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San Francisco Chronicle
a day ago
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
I used AI to make this song. The results, and its implications, startled me
Earlier this month, a band called the Velvet Sundown surpassed 1 million monthly listeners on Spotify. Its profile features two albums, some gauzy cover art and a genre-appropriate backstory. The music was credible, the branding effective and the effect convincing. Only afterward did we learn the truth: There was no band. Every note, lyric, image and faux-autobiographical gesture was the work of generative artificial intelligence. The project was presented as human, then rebranded as 'synthetic music guided by human creative direction,' a soft euphemism for automation. Whatever creative intentions, aesthetic sensibilities or prompting skills that may have guided the project, the resulting songs still arose from full substitution because no embodied musical practice took place. No performance, no skill-based interaction with the medium, no causal chain running through human hands in the act of making. We are in the process of crossing a threshold. AI systems trained on decades of creative labor now can plausibly simulate artistry, threatening to render the human creator redundant. Skills that once required years of practice are instantly mimicked by code. Musicians now face an existential question: Has their craft, refined through long hours of practice, collaboration and performance, already become obsolete? Listeners also face a paradox. A song moves you, but its 'singer' cannot feel. What, then, has moved you? The structure, the timbre, the rhetorical form? Or the knowledge that somewhere, behind the notes, another person is manipulating generative AI with whom you might be joined in experience? There is historical precedent for this. In the industrial era, machines hollowed out skilled labor. Weaving, typesetting and machining were all transformed into logistical problems that were, by and large, solved through automation. What disappeared was not only employment but a relationship between work and meaning. The rhythms of human labor were replaced by the monotonous hum of mechanical replication. Today's creative automation occurs on cloud servers. The new assembly line runs through graphics processing units and datasets on which a million songs become the raw template material for one more product. I've experienced this firsthand. Last year, I subscribed to Suno, an AI platform that generates music from text and audio prompts. Its marketing promises 'a future where anyone can make great music,' reframing skilled composition as a technical barrier waiting to be removed. My early experiments were forgettable. A prompt request for a Weimar-style cabaret polka returned a tune that sounded less like 'The Threepenny Opera' (1928), and more like elevator music for a mid-tier chain hotel in Leipzig, circa 2004. A Krautrock-inspired instrumental was more on point, but still nothing to write home about. Over time, however, Suno's responses improved dramatically. Then, in July, I decided to write a song combining the old way with the new generative tools. I uploaded lyric ideas (finished by ChatGPT) and a low-fi guitar recording from my phone to Suno. After several cycles, what came back startled me. The track, titled 'Ashes on the Heath,' didn't just resemble my idea; it felt like it was the idea, polished. The vocal delivery seemed emotionally real. It almost felt like a collaboration. [Listen to the song below.] Of course, the emotion wasn't real. Generative AI doesn't really collaborate. It doesn't know you or have feelings about strum patterns or drum fills. Most importantly, it doesn't make mistakes, which are integral to the process of real music. AI replicates genre conventions and timbral signatures. It does not live through them. It reproduces the statistical contours of prior performances while living nowhere inside them. It can only reconfigure forms once used to produce meaning. Generative AI is not magic; it's logistics. Platforms like Suno do not understand or feel music. They approximate its grammar. They rely on vast archives of recorded music, often pulled without permission or compensation. AI's 'cheap' outputs aren't cheap because the cost of making art has vanished. They're cheap because the cost for training is being invisibly offloaded onto past labor that was never compensated. They don't feel or resolve tension. They don't second-guess themselves. They produce form without the living content that once made form matter. Other audio tools based on machine learning — e.g., Izotope's noise reduction plug-in and Logic Pro's stem separation — have already become normalized in music production. But generative AI crosses a different line. It doesn't just assist the process. It threatens to supersede it entirely. The result could be substitution rather than enhancement. While some might argue that generative AI democratizes creativity, this framing obscures a deeper reality. These systems make possible the instantaneous imitation of creativity. Authorship too easily collapses into prompt-entry. It is more akin to configuration from a catalog. Yes, AI can and will enhance creative projects, making new outcomes possible. No, it will not mean the same thing if no human struggle threads it together. When I initially shared my AI-assisted track with a few friends, I withheld the fact that the vocals had been created by a machine. The reception was warm. Some listeners were moved to tears. Then I shared the track with some other friends, disclosing the AI vocals upfront. The reception was quite different. 'There's no tell in the vocal that it's a heartless construct sent by fascitarian tech overlords to extract phosphorus from the working class,' one wrote. 'So: 1) good job, and 2) ohmygodwhatishappening?' Another said simply, 'Nice track — but I draw a hard line on AI for music creation, and I'm sure you know why.' I do know why. Because music isn't just sound. It's a relationship based on tension, memory and embodiment. It's the moment in the take that no one planned, but everyone went with, or the phrasing that makes the line land. I don't think AI will erase human music. Music is social; it comes from bodies in time. But the economic logic is changing. A tireless synthetic co-worker, charging a modest monthly subscription fee and trained on the unpaid labor of artists whose livelihoods it now threatens — this is all new. The point is not to romanticize a pre-generative-AI past. It is to understand that the problem is not the tool but the system that deploys it to cheapen labor and consolidate cultural production on private platforms. The question is not only, 'Can AI make art?' but also, 'Who controls what counts as art and under what terms?' Platforms like Suno are not only generating songs. They are scripting the future conditions under which music will be made, circulated and valued. To what extent these systems serve as creative tools or substitutes for creativity will decide whether culture remains an open field of human meaning or a closed loop of recombinable parts. That decision is, in principle, ours to make. But the conditions for exercising that agency are eroding quickly.
Telegraph
22-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Rory Kinnear: ‘I'm self-aware enough to know I would never play Bond'
Fortunately, Rory Kinnear seems amused when I read him the less than flattering description of his character Leo in the National Theatre's staging of Here We Are, Stephen Sondheim's final musical. It begins: '60s'. Kinnear is 47. 'Thank you!' laughs the son of the late actor Roy Kinnear, who shares his father's cheerful, oval face and thinning pate. 'I'm not too precious about these things. I've been playing dads for a while. I looked quite old when I was quite young. My dad played the same age, which was late 40s-early 50s, from his late 30s and I'm following in his footsteps in some ways, physically. But I think quite often bald men look the same for a long time. So I'm hoping that will be the case for me.' Leo's description continues: 'Charming billionaire. Ruthless, insatiable, a little crude.' 'Yes!' says Kinnear, before mentioning the next script note, 'some non-strenuous singing'... I'm glad to say there is some competence there!' Kinnear beams. 'Grade 5 music theory. I can count out 6/8 time as well as anybody.' Most of us are more familiar with Kinnear as a powerhouse actor than a musical triple threat (in the production he dances, too). His packed CV includes directing The Winter's Tale at the London Coliseum and appearing in the National's 2016 production of Brecht's The Threepenny Opera. Yet such feats are overshadowed by dozens of other performances, not least at the National, where he's played – among others – Hamlet, (and Olivier Award -winning) Iago and Macbeth. On television he's been Tom Bombadil in Amazon's Lord of the Rings franchise Rings of Power, the British prime minister in Netflix's The Diplomat, and the lawyer in Toxic Town, Jack Thorne's four-parter for Netflix about the 2009 toxic waste scandal in Corby. On the big screen, he's immortalised in the four latest James Bond films as MI6's wry chief of staff Bill Tanner. Backstage at the National, on a break from rehearsals, the hyper-eloquent Kinnear exudes calm affability and a fierce intelligence. A true polymath (he plays the piano and reached Grade 7 trumpet), other strings to his bow include writing a play, The Herd, performed at the Bush Theatre in London, based on his family's experiences bringing up his severely disabled older sister Katrina, who died of Covid-19 aged 48, isolated from her family in her care home. Now he campaigns for charities helping families of disabled people. 'Social care is under collapse and the burden is now so overweightedly towards loved ones – there was a story the other day about a father who collapsed and died in care of his son, the son was unable to call for help so died himself. It's the burden of love. The expectation of people's capacity is unfathomably wide, and people's love is elastic, but it has a breaking point.' He read English at Oxford, where he first became enamoured of Sondheim, after appearing in a student production of Company. Now he's thrilled to be involved in Here We Are, alongside Jane Krakowski (Ally McBeal and 30 Rock) and Jesse Tyler Ferguson (Modern Family). Based on two surrealist films of Luis Buñuel, the show about six New Yorkers 'who try to go out to brunch and fail', was unfinished when Sondheim died in 2021. Its off-Broadway world premiere in 2023, directed by Joe Mantello (also in charge of the London production), was greeted with reviews that were generally more respectful than effusive, with the New York Times describing it as an 'inventive, beguiling and not quite fully solved puzzle of a show'. Kinnear says: 'Sondheim was always experimental with everything he did and there's a history that people don't necessarily get his stuff the first time it's done. Sometimes it takes a while to reveal itself. It's deeply odd, elliptical, portentous, very funny, joyous at times and, in moments, quite sombre. It's a wild ride.' Kinnear has been a regular at the National since 1985, when his father appeared in a season of plays led by Ian McKellen and Edward Petherbridge, that included Stoppard's The Real Inspector Hound. He was studying drama at Lamda when he saw a 2001 production of All My Sons directed by Howard Davis with Julie Walters. 'At the time I was questioning what [acting] meant, if it had significant value for me to be able to devote my life to. Seeing that made me absolutely redouble my commitment. I thought if something can move me like this, and make me question life as it did, then I want to be a part of that.' Many others might have questioned if acting was a sustainable career. Actors have always existed precariously, with Equity figures showing that the average thespian in the UK earns just £27,000 a year. Kinnear, whose mother Carmel Cryan (Brenda Boyle in EastEnders) is also an actor, as is his partner of 19 years Pandora Colin (they have two children aged 14 and 11 and live a short walk from the National), is one of the lucky few alternating lucrative jobs for the big streamers with poorly paid theatre parts. Yet he says he was never deterred by prospects of penury. 'People often ask what I got from having parents in the industry, and that was seeing acting as a viable career. Often a big block to people acting is thinking – and potentially familial pressure – that you're throwing your life into the unknown and it's a pipe dream. Whereas I saw it as a job that can be done.' He was inspired by Kinnear Sr, one of the hardest-working character actors of his generation, known for roles such as Veruca Salt's father in the original Willy Wonka film, as well as regular appearances on panel shows such as the taboo-busting That Was The Week That Was. Roy died in 1988, aged 54, falling from a horse on a film set in Spain, when his son was 10. 'Dad's dad [a Scottish rugby international] had also died when he was eight, and after that they had to be very careful. So he lived a pragmatic life. I don't think he was ever a day out of work – if it wasn't a play, it was a TV series, a voiceover, radio, a cartoon.' Today Kinnear has arguably superseded his father's legacy. 'Fame is quite different these days than in Dad's time,' he shrugs, embarrassed. 'The multiplicity of ways in which you can watch stuff means not everyone is watching things the way everyone watched [Kinnear Sr staples] Blankety Blank or The Dick Emery Show.' Nonetheless, streaming has made Kinnear Jr's face familiar to an international audience his father could never have imagined. In the US, many recognise him for his role in the first Black Mirror episode, where he played a prime minister forced to have sex with a pig, not to mention Bank of Dave, the Netflix biopic of Burnley businessman Dave Fishwick who established his own bank to help his community. Reviews were so-so but enthusiastic word-of-mouth prompted a 2025 sequel. 'Its appeal was a counter to what people perceive as institutions turning their back on people. It was nice to be part of something that gave people a good feeling.' For now he's just wrapped a film, Learning to Breathe Underwater; an Amazon miniseries based on Peter Shaffer's Amadeus; and season three of The Diplomat. Another season of Rings of Power is almost certainly on the cards. Yet his Bond role transcends all others in the fame stakes, even if Tanner's future is now unclear since the franchise was recently sold by Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson to Amazon. 'As ever with Bond, I imagine I won't know until everything is settled and they've written the script and cast a James Bond. It will be interesting to see what they do with it. I had a wonderful time working with Barbara and Michael. There'll obviously be a change in some ways, but I'm sure not too much, because it's very successful as it is.' Who is Kinnear's tip for the next Bond? 'If they're not asking me, I'm not interested,' he smiles. Was it ever his dream? He laughs self-deprecatingly. 'I've always had enough self-awareness to know I wasn't necessarily going to be Bond.' Never mind, there's plenty more to keep him occupied.
Forbes
04-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Revivals Of Classic Weill, Chekhov Plays Offered Now In Brooklyn
Top revivals of two classics—Kurt Weill's The Threepenny Opera and Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard—are being performed in Brooklyn this month. The Threepenny Opera is being presented at the Brooklyn Academy of Music by BAM and St. Ann's Warehouse through April 6, while The Cherry Orchard, a new version of the play by Benedict Andrews that originally ran at the Donmar Warehouse in London, will be offered at St. Ann's Warehouse through April 27. 16 December 2019, Berlin: Oliver Reese (l-r), artistic director of the Berliner Ensemble, conductor Adam Benzwi and Barrie Kosky, director and artistic director of the Komische Oper Berlin, will be at a press conference at the Berliner Ensemble. Kosky stages a new production of the Threepenny Opera by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill at the Berliner Ensemble. The premiere will be celebrated in early 2021. Photo: Bernd von Jutrczenka/dpa (Photo by Bernd von Jutrczenka/picture alliance via Getty Images) dpa/picture alliance via Getty Images The production of Bertolt Brecht's and Kurt Weill's The Threepenny Opera was created by director Barrie Kosky; it is performed by the Berliner Ensemble, which was founded by Brecht and whose home remains the theater where the opera premiered in 1928. As BAM explains, 'Murderous antihero Mackie Messer (a.k.a. Mack the Knife) slashes through Victorian London in The Threepenny Opera, Bertolt Brecht's scandalous satire that electrified Weimar-era German audiences 400 times in just two years after its 1928 debut. 'A century later, Brecht's razor-sharp critique of unbridled capitalism still cuts deep—an eerily prophetic vision of a well-fed society teetering on the brink, propelled by Kurt Weill's infectious, jazz-infused score. 'Barrie Kosky's Berliner Ensemble production is sly and perversely sexy, embracing seediness and cynicism with glitzy disillusion and more than a hint of danger. A master showman, Kosky manages to beguile us through the familiar rise and fall of Brecht's sociopathic leading man, adding a knowing creepiness to his unrepentant antics. 'As Mack the Knife's indelible melody lingers, this sleek, elemental staging amplifies the play's knife-edge allure, proving its savage indictment of greed remains as urgent and seductive as ever,' BAM concluded. LONDON, ENGLAND - MAY 02: Benedict Andrews attends the press night after party for "The Cherry Orchard" at The Donmar Warehouse on May 02, 2024 in London, England. (Photo by)Discussing its Chekov production, St. Ann's Warehouse said, 'In this in-the-round staging, the international cast arrive all at once and remain visible throughout the show, free to improvise and inhabit the characters' sacred home that will soon be gone. In the The Cherry Orchard Ranevskaya and her aristocratic household are confronted by the demands of a changing world. The tensions between the past and future, the personal and the political, are explored with urgency and passion while the family grapples with the inevitable loss.' Andrews, the theater continued, 'has developed a reputation as one of the world's leading interpreters of Chekhov. With the critically acclaimed The Cherry Orchard, he takes on the writer's masterpiece, contemporizing elements of the text in an unbridled, playful, and devastating vision that feels, (The Evening Standard said), 'entirely true to the spirit of the original.'' According to St. Ann's, Andrews said, 'I just love being in the rehearsal room with actors and Chekhov, it is the greatest gift. It invites enormous play, enormous exploration. It's a very democratic, collective, exploratory process where there's room for people to make offers and search for the life of the play together. By us putting the audience all the way around, there's an openness to it, it's only, only about the actors, their contact, and how they play with each other, and how that resonates with an audience. That collective experience is all I'm interested in.' St. Ann's previously offered Andrews' production of Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire, starring Gillian Anderson, Vanessa Kirby and Ben Foster. In an interview this week with Andrews said the text he created for his Chekhov production is 'direct and contemporary,' though he did retain Russian references. He also praised the intimacy of St. Ann's theater. Chekhov's characters, he added, live in a society 'that's on the brink of change and uncertainty, there's a storm on the horizon.' In today's 'time of division, (for the audience) to watch an ensemble play like this together I find really moving,' he concluded.
New York Times
18-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Barrie Kosky Is the Director New York Has Been Waiting For
When 'The Threepenny Opera' returns to New York this spring, for an all-too-brief visit to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, it will be notable for a few reasons. For one, it will be a homecoming. Although 'Threepenny' was born in Berlin, an artifact of Weimar-era culture, with music by Kurt Weill and text by Bertolt Brecht and Elisabeth Hauptmann, it had a midcentury resurgence on the level of a pop-culture phenomenon when it was revived Off Broadway in 1954. And it will be performed by the Berliner Ensemble, which was founded by Brecht and still operates out of the theater where 'Threepenny' had its premiere in 1928. The group is a trustworthy custodian of a work that is often mishandled today, especially in recent New York productions. But what is most important about this run of 'Threepenny,' presented by BAM and St. Ann's Warehouse April 3 through 6, is that it will be the first real opportunity for New York audiences to see the work of the director Barrie Kosky. Though Kosky, 58, graced local playbills once before, when his production of 'The Magic Flute,' a collaboration with the company 1927, came to the Mostly Mozart Festival in 2019, 'Threepenny' will be the first show that is purely his own. Which should come as a shock, since Kosky is one of the busiest and most brilliant, not to mention entertaining, directors working in Europe today. He is a director accomplished in theater and opera. His work could fit easily on Broadway and at the Metropolitan Opera, with a balance of intelligence and showmanship that would breathe new life into both. This 'Threepenny' will be an opportunity for him to win over New York audiences. Will impresarios be watching? Born in Australia, Kosky has described himself as a 'gay, Jewish kangaroo.' His grandparents were European transplants who came from Budapest and the shtetls of Belarus. His grandmother from Hungary instilled in him a love of operetta, he wrote in his book ''Und Vorhang auf, Hallo!,'' or ''And Curtain Up, Hello!'' He ended up developing a passion for classical music, operas and musicals without much regard for genre or hierarchy. To him, 'The Magic Flute' was the 'mother ship of the musical.' Mahler's symphonies were art, and so was 'The Simpsons.' As he grew up, and began to perform in and then direct theater, his artistry was informed, he likes to say, by two other cultural artifacts: Kafka's writing and 'The Muppets.' They weren't so different, at least in his mind. Several Kafka stories are about talking animals, and there is something Kafkaesque in Kermit's never-ending struggle to keep his show going. Both, Kosky wrote in his memoir, are reminiscent of Yiddish theater; Fozzie Bear is even a kind of sad Jewish clown. He thought of 'The Muppets' as 'a queer space' in which Miss Piggy was the reigning drag queen, flirting with Rudolf Nureyev in a steam room and tormenting Kermit, a gay 'Max Reinhardt meets Charlie Chaplin.' It's sensational for Kosky to say that his aesthetic is Kafka and 'The Muppets,' but if you watch his productions with that in mind, it's accurate. There is hardly a trace of realism in his shows, which tend to unfold throughout dreamscapes. A room may not have a wall; comedy may become irrationally nightmarish; life may just be an endless vaudeville. Kosky's career bloomed in Australia before flourishing in Europe, with tenures running the Schauspielhaus in Vienna and the Komische Oper in Berlin. (He has also had champions in the United States. The Met had planned to import his production of Prokofiev's 'The Fiery Angel' in 2020. It was canceled because of the pandemic, with no rescheduling in sight. Upstate, however, he is developing a new work with the Fisher Center at Bard.) Throughout his projects you sense someone, like Kermit, determined to put on a good show. That is why even his weaker productions still function well as theater. If anything, that is the thread through his stagings. Some are maximalist and some are minimalist, but all are theatrical, which isn't always the case with his peers in Europe. And while there are visual hallmarks to a Kosky show, like bold colors, his work is more recognizable for its sensibility: Audience members can count on virtually airtight logic, no matter how zany his work may appear, and they can expect performers to behave with the organic freedom that comes from thorough, detail-obsessed rehearsals. Like the best of directors, Kosky also knows that different titles call for different looks and dramatic gestures. In his book he describes 'Tosca' as an opera that calls for 'thick oil paint and a broad brush,' whereas something by Mozart or Janacek requires 'a fine brush.' One of the broadest canvases in the repertoire is Wagner's 'Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg,' which Kosky staged at the Bayreuth Festival in 2017. The production encapsulated his bravery, wit and charm. 'Meistersinger' contains over four and a half hours of music, with pitfalls throughout: comedy, romance, antisemitic tropes and, in the final minutes, a darkly nationalistic turn. Even more difficult is staging it at Bayreuth, which was founded by Wagner and comes with the baggage of complicated history, not least as a favorite opera destination of Hitler's. Kosky addressed all that head-on. He set the first act inside a replica of Wahnfried, Wagner's home, where the composer was known to play and sing through his opera scores. Kosky recreated one of those gatherings, with 'Meistersinger' characters represented by real, historical people like Cosima Wagner and her father, Franz Liszt. He even included Wagner's Newfoundland dogs. At first, the set design was unusually realistic for Kosky. But at the end of Act One, the walls were pulled up to reveal the comparatively chilly courtroom interior of the Nuremberg trials. In Wagner's libretto, the second act closes with a comedic riot sparked by a misunderstanding and an attack on the character Beckmesser, a pedantic villain coded as a kind of Jewish outsider. There was humor in Kosky's staging, but it was replaced by horror at what suddenly started to look like a pogrom. It felt as if everyone in the theater was holding their breath as an enormous antisemitic caricature based on 'The Eternal Jew' inflated onstage like a Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade float. As it deflated and the curtain closed, the audience was left with a provocation for the hourlong intermission that followed. For the nationalistic ending, Kosky had the character Hans Sachs deliver his monologue about 'holy German art' as if testifying at Nuremberg, shaking his fists with conviction as the courtroom emptied and he was left alone while a Fellini-esque orchestra in black tie rolled onstage to play the jubilant finale. Was it delusion or triumph? The audience was left to decide, a stand-in for the jury. Like the opera, Kosky's staging was hardly simple. But it was clear, funny yet terrifying, delightful and then haunting. He has achieved similar effects with starker images. In his production of Janacek's 'Kat'a Kabanova' at the Salzburg Festival in 2022, the opera's tragedy unfolded both on a bare stage and before hundreds of mannequins with their backs turned on the action. The action of his 'Fiddler on the Roof,' which originated at the Komische Oper but has traveled to Lyric Opera of Chicago, springs from a stack of wardrobes and wooden furniture. 'Fiddler' is far from the only musical that Kosky has staged at the Komische Oper, a one-stop shop in Berlin for opera, operetta and musical theater. During his time there, which ended in 2022 with a delirious, three-hour show called 'Barrie Kosky's All-Singing, All-Dancing Yiddish Revue,' he revolutionized the company's repertoire and unearthed operettas by composers like Paul Abraham, Oscar Straus and Emmerich Kalman. Kosky continues to direct at the Komische Oper, and he is midway through a plan to stage five musicals there. He began with 'La Cage aux Folles,' in a gayer, grander treatment than it ever got on Broadway, and continued with 'Chicago,' free of Fosse clichés and heavy on razzle-dazzle. Last fall he directed 'Sweeney Todd,' which at first appeared to take place in a Victorian toy theater before unfolding against images of urban decay, including in Thatcher-era London. All these were better than their most recent counterparts in New York. Directing 'Threepenny,' at the storied Berliner Ensemble in 2021, had similar pressures to the 'Meistersinger' job at Bayreuth. He was replacing the chilly, unmusical production by Robert Wilson, and 'Threepenny,' a beloved but imperfect work, is difficult. Too often, modern productions are bogged down by humorlessness and affected sleaze, as if it were 'Cabaret.' But 'Threepenny' is filthily hilarious and dangerously entertaining, daring audiences to be seduced by Weill's earworm melodies before stinging them with the barbs of Brecht and Hauptmann's script. Kosky, more than most directors, is sensitive to its polyphonic structure in his staging, which moves around, repeats and trims material throughout to make the show move briskly and with a light hand, allowing the subtext its slithering grace. For people who were brought up on Brecht as a purveyor of deliberatively blunt theater, Kosky's approach may seem sacrilegious. But in its affability, its showmanship, his 'Threepenny' works the unsettling magic it should. It's not until the lights come up, and you begin to relax your smile, that you realize you were just cheering for a narcissistic murderer by the name of Mack the Knife.
