Industry and the Arts

Industry and the Arts is a set of five short songs for alto voice with MUGIC controller and electronics. This piece was written for Heather Byford in 2022. Industry and the Arts explores the relationship between industry and art. The initial inspiration for this piece was a passage that describes a newly-opened Parisian Arcade from the opening pages of Walter Benjamin’s unfinished Arcades Project:

De ces palais les colonnes magiques / A l’amateur montrent de toutes parts, / Dans les objets qu’etalent leurs portiques, / Que l’industrie est rivale des arts. —Nouveaux Tableaux de Paris (Paris, 1828), vol. 1, p. 27

Benjamin describes the 19th-century arcades of Paris as the birthplace of modern consumerism, and in this piece, I connect this idea with current technology of the Internet and machine learning as the focal point of industry’s incursion into our lives and art. While writing this piece, I met with vocalist Heather Byford to create a corpus of recordings that were used to create the electronic elements of this piece. This electronic part takes the form of a motion controller (MUGIC) that is attached to the performer’s hand, triggering electronic sound.

Premiere: Heather Byford, Phillip T. Young Hall, University of Victoria, February 12, 2023.