Commissioner Tampere Philharmonic
Opus 90
Category symphony orchestra
Year 2024
Duration 11
Orchestration 3333-4331-13-pno-harp-strings
Publisher Gehrmans Musikförlag

Program note

We live in an age of constant information overload: the internet and the smartphone have changed our world. Information is travelling faster and faster across the world thanks to today’s technology. It has become easier for anyone to share information, and at the same time, both misinformation and disinformation have started to spread at a rapid pace. I was once naive enough to think that disinformation was largely due to people misunderstanding things and therefore spreading misinformation unwittingly. Misinformation is when you accidentally spread the wrong information because of wrong knowledge.  Disinformation is deliberately spreading the wrong information. After reading Jessikka Aro’s book ‘Putin’s Trolls: On the Front Lines of Russia’s Information War Against the World’, I realised how naive that idea was. The Nazi propaganda chief Josef Goebbels is attributed to have said almost 100 years ago, ‘Repeat a lie enough times and it becomes a truth’. Unfortunately, he seems to be right to this day, as can be seen in world politics. Some politicians and political parties deliberately use lies to strengthen their own position of power. In a world where artificial intelligence and ‘deep fake’ can make videos look astonishingly real, it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish fact from fiction. 

Reading Jessikka Aro’s book “Putin’s Trolls” and Naomi Klein’s book “Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World” made me realise how misinformation can be used for very fundamental things: dividing people. When people are united, it is much harder to push through initiatives that go against human rights, but if you succeed in spreading lies that divide communities, you can continue with corruption and laws that destroy our planet, without being called out for it, as people are busy arguing whether it is true or not. It came as a surprise to me how some countries spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year on spreading misinformation, which is why I wanted to write this piece; to raise awareness about the world we live in.

The piece ‘Information’ consists from beginning to end of various words in English in Morse code.  In addition the notes of each chord are taken from the letters of the word in question. In Western music we have the notes a-h , and in addition I have used the notes chromatically ascending from b (in German called the note h) to continue the alphabet, so that the letter i is the note c, the letter j is the note c# and so on.

Here are the words we hear during the composition (repeated several times):

INFORMATION  INFO  KNOWLEDGE  KNOW  INFOTMATION  DATA  TRUTH  DATA
INFORMATION  INFO  KNOWLEDGE  KNOW  INFOTMATION
TRUTH  LIES  FEAR BLAME  LIES  ANGER  TRUTH  LIES  TRUTH
HOPE  EMPATHY  HOPE  LOVE  FEAR  LOVE
DATA  LIES  CONSPIRACY  LIES  BLAME  FEAR  CONSPIRACY
ACTION  INSPIRATION  WAR  INPIRATION  PEACE  WAR  PEACE  UNITY  UNITED  HUMANITY

 

This piece stands also as the most information-dense composition I have so far created, encompassing over 47,000 notes within a ten-minute span, averaging around 4,700 notes per minute and peaking at over 8,700 notes per minute.

When people use social media, they usually consume a lot of information unconsciously. On social media, disinformation is easily spread through memes and videos without sources. With this composition, I aspire to encourage individuals to critically examine the sources of the information that shapes their worldview.

 

Performances

2024 November 29 – World premiere by Tampere Philharmonic conducted by Matthew Halls – More info