Kitagawa Utamaro, Grasshopper and Cicada, from Picture Book of Selected Insects with Crazy Poems (1788).
Hello World
Music: Thomas Hewitt Jones
Words: Paul Williamson
© 2014
Recitative and aria (8 minutes) bringing together themes from Plato’s Phaedrus with the Python programming language code sequence that produces the introductory phrase ‘Hello World’. The piece was performed by Benjamin Williamson (countertenor) and Thomas Hewitt Jones (piano, cello, electronics) at The Poetics of Verticality, curated by Simone Kotva, an event held at Robinson College, Cambridge, 21 January 2014. Other contributions included Sue Henderson’s Formation and Triptych (two sets of works on paper) and a reading by Robin Kirkpatrick.
From the programme note: In the dark interior of the devices on which we work and play, millions of tiny signs are at work. They scurry about like blind ants performing their thankless tasks, except that they are invisible and apparently motionless. Nothing more than the presence or absence of electrical pulses, these little bursts of energy are perceptible in themselves only when they are working so hard that their efforts spill out into the world as heat. Then the annoying fan is activated. For, despite its magic, the laptop is the great grandchild of the steam engine, toddling along the arrow of time with the rest of us, making its minuscule contribution to the disorder that is gradually and ineluctably settling on everything.
From the text:
Crick, the cicadas from above
Compose enticements to your love:
The pleasing green is deep and wide,
Come nestle softly by my side
And gather while we may a kiss.
Reminding is forgetfulness,
And love is madness, frenzied bliss:
Crick the cicadas sing of this.
[…]
Here follows the source code to generate
The standard introductory sequence,
Hello World, in Python, a general-
Purpose, high-level programming language
[Open-source software, multi-paradigm,
Object-oriented, imperative,
Functional and reflective …
Two Extracts from Hello World © 2014