Yannis Kyriakides’ new work Ask Ada comes exclusively to GNO TV

Yannis Kyriakides
Ask Ada
Music theatre for voice, instrumental ensemble and multimedia

Available for free streaming at nationalopera.gr/GNOTV/en
from 11 September to 31 December 2021

As part of the tribute to the 2021 bicentennial of the Greek Revolution
Cycle “Odes to Byron”

Distinguished composer Yannis Kyriakides’ new work Ask Ada comes exclusively to GNO TV from 11 September to 31 December 2021, as part of the tribute to the 2021 bicentennial of the Greek Revolution. It is a groundbreaking music theatre composition for voice, instrumental ensemble and multimedia, based on the life and work of computer science pioneer and Lord Byron’s daughter, Ada Lovelace, who is considered to have written the first algorithm for computer in 1843.

Predicated on the historical testimonies on her life and work, as well as on the repentant Byron’s subsequent letters and poems about his abandoned daughter, the prolific new music virtuoso Yannis Kyriakides, who lives and creates in the Netherlands, gives voice to this unique historical figure –with her equally colourful, “Byronic” personal life– in a work of multimedia music theatre that showcases and draws on the implications of her pioneering scientific research.

Ask Ada, to a libretto by Theodora Delavault, conducted by Gregory Charette and with visual material created by Darien Brito, will be available for free streaming at nationalopera.gr/GNOTV/en with Greek and English subtitles. The work was commissioned by the GNO Alternative Stage from Yannis Kyriakides as part of the thematic cycle “Odes to Byron”, which pays homage to the emblematic Romantic poet and philhellene Lord Byron. The cycle is curated by composer Alexandros Mouzas.

This production, part of a tribute to the 2021 bicentennial of the Greek Revolution, is made possible by a grant from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) [www.SNF.org].

Ask Ada Lovelace

Fruit of Lord Byron’s failed marriage to Annabella Milbanke and expelled from home, alongside her mother, at the age of only five weeks, Ada Lovelace never had a relationship with her father, who definitively abandoned England only three months later, in the midst of unbridled scandal-mongering. This didn’t prevent Byron’s only legitimate child from developing her own autonomous and fascinating personality. Discouraged from any interest in poetry and poets, the young Ada cultivated her mathematical skills to explore “the hidden world around us”: she drew flying machines in the age of twelve, published a pioneering algorithm, widely considered as the first computer programme in history, for Charles Babbage’s “Analytical Engine” and envisaged early the extended potentialities of computers in fields such as musical harmony and composition.

Ask Yannis Kyriakides

In her infamous “Note G” to a paper on Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine (1843), Ada Lovelace, creator of the first computer algorithm, writes: “The analytical engine might act upon other things besides number.”

With this vision, she foresees the era of artificial intelligence and its effect on our lives more than a century and a half before its time. As an amateur musician (she played the harp), she even understood how music itself could be generated by an algorithm based on certain rules.

When I was asked to compose a new work based on Ada Lovelace, my first thought was what kind of composition might she have imagined could be written based on these algorithms. When I looked at the original algorithm, the first thing that struck me was how contemporary it seemed: functions, variables and loops that we find in contemporary code were already in this first algorithm, a programme that she created to solve so-called Bernoulli numbers, a complex mathematical procedure.

I set about trying to create my own algorithm based on generating a series of numbers with a similar pattern. I wanted to create a sound world that was both machine-like but within a coherent harmonic world that would not be too far from the tonal language of mid-19th century Europe. I wanted to use this structure in how the pieces of her life are presented, a dramaturgy that oscillates between different perspectives of her life, of her writing, the autobiographical, the scientific, and her legacy.

— Yannis Kyriakides

Synopsis

Ask Ada, not Siri. Ask someone who understands, who was here before the madness began. And ask her in the lightest, most opiate way. Leaving the dullness of science to its own fields. Speak to the whole woman at once. The sides A and B of Ada, the on-screen and live, interweave their two tones, the way a Jacquard loom might, with, at its heart, a human creation, but, in its cloth, a lot of the machine about it. Conscious and subconscious, day and night, they interrupt each other continuously in the rhythmic way of a loom pedal.

Ada Lovelace was first rendered an icon in the 1970s, when her name was given to a pioneering computer programming language. Like Tutankhamen, she was brought back to life the moment her name was recalled, for Egyptians, in antiquity, believed you only die once your name is no longer uttered. And now she is in every Rebel Girls story, Doctor Who programme, or cartoon web series on female mathematicians, and has become the heroine of an age that despises math, but depends on it.

An opera based not only on the correspondence between Lady Lovelace and the inventor of the Analytical Engine, Charles Babbage, but on her father’s, Lord Byron’s, poetry as well as the wide-ranging effect and influence of her “intuitions” and vision for where this Machine might lead humanity. Any real power today seems to lurk in the hands of mastermind programmers, the algorithm itself knowing more than its inventor, the results –unknown– often leading to inhuman consequences. So who is in charge? Who is to say whether the outcomes are godly, the patterns that exist, veiled lightly, ruling our universe and ourselves… Or demonic? The devil’s luck! As Ada would say, the outcomes are often unpredictable.

Limited as she was to doing everything in 36 years, like father Byron, it was enough to bring us here today, reading quietly on our time machines, painlessly, in the event that there’s still more to explore and discover, that the world will continue, despite the chaos and catastrophe that are once more cataclysmically hitting it. Even with time being unreal, the work is relatively short for an opera, lasting just under an hour, and the structure revolves around the number 36.

Music theatre • World premiere / Commissioned by the GNO Alternative Stage
Cycle “Odes to Byron”

Yannis Kyriakides
Ask Ada
Music theatre for voice, ensemble and multimedia

As part of the tribute to the 2021 bicentennial of the Greek Revolution

Free screening on nationalopera.gr/GNOTV/en from 11 September until 31 December 2021

Filmed on the GNO Alternative Stage at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center on 11 & 12 June 2021

With Greek and English subtitles

Libretto: Theodora Delavault

Conductor: Gregory Charette

Visuals, Programming: Darien Brito

Costume design:  Brian De Carvalho

Lighting designer: Melina Mascha

Vocalist: Michaela Riener

Musicians: Costas Seremetis (percussion), Evangelia Kiosoglou (harp), Apostolos Palios (piano), Dionisis Vervitsiotis (violin), Yannis Athanasopoulos (viola), Alexandros Botinis (cello)

Founding donor to the Alternative Stage & the 2021 bicentennial of the Greek Revolution
Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) [www.SNF.org]