New Music Orchestra / Ghost in the Shell - NOSPR

Can consciousness exist without a biological body? Is the mind capable of surviving in a void, in another dimension, united with God or… with integrated circuits? Such questions are no longer the sole province of religion and philosophy. Today, neuroscience, theoretical physics, and computer science wrestle with them too. And can new music – especially one based on the foundations of natural science, mathematical formulae, and digital algorithms – also serve to transcend the limits of the sensorially perceptible world? 

Perhaps we will find out when we listen to the latest work by Peter Ablinger, The Moment You Leave the Room, a three-part work composed specially for the NOSPR building. The outstanding Austrian experimentalist completed this singular gift for the Katowice audience while contending with his own waning body that was beginning to fail him. Peter, we hope you will be with us on the day and take equal pleasure in hearing Jonathan Harvey’s Bhakti, rooted in Hindu metaphysics, as well as Cezary Duchnowski’s Posthumana, commissioned by the Orkiestra Muzyki Nowej with a very different kind of transcendence in mind – one that feels ever closer. 

Michał Mendyk