This weekend, Brazilian-American composer and musician Clarice Assad will be channeling her inner cyborg for a performance that merges music, movement, technology and a philosophical meditation on artificial intelligence.
In “The Evolution of AI” for Chamber Orchestra and Electronics, an SPCO commission and world premiere, Assad plays a hybrid human machine, enhanced with costuming and lighting effects. “I’m using gadgets to portray that robotic world of non-human sounds that are going to come out of me,” she says.
In the work, Assad engages an electro-organic frame drum. “It imitates a frame drum that you hear in Middle Eastern music, but it’s MIDI controlled,” Assad says. She also uses a wearable device connected to a laptop called Wave, from a company called Genki. Assad describes it like a sine wave, where the parameters of the sound change depending on her gestures and movements.
Before the initial release of ChatGPT exploded onto our digital landscape, reworking our collective understanding of sentience, human beings’ relationship with computers and our understanding of creativity, composer Assad got a hint of what was to come when she encountered a different program called Stable Diffusion.
Also considered part of the “AI Spring,” Stable Diffusion was released in August 2022, several months before the initial release of ChatGPT. Stable Diffusion generates images based on text descriptions.
Assad has a brother who is a filmmaker and works with image. When he showed her what the program could do, Assad was flabbergasted. “It was very interesting and scary,” she remembers.
Assad is currently a composer in residence with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, through a new program called Sandbox. The SPCO built the program to create a supportive, collaborative environment for making new music.
“The idea behind Sandbox was to really embed the composer into the orchestra in more ways than just showing up for the premiere and the rehearsals,” says Jonathan Posthuma, SPCO’s artistic planning manager. The program brings composers and musicians together much earlier in the creation process than typical commissions. From the beginning, the composer dialogues with the musicians about conceptual ideas, and engages in a process that involves workshops and an ongoing exchange of feedback.
Funding comes from New Music USA. They’ve co-commissioned Assad’s new piece with the SPCO through their Amplifying Voices program, formed in 2020 as a way to foster collaborations between composers and US orchestras. After the SPCO performance, Assad will take the piece to Chicago Sinfonietta, the American Composers Orchestra in New York, and Roco, a chamber orchestra based in Houston.
Assad is the second composer to premiere a new work born out of Sandbox, with the first being Viet Cuong, whose piece, “Doubling Back,” premiered in November 2022.
“Coming out of the pandemic, we said we want to do this differently, we want to do this better,” Posthuma says. “One way we can do that better is to support the composer taking risks, trying things out, learning in a kind of sandbox setting where there’s no wrong answers.”
“The Evolution of AI” for Chamber Orchestra and Electronics is being presented as an evening of work curated by Daria T. Adams, a violinist with the orchestra. As a musician-led organization, SPCO often uses members of the orchestra as creative leads. In this week’s concert, Adams will be performing two autobiographical works by Czech composers Leoš Janáček and Bedřich Smetana.
Both the Janáček and the Smetana works look back on the two composers’ lives. Assad is taking an opposite approach. “Clarice is almost a character somehow contemplating its own life, but kind of looking forward with her piece, while the other ones are looking backward,” Posthuma says.
As a creator, Assad says she doesn’t personally feel threatened by AI. “I am into performing for an audience that likes to see humans do things,” she says. “Could it threaten us in classical music in the future? Maybe,” she says. “I think that we’ve been using AI for a while not generating ideas, but we use software that will play back music to us. Is that cheating? I don’t know. The problem is when it becomes — are you really coming up with these ideas on your own?”
Assad often uses technology in her work, but it’s not through sampling found music or sounds. “I’m actually not really computer savvy in that way, believe it or not,” she says.
Assad lets her strong interest in gadgets often guide her work. She uses a Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) controller to transmit information to musical instruments. “I love the marriage between acoustic music and electronic music,” she says. In her work, she’s a part of the machine. “I actually have to physically do something for the instrument to work,” she says.
Assad will be moving amidst the SPCO musicians, and interacting with them. “So that’s where Sandbox came in perfectly, because it took a long time for us to figure out how they would visually respond to my cues,” Assad says. In the narrative of the piece, Assad’s AI character “learns” pieces of Western music, and uses it to come up with new creations.
“Assad, Janáček and Smetana” takes place Friday, Jan. 12, at 11 a.m. and 7 p.m., and Saturday, Jan.13, at 7 p.m. at the Ordway ($12-$55). More information here.
