Cicero is typing

One of Russia’s leading chamber choirs, the Intrada Vocal Ensemble, performed five new works by contemporary composers at the SOUND UP festival. Among them, Igor Yakovenko presented his vocal score “Cicero is typing...”.

In this piece, the choir becomes the medium of a philosophical debate: fragments from Cicero’s On the Ends of Good and Evil and Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil are transformed into an imagined dialogue across centuries. Written in a three-part structure, the work unfolds as a sequence of theses, antitheses, and syntheses, where the logic of music takes precedence over the literal meaning of the text.

Yakovenko’s score reflects on how intellectual life might look in the digital age — as if two great European thinkers were arguing in a modern chatroom. The choir voices embody this paradox, balancing irony and seriousness, and turning abstract philosophy into a vivid and emotionally charged sound experience.

Through this work, Yakovenko not only continues the centuries-long tradition of Russian choral music but also brings it into dialogue with European cultural thought. “Cicero is typing...” became one of the most striking moments of the concert promenade, showing how the human voice can bridge the gap between history, philosophy, and contemporary art.