Make Them Dance
ensemble: chamber orchestra (1[picc].1.1[bcl].1-2.1.1.0-hp.perc[3]-strings)
duration: 9 minutes
written: winter 2020
written for: Illinois Philharmonic Orchestra; Stilian Kirov, music director
premiere: September 22nd, 2021; Chicago, IL
Note:
“We can engineer the context around a particular behavior and force change that way. Context-aware data allow us to tie together your emotions, your cognitive functions, your vital signs, etc. We can know if you shouldn’t be driving, and we just shut your car down. We tell the fridge, ‘Hey, lock up because he shouldn’t be eating,’ or we tell the TV to shut off and make you get some sleep, or the chair to start shaking because you shouldn’t be sitting so long. We are learning how to write the music, and then we let the music make them dance.”
- Anonymous Software Developer
quoted in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff
My piece Make Them Dance is a sort of techno-utopian ‘danse macabre,’ taking its inspiration from Shosana Zuboff’s 2019 book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. In it, Zuboff discusses a not so distant future—and in some cases a very real present—in which large tech companies such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon control our life experiences and create a world which is entirely online. The quote excerpted above led me to think of Zuboff’s concepts in musical terms. What if certain sections of the orchestra were gatekeepers that forced other sections to dance with a loss of their free will?
The piece opens with the evolution of a dance groove. This groove spreads throughout the orchestra and generates a melody. After a number of other dances break out, the whole orchestra comes together to blare out one last statement of the main theme. As the music begins to shift to something less dance-based and much more lyrical, introspective, and soloistic, a loud crack from the percussion section silences the orchestra. The orchestra tries, time after time, to express themselves lyrically only to be shut down by louder and louder smacks from the percussion. The percussion in a sense demands the orchestra dance by bombarding it with a relentless dance rhythm which sections of the orchestra slowly give in to one at a time. Eventually, with the percussion winning out, the orchestra succumbs to the dance. The piece ends with the orchestra wheezing and panting for air until that too is violently silenced.
