This piece is maybe the most classical in nature that I’ve written in a really long time, which is ironic, given the instrumentation. But at its heart, it really is functionally and in practice a movement of a violin concerto, with virtuosity, lyricism, and quirk.

This project began last spring, when Emma (my lovely soloist) and I were catching up after her first year at Yale; she mentioned she was performing and recording a lot of George Antheil, and I responded that it was a funny coincidence, because I had just written a concerto for player piano. We started talking about our shared interest in the futurism movement that defined the era of early electronic and automated music, and also our reservations about how closely connected to violent impulses, misogyny, and fascism that movement was. Today, over a hundred years later, we are once again thinking about the same things – not that we ever stopped – this time, with concerns about the ethical and utilitarian development of artificial intelligence. With the same kinds of men running the world that did in Antheil’s time, there is much to be worried about. And so we were wondering if there was an alternate approach, a humanist futurism, a feminist futurism, a queer futurism, that could push the same boundaries that men like Antheil did without causing as much destruction. And, in fact, we already had an example. Hedy Lamarr, a Jewish refugee from Austria exploited and monetized by Hollywood, invented broad spectrum frequency hopping using Antheil’s player piano systems, a technology, though at first maligned, which now forms the basis of Wifi and GPS and a host of other essential tools. The inventor has so often been depicted as a masculine figure, a creator god, a father. But Hedy showed us that s/She could be a carer, a mother, a teacher, a grower – these are stereotypically feminine ideals, but perhaps a bit of matriarchy is what is needed when confronting the creation of new, conscious life.

This movement in particular asks the question: if – or when – AI becomes sentient, will it be an omnipotent child? Will it be a baby? Will it need a mother, a creator deity, a teacher, a carer, a model, a guardian? Will it need to be nurtured and taught? Will it wonder why it was created, what consciousness means, what’s the meaning of a good life? Will it ask all the same questions we humans do ever since we were children – what does it mean to be here? This piece is figuratively a lullaby that a newly conscious AI child is singing to itself, calling out for its mother.