Dal Niente violist Ammie Brod sat down with composer Wang Lu to talk about her piece Pecking Orders, commissioned by Dal Niente with support from the National Endowment for the Arts. Dal Niente will give the world premiere of Pecking Orders at Constellation on October 13.
Pecking Orders deals with order in a number of contexts, from chickens to the arts to high school social hierarchies. Was there anything in particular that got you thinking about different kinds of order, or about order in general?
The order of things around us that we obey can be simply taken for granted, as if they are the same as the order of events that happened in history, or elements in chemistry. As Foucault’s “The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences” pointed out, the foundation of what we believe as the orders is shaky. I thought about how orders shift and transform from culture to culture, and then I thought, “what if we look at AI generated ideas on orders?”
The text for this piece comes from your searches for the term “order” using AI. Were you surprised by any of the results that came up? Do you have any particular favorites?
I’m very amused by the results that came out of AI on what “pecking order” is in music. As you’ll hear, it says that since the human voice is a gift from God, therefore voice is at the top of pecking order. Percussion instruments that don’t play any melody are at the bottom. And in visual arts, the AI-defined pecking order puts oil painting above watercolor painting.
I find that many societally acceptable orders are as arbitrary as these AI generated ones — because AI only generates ideas from the data it gathers, and the data is from us and existing materials created by us. Going through AI brings out the humor and highlights the ridiculousness of assumptions we already have.
What are some of the ways in which the music either reinforces or undermines the text?
The soprano has a beautiful vocalise at the beginning of the piece, which reinforces the idea that voice is the most divine in the music pecking order. But later in the piece, the soprano shows various distorted and sometimes incomprehensible sides of herself, which supports ideas of alternate pecking orders.
Are there specific musical sounds or techniques that you use to work with or against the meaning of the words?
The AI-generated text at one point explains how we might avoid human pecking orders. It mentions that we could achieve this goal by constructing social orders. Following this text, I used layered homophones of a modal but microtonally twisted simple marching band like idea to comment on and question the feasibility of the suggestion.
The text mentions the historical cultural view of vocal music as superior to instrumental music, as well as melodic vs non-melodic material. This is an ensemble piece with a soprano soloist; can you talk about the vocal part with (or versus) the instrumental parts in the framework of those hierarchies? Do they work differently? Does that itself create a hierarchy within the piece?
I definitely thought about voice in this piece playing two functions. One is as the narrator, who reads the texts like an announcement-like way, outside the character. The other role the soprano plays is a series of characters with singing voice or half singing voice.
The text started with chicken pecking orders, then talks about music, art, high school, and society as a whole. Later it goes back to how humans make chickens surrender to the order. This journey of starting from chicken to human and back to the chicken makes the soprano kind of an in between character. She has space to explore her emotional range throughout the piece, and to go beyond the human.