Portrait of the composer by Frankenstein
Andrea Liberovici is a composer of his time. His works express the tragedy of postmodern man.(…)
His Frankenstein Cabaret can be heard as a metaphor for the present day composer.(…)
His music it confronts us with our most most intimate contradictions , and transports us to the darkest recesses of our inner selves.
With Electronic Lied , whose title characteristically combines English and German, and whose musical material is treated in the same manner as in his Frankenstein, Liberovici goes one step further. He confront the most terrifying thing of all: our own solitude.
This work is probably the first in the history of music to have been inspired by the Internet, or more precisely, by an email correspondence. Of course, the listener would probably not be aware of this, had the composer not told us. However, was it not through a program distributed to his public that Berlioz made know the secret meaning of his Symphonie Fantastique? Was it not because of Goethe’s poem, published at the top of the score, that we understand what Dukas is “portraying“ in his Sorcer’s apprentice? In Liberovici’s Lied, he was trying to depict the unexpected destinations to which the Web can lead us, the surprise encounters, and the purely imaginary voices which engage with each other. Here the writer remains anonymous, his location being unknown and unknowable, rendering an actual encounter, beyond the computer screen, unimaginable for the recipient. (…)
“Net is a mirror“, says Liberovici, revealing himself to be a tragic composer, the composer of the postmodern tragedy – of the man (or the woman) who is comforted with the unbearable – and absurd – solitude to which, more and more, we are confined, as a result of the onanism of the internet.
Thanks anyway Bill Gates! What are we waiting for to disconnect our computers?
Jean-Jacques Nattiez