We went to the final regular season concert for the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Disney Hall today. There were three more modern (1900+) pieces that were nice, if a little more avant garde then our preference, but still enjoyable.

One of the pieces was Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Piano Concerto. This is a new piece, composed in 2007, at its first performance by the Philharmonic. It being the last performance of the season, they introduced three retiring performers, each of whom had been with the orchestra since the early 1960s. The retiring french horn player commented that we needed to be tolerant of new music, such as the Piano Concerto to be performed that day. He said “Remember your favorite keys: C, F sharp, G. You’ll be hearing all of them. At the same time.” Very amusing.

Even more funny is the paragraph from Esa-Pekka’s own description of his piece:

Synthetic Folk Music with Artificial Birds I (my working title)

I imagined a post-biological culture, where the cybernetic systems suddenly develop an existential need of folklore. Composing intelligence creates music that somehow relates to an area that long time ago [sic] was called the Balkans. All this is accompanied by bird-robots.

I take it he was being funny and it was a light hearted piece, but that description made my jaw drop.