Instruments of Desire

Earlier this year, Timothée Chalamet touched off a cultural firestorm by suggesting that classical performing arts were being kept alive “even though no one cares about this anymore.” From the uproar, a question emerged: How does an artform remain vital rather than merely survive, and continue to be an experience people desire and seek out?

Part chamber concert, part repertory series, Instruments of Desire presents four films that set classical music and narrative storytelling in unusually close counterpoint. Music goes beyond supplying the emotional texture of a soundtrack to directly shape stories of artistic mythology and obsession, patronage and institutional power, and the labor and seductions of performance. These films reimagine how cinema can think musically. While questioning how tradition is inherited and authorized, they revel in it as living, complex, dramatic material.