A Conspiracy of Feelings

A Conspiracy of Feelings is a seven-minute work for chamber orchestra, written for the HELIX! New Music Ensemble and premiered at (Le) Poisson Rouge in New York. Its title and concept come from Yuri Olesha’s 1929 stage adaptation of his 1927 novel Envy; the piece moves through the bourgeois emotions to which the deuteragonist Ivan Babichev is so attached — greed, resentment, envy — feelings that Olesha argued were chief in the matter of art, tragedy, and narrative, and that the new revolutionary order had set out to dismantle.

In 1927 a great deal of Russian society was changing rapidly. Many welcomed the changes; others, attached to the older individualist values, found themselves marginalised — for good and for bad. We are living through a version of this now, with unchecked technological monopolies setting the terms of our social world. Indifference is the feeling both novel and piece end on. I recommend the book heartily; perhaps we will feel differently when the time comes for our own revolution.

“…evoking post-revolutionary moods in an almost Elgarian sweep of broad melody and nostalgia.” — New York Classical Review