UoS Music Presents | AI Love Letters + Milhaud Projects

This double bill features two works that explore contemporary innovations, and written exactly a century apart. Darius Milhaud’s ballet score for small orchestra, ‘La Crèation du Monde’ (1923), and Benjamin Oliver’s ‘Love Letters’ (2023) for vocals, piano and electronics.

The Department of Music’s project ensemble Hartley Loop Orchestra will perform ‘La Crèation du Monde’. It draws on elements of the jazz Milhaud heard in London in 1920 and New York in 1922. Leonard Bernstein suggested this piece reflected Milhaud’s ‘real love affair with jazz’. Influences from jazz can be found in the instrumentation, such as replacement of the viola in the string section with an alto saxophone, and the musical language, for example the use of ‘blue notes’ and percussion cross-rhythms.

Jazz influences are evident in all of Benjamin Oliver’s music. The texts of the seven love songs in ‘Love Letters’ emerge from working with the contemporary technological innovation of Artificial Intelligence. The songs set melancholic, absurd and dramatic expressions of love created with ‘LovelaceGPT’, an AI text generation model developed by University of Southampton researchers. Originally recorded by British soul sensation Hannah Williams and Riot Ensemble for Oliver’s portrait album TOO MANY SWEETS (BRC24), this duo version features Williams performing alongside the composer at the piano.