Nadar Ensemble / Jennifer Walshe – A Late Anthology of Early Music

Composer Jennifer Walshe explores how artificial intelligence can reimagine early Western music. Through voice, electronics and ensemble, a playful reinterpretation of medieval and Renaissance repertoire emerges. For more than ten years, composer and performer Jennifer Walshe has worked with artificial intelligence. She trains machine-learning systems with her voice and investigates what it means to become a musical data corpus herself. In A Late Anthology of Early Music Vol. 1: Ancient to Renaissance - named album of the year by The Wire - Walshe applies AI to an unexpected domain: the early history of Western music. Together with Nadar Ensemble, she explores an alternative musical reality in which past and technology intersect. The result is a playful and estranging reinterpretation of the repertoire. Think of Hildegard van Bingen, Perotinus, Palestrina and John Dowland, but then via a 'historically uninformed practice', in which human and machine listen and make music together across the gap between them.