London Contemporary Music Festival: The Artist Is Not Present

The London Contemporary Music Festival and Wigmore Hall present a programme that charts the way composers have engaged with AI-adjacent ideas for centuries. Moving from the age of Mozart to the modern day, this evening’s concert shows how startling, amusing, mesmerising and even moving music can be when composers throw the dice and embrace the algorithmic. The ever-adventurous Explore Ensemble and acclaimed percussionist George Barton will showcase neglected figures Clarence Barlow and Hanne Darboven; composer Dominic Murcott will present several firecracker works for player piano from the great Conlon Nancarrow – on a replica of Nancarrow's own player piano; Jennifer Walshe returns with a new commission delving into the history and future of computational thinking and artificial intelligence in music; and there will be a very rare outing of a selection of Musikalisches Wùrfelspiele (musical dice-games) – works attributed to or by Mozart and C.P.E. Bach et al. – early examples of algorithmic composition that took the Enlightenment by storm. 

Tonight's concert will be prefaced by a pre-concert talk from Jennifer Walshe at 6pm.