Mira Calix: Women Make Music

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A girl in love with a machine asks to be adored. She seeks out the language of her paramour, desperate to be understood and to understand. Are its gestures a sign of love and intention? Or will her passion be forever unrequited? The girl dares to hope, imploring for her ardour be reciprocated. Is she doomed to a desire of disappointment? To be left alone in the shadows.

-Mira Calix, composer

Internationally renowned composer Mira Calix has teamed up with London-based sculptor Conrad Shawcross to create a new score in response to his choreograph-able light sculpture. Beginning in the summer of 2013, Shawcross has hosted a series of female composers as residents in his studio / laboratory – each given a unique choreography to inform a unique composition. The project springs from the life of Ada Lovelace, the daughter of Lord Byron and considered the first computer programmer. Working with Charles Babbage on the Analytical Engine, Lovelace envisioned the potential for computer generated music in 1842.

Calix mines the soul of the machine investigating Lovelace’s statement, “The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform” and Alan Turing’s riposte, “Can a computer ever take us by surprise? Be kind, resourceful, beautiful, have initiative, make mistakes, fall in love, enjoy strawberries and cream, make someone fall in love with it?”

Calix’s PRSF supported composition premieres in January 2014 as a featured project of the Museum of Old and New Art’s MOFO festival.

Photo by Conrad Shawcross.