NEWS

24.01.2024

The University of Hong Kong: HKU Music Colloquia Debut

Angus Lee will make his debut at the HKU Music Department’s Research Colloquia series, delivering the paper The Vocation of Music-making in the Time of Digital Automation, on the 6th Feb, 2024. 

Abstract:

In this presentation, I seek to problematise the increasingly normalised rhetoric that equates the use of technology with ‘creativity’ and ‘innovation’ from the perspective of a performer-composer trained in the European classical tradition. Through examining several recent compositions of mine, I attempt to illustrate the various challenges and dilemmas that potentially underscore any human-machinic musical endeavours, particularly those involving automation through algorithms and artificial intelligence. Furthermore, I contextualise this disucssion by exploring the broader socio-political and economic conditions that shape music production and consumption today. Here, leaning on the works of composers Brian Ferneyhough and Helmut Lachenmann, I investigate the potential avenues through which contemporary classical music may be weaponised as a form of resistance against the ‘psychopolitical’ forms of capture, surveillance and control exerted by totday’s all-pervasive digital technology.

Poster:

Further reading:

HKU Music Department’s Research Colloquia webpage: http://tinyurl.com/rycwyf7t