The Mozart Code

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The New York Sun

In an unused telemarketing studio in the basement of Lincoln Center, Marc Downie sat hunched at his computer. On 10 screens mounted to the wall in front of him, lines and dots appeared in random yet graceful patterns, while fragmented musical themes emerged from a row of speakers on a shelf. “Enlightenment,” a digital artwork created for Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival by Mr. Downie and his partners, Paul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar, was almost finished, and the artists were giving a demonstration.

By the time “Enlightenment” is unveiled on Thursday evening at 10 p.m., in the colonnade outside Avery Fisher Hall, it will be able to run by itself in 35-minute sequences, 24 hours a day. But on a recent morning, there were still a few kinks to work out, and Mr. Downie remained tethered, psychologically and otherwise, to his keyboard.

“I’m hovering nervously,” he said. The artistic director of the festival, Jane Moss, commissioned “Enlightenment,” along with three other new works — a dance by Mark Morris, a violin concerto by the Finnish composer Magnus Lindberg, and a staging of Mozart’s unfinished opera, “Zaide,” by the director Peter Sellars — to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth and explore his connection to the 21st century.

In the most basic terms, “Enlightenment” is an algorithm that allows 10 computers, working by trial and error, to reconstruct the composition of the 30-second coda to Mozart’s Jupiter symphony, starting from scratch. Each of the 10 computers respresents one section of the orchestra. It’s like waiting for monkeys to type Hamlet — only they’re specially trained monkeys that go back every time they make a mistake.

What “Enlightenment” is not, the artists repeatedly emphasized, is an effort to imagine Mozart’s own composition process.Instead, it’s the solution to a problem of the designers’ own invention.And it is not a criticism to say that instead of bringing us closer to Mozart,”Enlightenment” reflects the distance between the art of his time and that of today.The multimedia artwork is intended to heighten our appreciation of Mozart’s genius. Aficionados may enjoy recognizing the fragments of Mozart’s themes, like individual strands of musical DNA, as they gradually cohere and order themselves. Casual passers-by may enjoy “Enlightenment’s” patterns, which are as mysterious and bewitching as those produced by many forms of modern technology.

The work represents the marriage of art and artificial intelligence; as such, it is a thoroughly contemporary work that reflects the various, unconventional ways in which artists today approach their chosen field.

“I came to America to become a composer, but I took a very circuitous route,” Mr. Downie, who is Scottish, said. “The notion of me sitting down with a pen and a piece of paper and composing a piece is inconceivable. It’s just not what I have to offer the world of music.”

With 14 years of piano training behind him, he chose to study physics. “I felt that a math background would be a way of cracking open composition,” he said. “The rest of my work has been orbiting around music, in what I think is a useful way.”

With his background in music, as well as experience in creating artificial intelligence, Mr. Downie has carried the heaviest load in this monumental undertaking, writing more than a quarter of a million lines of computer code. But in general, these three artists function very much as a team, as their style of conversation and habit of good-natured ribbing — punctuated by Mr. Downie’s dry, understated witticisms — reflects.

“There’s an incredibly tiny bug here,” Mr. Kaiser said, as one of the screens — the cello section — suddenly went blank.

“Microscopic,” Mr. Downie said.

The three have been together since 2001, when the MIT Media Lab, where Mr. Downie was working, asked Mr. Kaiser and Mr. Eshkar to collaborate with him on a digital “portrait” of the choreographer Merce Cunningham. Mr. Kaiser and Mr. Eshkar had worked together since 1991 on several projects for dance companies, although they were in the process of moving toward more public art, such as a series of trompe-l’oeil projections on city sidewalks. Once connected with Mr. Downie, they continued in that direction. They call themse lves the OpenEnded Group.

When Ms. Moss asked them to do a piece for Mostly Mozart, they knew that they wanted to combine both sound and image — and to do so in a deeper way than in their previous work. Mostly Mozart’s musical director Louis Langrée suggested that they look at the Jupiter coda, which is famous for its virtuosic complexity: It is one of a very few examples of five-part, or, as Mr. Downie more impressively called it, “quintuply invertible” counterpoint.

“Enlightenment” runs with two kinds of input: the score of the symphony’s entire Fourth movement and an actual orchestral performance (recorded on audiotape and video) of the coda. It analyzes the input according to repeated patterns, relationships between adjacent pitches, and the ways in which pitches combine into chords. As the program attempts to reconstruct the composition, it checks each note and theme against the score.

In 35 minutes, the work passes through four stages. First, the program tests various notes, keeping the ones that Mozart used and throwing out the others. In the second, it identifies the musical themes. In the third, it attempts to put those themes in order, starting over each time it makes a mistake. In the last stage, having successfully reconstructed the coda, the program plays it.

In the process, the computers’ search for notes and themes produces visual images that appear on screen.These images are not traditional musical notation, but abstract lines and shapes.When one of the computers successfully derives a theme, a pattern of arcs that is abstracted from the video of the musicians playing, flashes briefly. The sights and sounds are different every time the program runs.The result is, both visually and aurally, a work that is contemporary and abstract — more John Cage than Mozart.

“From a strictly musical composition standpoint, it’s an utterly modern piece,” Mr. Downie said. “Or maybe even slightly early 20th-century.”

“In the beginning, it sounds like Cage or [Anton] Webern,” Mr. Kaiser said.

“Then it moves into minimalism. It’s almost as if you’re taking music of the 20th century, but, instead of going forward, you’re pointing back to something which is, in some ways, a much greater achievement.”

As the visual images develop, they also evoke various styles in early 20th-century painting. “We’ve seen Paul Klee and Picasso, sometimes the Suprematists and Constructivists. In addition to going through the history of modern music, it goes through the history of modern art!” Mr. Kaiser said.

Before the piece is unveiled on Thursday, the artists said they planned to add more explanatory captions, and Mr. Downie had to create what he called the “master page,” which determines when the program will proceed from one stage to the next.

“The last three weeks of any project involve me doing less and less, and the piece getting better and better,” he explained. “And eventually it runs 24–7 for four weeks.”

The process toward that point has been grueling.They have been in the basement since April, working many 17-hour days. They kept themselves going with music, of course — though not always Mozart.

They won’t know exactly what the piece will sound like until it is installed on the pillars in front of Avery Fisher, although they’ve done tests in the space with speakers. “It’s always hard to move from the rehearsal room to the performance space, but we’re very optimistic,” Mr. Downie said. The piece will be up, as he said, 24 hours a day, although it is best seen at night.

Although they’ve vowed never to do a single piece of this technological complexity again — their next commission involves tracing the patterns of children in a playground — the artists agreed that the process had been deeply satisfying.They had no idea what the images would be when they started; instead, they watched them emerge from the program they wrote.

“That makes it continually rewarding and humbling,” Mr. Downie said. “You make an image, but you don’t feel like you made it, quite. You sort of discovered it.”


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