Floof (Songs of a Homeostatic Homer) (1988)

Esa-Pekka Salonen ended a Green Umbrella Program Tuesday with a performance of "Floof," a small Modernist work he wrote 20 years ago for soprano and five instruments. It is a humorous score. The singer represets a sputtering computer trying to learn language and create poetry.

A histrionic cantata for solo soprano and amplified quintet, Floof was given a hysterical, energetic performance by the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group and soloist Anu Komsi, conducted by the composer.
The piece sets a text by Stanislaw Lem that imagines a cybernetic world in which poetry is composed by machines, and the words lurch from semantic confusion to outright nonsense. Komsi captured the sense of a machine gradually losing control, and Salonen's music mixed machine-like passages with wild, improvisatory abandon.

Salonen’s output is not large, but most of his pieces reveal a fertile mind. They are neither uncompromising nor compromising in a post-modern way; post-serial might be a better description, for there remains a striking, avant-garde adventurousness about the best of them. Floof, which draws from the Polish science-fiction writer Stanislaw Lem’s The Cyberiad, is a humorous work that inhabits a strange sound-world – its five instrumentalists and coloratura soprano are amplified to give an almost “pop” flavour. The young Finnish singer Anu Komsi was an outstanding soloist, whose feat was not only to produce the guttural noises and piercing, stratospheric notes, but to deliver the text flawlessly from memory.