion led by Radio 3’s Andrew McGregor, which both burnished Lovelace’s aura and debunked a few romantic myths. It was a chewy evening, offering much to think about but less in the way of musical reward – though it is to the credit of the excellent Britten Sinfonia that it was attempted at all.
McGregor interviewed each composer before their piece was performed, inevitably throwing up more questions than were answered. Howard’s Ada Sketches, from 2011, imagined Lovelace slipping into trancelike song as she fed an equation through the machine. The other works, all premieres, used words from Lovelace’s letters, chopped up and crunched by algorithms, including Howard’s But Then, What Are These Numbers?, in which a succinct little song finally assembled itself out of the component parts of preceding variations.
Shiva Feshareki’s Perpetual Motion disappointed, in that the electronic second movement exhaustively explored the composer’s own voice rather than the rich violin and cello overtones of the acoustic first movement. Alter, created by Robert Laidlow and colleagues at the Royal Northern College of Music’s interdisciplinary PRiSM lab, had a gratifying sense of theatrics, using an analytical engine replica as a percussion instrument, and with the soloist, the unfailingly poised mezzo-soprano Marta Fontanals-Simmons, duetting with a version of herself; what was lacking was a sense of resolution. Patricia Alessandrini’s gauzy Ada’s Song used AI to manipulate the piano strings and to generate new material for Fontanals-Simmons in real time, apparently. All evening, the processes were fascinating; the resulting music less so.
