Opening concert: Magda Mayas & Jennifer Walshe

George Lewis has a unique reputation – beginning as a member of the legendary AACM improvising collective, he was a pioneer in developing intelligent systems for co-improvising with early personal computers. As a composer and theorist he has remained at the cutting edge of creative music, dissolving barriers between composer and improviser, human and machine, and between genres. He is currently Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music at Columbia University, New York. In this concert we hear the latest instantiation of his Voyager project, in a version for two computer-extended pianos, performed by the stellar pianist and improviser, Magda Mayas.

Jennifer Walshe has continuously challenged received concepts of musical work and performance, especially through her powerful voice-driven solo performances. Currently Professor of Composition at the University of Oxford, her recent work has addressed the challenges and potential of AI. In her A Late Anthology of Early Music, heard in this concert, the inherited body of Western art music, mediated by artificial neural networks, becomes a vital sonic-historical force encountering the dynamism of Walshe’s own performance in the moment.

These artists both feature centrally in Musica ex Machina, and their performances will be the musical embodiment of the main themes of the exhibition.

• Magda Mayas

  
  

  Mayas performs internationally solo and in collaboration with a large number of musicians and composers. Current projects are Spill, a duo with drummer Tony Buck, a duo with Christine Abdelnour, Jane in Ether with Biliana Voutchkova and Miako Klein and Filamental, with Christine Abdelnour, Anthea Caddy, Angharad Davies, Rhodri Davies, Magda Mayas, Zeena Parkins, Aimée Theriot-Ramos, Michael Thieke. She has performed and toured in Europe, the USA, Australia, Mexico and Lebanon and collaborated with many leading figures in improvisation and composers such as Marilyn Mazur, John Butcher, George Lewis, Andy Moor, Nate Wooley, Peter Evans, Eddie Prévost, Phill Niblock, David Sylvian, Zeena Parkins, Fred Frith, Hamid Drake, Joelle Leandre, Paul Lovens, Ikue Mori, Ken Vandermark, Okkyung Lee, Nic Collins, Elliot Sharp and Maja Ratkje.

  
  
• Jennifer Walshe

  
  

  “The most original compositional voice to emerge from Ireland in the past 20 years” (The Irish Times) and “Wild girl of Darmstadt” (Frankfurter Rundschau), composer and performer Jennifer Walshe was born in Dublin, Ireland. Her music has been commissioned, broadcast and performed all over the world. She has been the recipient of fellowships and prizes from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, New York, the DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogramm, the Internationales Musikinstitut, Darmstadt and Akademie Schloss Solitude among others. Recent projects include TIME TIME TIME, an opera written in collaboration with the philosopher Timothy Morton, and THE SITE OF AN INVESTIGATION, a 30-minute epic for Walshe’s voice and orchestra, commissioned by the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland. THE SITE has been performed by Walshe and the NSO, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and also the Lithuanian State Symphony Orchestra. Walshe has worked extensively with AI. ULTRACHUNK, made in collaboration with Memo Akten in 2018, features an AI-generated version of Walshe. A Late Anthology of Early Music Vol. 1: Ancient to Renaissance, her third solo album, released on Tetbind in 2020, uses AI to rework canonical works from early Western music history. A Late Anthology was chosen as an album of the year in The Irish Times, The Wire and The Quietus. Walshe is currently professor of composition at the University of Oxford. Her work was profiled by Alex Ross in The New Yorker.