Mozart and the Elections

Document Type

Recording

Publication Date

2016

Streaming Media

Abstract

Laptop orchestra [ca. 5’00]

Premiered by SCLOrk (the Santa Clara Laptop Orchestra) on June 2, 2016 at Santa Clara University.

Comments

This is a tragicomic piece on the state of American democracy through the lenses of Mozart’s Musical Dice Game. It was composed during the presidential primaries season of 2016. Each player obsessively votes as fast as they can to elect the next measure from a pool of candidates. A supposedly fair conductor counts the votes when he or she wishes. Players can use a Super Delegate button to make their votes be worth 10 times more than everyone else’s. Every now and then the conductor throws referendum questions to the players to decide the development of the piece. Referendum questions used in this performance were: “Slower?” — “Faster?” — “Transpose Pretty?” — “Transpose Prettier?” — “Make Mozart Great Again?” — “Lesser Evil?”

The audience follows everything on screen by watching the conductors “dashboard”. The piece ends when the system crashes.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

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