Promo image via Present Music
Present Music's Avant Garden of Love - Second Edition
For their Valentine’s concert, “Avant-Garden of Love,” Present Music offers a world premiere by Cory Dargel. The classically trained composer’s recent albums easily cross over into synth pop, including Other People’s Love Songs set to 13 lyrics commissioned from real-life couples. His world premiere commission from PM, true love not pretend, was achieved in part with the aid of AI.
“The chatbots kept generating checklists to determine whether or not I was in an honest relationship,” Dargel explains. “It also generated scripts for me to rehearse telling someone I love them for the first time. It often told me to watch out for fake love and for partners who were not truly invested, while simultaneously giving me methods to practice being honest with someone. The whole thing seemed all about learning to be fake while watching out for fake partners.” Will it pass the Turing test?
Dargel will perform true love with PM, singing the words that resulted from his multiple conversations with AI chatbots. “I've embraced a theme of pretending to be in love and performing love for others while also desperately searching for true love for myself. And in the end, the chatbots try to convince me that falling in love with a machine would be so much more rewarding than falling in love with another person,” he says.
“It’s not a sit-down concert,” adds PM’s Eric Segnitz of “Avant-Garden.” “It’s more of a variety show.” Among the attractions: “Simultaneous Poetry,” with audience members reciting love poems and Craig’s List personals from slips of paper (nodding to Dadaist Tristan Tzara) and Fluxus founder Alison Knowles’ “Make a Salad,” where everyone chops salad fixings to the tune of percussionists with hollow vegetables and violinists strumming string beans.
“Avant-Garden” will also include Double Sextet by Steve Reich, the master of 20th century minimalism. “It’s a wonderful masterpiece; we played it 15 years ago, right after it came out,” Segnitz says. “We’re getting the jump on the Reich retrospective all over the world for his 90th birthday in October 2026. He was the person who influenced Present Music’s direction. Double Sextet fits the program because it’s like a relationship—it’s a counterpoint between a live sextet and a digitally recorded sextet. It’s propulsive, energetic and fun.”
7:30 p.m. February 13-14 at Jan Serr Studio, 2155 N. Prospect Ave. For tickets, visit presentmusic.org.
