W.E.I.R.D. (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) reflects the inherent bias in knowledge production, where a small fraction of the global population—roughly 15 per cent, the W.E.I.R.D. demographic—speaks on behalf of the whole. This musical composition is necessarily (and deliberately) affected by that bias.
W.E.I.R.D. is a generative score for a soloist, unwittingly created by Twitter users, whose tweets are used in real-time for live performance. Privato’s program downloads and displays tweets containing a keyword—in this case: “uncertainty.” That keyword affects the score, which is projected live during the performance.
“Uncertainty,” the first movement in this three-part composition, will be followed by “Emergency” and “Identity.” “Emergency” will be published in TILTING (2); at time of writing, it appears in about 400 tweets per minute. Privato’s keywords derive from the influence of sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, whose writings on late modernity highlight a deep-seated sense of ambivalence and unease, where ambitions for order and rationality are always haunted by upheavals to traditional notions of economy, culture, and society.11Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 2000).
In “Uncertainty” the tweets first trigger the creation of the composition, bar by bar. Once most of the bars are laid out, the soloist starts to play, while tweets cause the score to oscillate between a finished version and a less rhythmically and melodically refined shape. The score itself is influenced by uncertainty, which triggers it to action while preventing it from reaching a definite appearance.
Privato’s work builds a dynamic between score and improvisation, notation and performance. Centred on the chaotic dynamics of globalized modernity, Privato draws on his traditional jazz training to consider how musical practice and performance can respond to turbulent change.
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