Big Concert Night

Since 2003, Ars Electronica’s Big Concert Night in collaboration with the Bruckner Orchester Linz has been the highlight and magnet attracting audiences at every festival, and it’s the centerpiece of a long-standing collaboration between Ars Electronica and the Bruckner Orchester Linz.

In 2023, the motto of the Big Concert Night is UPBEAT—a new beginning and a continuation of the tried-and-true: once again, POSTCITY’s train hall will be the spectacular stage for this brilliant evening in which orchestral music and digital sounds, live electronic music and real-time visualizations will encounter each other.

From the moment of force of the now.

The Big Concert Night has always been a laboratory for the construction of unheard-of resonance spaces, which call for openness, the joy of collaboration, a boundless desire to program, and the search for unusual concert venues.

We return to the formidable train hall at POSTCITY, where the big bang of the partnership between the Bruckner Orchester Linz and its new chief conductor Markus Poschner took place in 2017. Six years of an intense sound journey lie behind us, which have led to the establishment of a community that is now causing ears to prick up around the world. It began with a radical investigation of Bruckner’s 8th Symphony; today, five scherzos, four dance
spaces from symphonies by the traditional local avant-gardist Anton Bruckner, who celebrated his 199th birthday on September 4, again provide intangible torques that shake things up and resonate with the sound spaces of Icelandic composer and double bassist Bára Gísladóttir and Austrian rapper Def Ill.

Expect the unheard-of, the truth belongs to us listeners!

Norbert Trawöger
Artistic Director Bruckner Orchester Linz

UPBEAT

Bruckner Orchester Linz under chief conductor Markus Poschner
with Bára Gísladóttir, Def Ill, and visualizations by Cori O’Lan

Anton Bruckner (1824–1896)
Scherzi from various symphonies

The festival theme Who Owns the Truth? also raises the key question of originality and authenticity in artistic production given the technical context of our time. So this year’s concert night presents music in search of truth, in search of origins. This aligns perfectly with the music of composer Anton Bruckner, who, in the lead-up to the grand anniversary year 2024, already takes center stage in September as part of the musical journey during the Ars Electronica guest performances of Bára Gísladóttir and Def Ill.

Scherzos from Bruckner’s symphonies form the musical framework of the evening. These serve as the starting point for encounters, reflections, and are interwoven with traditional violin music and sounds by the exceptional rapper Def Ill, who originates from Upper Austria like Bruckner, and the Icelandic composer and double bassist Bára Gísladóttir.

Def Ill, also known as Ruffian Rugged, became known for his political lyrical activism, exceptional skills, experimental productions and flow that made him the fastest rapper in Austria, indeed the fastest rapper on the planet. Icelandic composer and double bassist Bára Gísladóttir works mostly in the environment of classical contemporary / avant-garde music. With her latest album SILVA she has created a work for processed double bass built on the idea of a downward growing forest, living its own secret life of underground raves and meditative cohesiveness.

Forest and nature are also recurring themes in Bruckner’s work, which also serves as the starting point for this evening’s real-time visualizations.

Gerfried Stocker
Artistic director Ars Electronica

The Surface of Bruckner
Four visualizations based on AI-generated images

All images that you see in the visualization of Bruckner’s music are solely created with generative AI systems after several weeks of conversation about Bruckner’s music held by Ars Electronica curators with ChatGPT. At the end of these conversations, ChatGPT was asked to describe Bruckner’s music as a landscape or as a building, but also as musical instruments, machines, or as simple brushstroke.

ChatGPT was also asked to describe some of the typical stories of Bruckner’s life. These descriptions were used as prompts for the image creation. A few thousand images were created in this process, with only a few selected and animated live by the sounds of the orchestra.

After Images of Sacre du Printemps (by Stravinsky and presented in the piano version for four hands by Maki Namekawa and Dennis Russell Davies in Innsbruck’s Haus der Musik) The Surface of Bruckner is the second experiment aimed at exploring possibilities of co-creation with AI systems. This takes the form of active collaboration, exploring the grey zones of interpretation between basic forms of expression and communication like music, language, and images.

The results, however, expose the very stereotypical and often superficial nature of commonly available AI systems and demonstrate once again that the starting point of true creativity can be rather found in the glitches, imperfections, and shortcomings where our common view of reality becomes fragile and breaks open.

Cori O’Lan

7:30 pm
Doors Open, Train Hll, POSTCITY

Entrada
Florian Sighartner – Violine

8:00 pm
Train Hall, POSTCITY

UPBEAT

Bruckner Orchester Linz
under Chief conductor Markus Poschner

Drehmomente
Anton Bruckner (1824–1896)
Scherzi from the Symphonies No. 0, 2, 4, 6, 7
Real-time Visualization: Cori O’Lan

Soli
Bára Gísladóttir
Her palms faced down forever after
Video: Margrét Bjarnadóttir
Silva

Def Ill
Stakkatoflow Intermezzo – Medley

NIGHTLINE

The Ars Electronica Big Concert Night was first launched in 2003 by Dennis Russell Davies, Gerfried Stocker, Wolfgang Winkler, and Heribert Schröder as a cooperation between Ars Electronica, Bruckner Orchster Linz, and the Brucknerhaus Linz.

Panasonic Tech Patronage of POSTCITY’s Train Hall