José Nuno Miranda, bachelor’s student of both horn and composition, composed his piece ZAP specially for the CvA Symphony Orchestra. ZAP! combines text and music and reflects with sharp humor on what our daily dose of screen time does to us. On March 21, 22 and 23 the CvA Symphony Orchestra will perform ZAP! as part of a specially curated programme, conducted by internationally renowned conductor Jun Märkl. Here you can find more information about the concerts as well as the programme.
What inspired you to compose ZAP?
My composition is a musical interpretation of zapping through television channels, which is also what the title refers to. It consists of two sections: in the first, we rapidly jump from one channel to the next. The orchestra mimics sounds you would expect to hear on TV - I made my own style-copies of stereotypical TV sounds-worlds. In the second section, the orchestra lands on a news channel, where a text describes a socio-political tragedy in an unspecified country. At a certain point, the ‘zapper’ gets emotionally involved with the story and starts to feel compassion.
With this piece, I wanted to reflect on the overwhelming amount of content that is being fed to us online and through screens, and how it totally numbs us. We forget that the people we see on those screens are actual people, and not just images. It’s something that I have personally experienced: sometimes I spend a lot of time on my phone, and I will not even remember what I was watching five minutes before. When I take public transport, I will see everybody glued to their phones. Of course, they could be doing productive things or texting people, but I am sure many are just mindlessly scrolling on their phones. To me it’s a little revolting how we are being controlled by these algorithms. We’re basically trained to get bored very quickly, always needing new stimuli. The danger is that we lose sight of what really matters.
I believe art has the capacity to show a message in a very powerful way. It can ask questions and make people think. Maybe my piece can provoke a certain self-awareness. The audience is invited to reflect on how they ‘zap’, too, on their televisions and on their phones. At the same time, I also want people to laugh during the first part. I aimed, however, for a strong contrast between being entertained in the beginning, and then, in the second part, feeling compassion. I’d like for the audience to be ready to be taken on a journey.
What was it like composing for a symphony orchestra?
Really exciting! Composing turned out to be much less intimidating than I expected, especially because the subject is so close at heart. The biggest challenge was writing the individual parts for the musicians. It was a process of trial and error, but also of learning.
What I especially enjoyed, was experimenting with ways to make the orchestra sound like TV. For instance, I wanted to create a sound effect for switching channels. At first, I thought of having the musicians pick up their paper and blow into it, but for practical reasons, I ended up telling them to make a ‘tshh’ sound instead. I also included a baseball channel and wanted to recreate the sound of a bat hitting the ball. I found a solution by using a slap tongue technique on the bass clarinet and contrabass clarinet.
How does your piece fit in to the programme the CvA Symphony Orchestra will be performing? Are you looking forward to a particular part of the programme?
While composing the zapping section of my piece, I thought of a quote by Mahler: “A symphony must be like the world. It must contain everything.” There’s also a kind of homage to Ligeti in my piece—I included a horror-movie scene where I used a bit of micropolyphony to create a dense, chromatic texture.
In the overall programme, I really like Mahler 4, especially the first movement. It’s so colourful. At Portuguese weddings, they sometimes serve a small lemon cake between the fish and meat dishes. Mahler 4 is like that cake among all the Mahler symphonies - refreshing. As for my own piece, the second part has a particularly emotional moment in the text, which is followed by a solo cello - it’s very beautiful.