The Spanish chamber orchestra Vertixe Sonora premieres tomorrow in Santiago de Compostela “Insomnia”, a chamber opera composed by the Chilean Óscar Carmona.
Tomorrow Tuesday, June 27, at 20:30, the premiere of Insomnia, the new chamber opera composed by Óscar Carmona, will take place at the Teatro Principal in Santiago de Compostela. Written for five musicians and electronics, Insomnia will be performed by members of the Galician chamber orchestra Vertixe Sonora: Enrique Martínez (voice), Pablo Coello (saxophones), David Durán (keyboards and synthesizers), Diego Ventoso (percussion) and Iván Ferrer (sound diffusion).
The Chilean composer (Santiago, 1975) explained that this work is a musical performance “about our current condition of submission to algorithms that enclose us in fictitious worlds and distance us from any connection with reality. The torrent of information to which we are subjected with social networks is our daily drug, the modern soma that increases the inner noise of our thoughts. Artificial intelligence algorithms decide for us and shape us. On stage, a subject-musician quartered in an empty space (a character?). He is accompanied by only a few objects that give an account of our virtual world: screens, telephones, recorders, a camera, a projector. The other musicians – protagonists and at the same time spectators – interact with him in different ways throughout the work. The visual proposal, simple but effective, serves as the physical but also metaphorical territory of the subject on stage. Ghosts from the present, the past and the future take over his mind, the last trench to conquer. As a plot we could suppose that a solitary subject, locked in his room, tries to survive an endless succession of sleepless nights caused by interaction with social networks. In his delirium he performs meaningless actions while recording and uploading videos to tiktok without getting likes or followers. Thus, kidnapped by the algorithms and seduced by the artificial intelligences that accompany him, he becomes convinced that all existence is nothing more than a great fiction, a gigantic conspiracy and that he…”. The explanation ends thus, with a completely open ending.
Óscar Carmona is a chilean composer, pianist and multimedia artist. Although greatly influenced by the music of Bach, his music currently seeks a symbiosis between the realm of classical music and the sonic universe of genres such as minimalism, film music and electronic music. His latest works, easily found on Spotify, consist of compositions of a more intimate character, mainly centred on the piano.