Igor Toronyi-Lalic

I’m bullish about AI. All aesthetic snobs should be. In the war on man-made slop – still the most pressing threat – algorithms are an ally. After all, how much of the output of Netflix, Hollywood or Sony will retain its allure once AI is ventriloquising it to perfection? The qualities that have made popular art popular – legibility, fluency, tidiness – will surely be fatally tainted, perhaps even start to repel us. What we will crave instead is for culture to look and feel weird – opaque, messy, frangible. The experimental might even become box office. Wishful thinking? Well if the Rewire music festival in The Hague is anything to go by – so rammed this year that it was actually rather unbearable – it might already be happening.

Bruckner at the Wigmore Hall. Yes, you heard right: a Bruckner symphony – his second: usually performed by 80-odd musicians – on a stage scarcely larger than my bedroom. How? Welcome to Anthony Payne’s very smart 2013 chamber arrangement. Bruckner on Ozempic. Composition is an Alice in Wonderland activity. A key duty is mastering how to make things bigger and smaller, how to stretch and compress and bend – time and space and sound. Bruckner understood this well. If you know anything about his symphonies, it’s that they’re vast – and that critics are mandated to compare them to cathedrals or mountain ranges. What survives after such an extreme trim? More than you expect. The long sightlines remain; paradoxically, the reduced forces sharpen the sense of depth.

No one wrote programme notes quite like the English experimentalist John White. ‘This music is top-quality trash,’ proclaims his 1993 album Fashion Music. ‘We kindly ask the users of this CD to play it at the volume of a suburban Paris soundmachine or a London underground discman earphone as used by the kid next door.’ Track titles included ‘Epaulette’ and ‘Latin Flutes’. From what I remember – my copy vanished a long time ago – the music was cheap and very funny: tinny and dumb. I was reminded of White recently because trash is back. Everywhere I go, I find composers producing shamefully terrible music. Some deliberately, some inadvertently. What flavour of terrible? Not ugly or discordant. Not camp. More tonal and naff: works woven from the worn-out and iffy.

On the continent this summer, new operas from two of Britain’s most important composers. Oliver Leith likes guns, animals and dissolving sickly sweet sounds in acid baths of microtonality. In one recent orchestral work, the conductor becomes a pistol-wielding madman; his next, Garland, a vast pageant premiering on 18 September at Bold Tendencies, Peckham, sees a horse become a musician. He’s 35 and already has a school. Listen out for it – in the London new-music scene you can’t move for Leithians. The telltale sign is the sound of twisting metal: shiny pitches that warp and bend until brittle. He’s English but in an outsidery way – jokey, gentle, sad, eccentric. The opposite of arch, insidery Benjamin Britten.

‘When you’re not offensive in life, you obtain absolutely nothing,’ declares a twinkly-eyed Pierre Boulez in one of the archive films that the Barbican were screening to celebrate the composer’s centenary. What a joy to be reminded of the young Boulez – the unashamed elitist, the unbeatable snob. Not even allies such as Schoenberg (too trad) and Messiaen (‘vulgar’) were safe from his tongue. To Boulez, pop music wasn’t good or bad; it didn’t exist. Ditto his own life. ‘I will be the first composer without a biography’, he proclaimed. Forget that Boulez was entangled in a love triangle with Camus’s mistress and for most of his time on earth screwing his valet, Hans… The music was everything.

The most important thing to know about the filmmaker and writer Marguerite Duras is that she was a total drunk. ‘I became an alcoholic as soon as I started to drink,’ she wrote, proudly. ‘And left everyone else behind.’ It’s not something any of the academics who’d been drafted in to introduce each film in the ICA’s exhaustive Duras season thought to mention, even in passing. Instead they spent their time trying to convince us that her films were political: they were about Palestine, feminism, decolonisation. They aren’t. They’re about being bladdered. They’re about the fact that Duras would wake up by vomiting her first two glasses of booze, before embarking on as many as eight litres of Bordeaux a day. To ruin we all go: cinema and actors, ears, eyes and brain.

Salzburg Festival doesn’t mess about. The offerings this year include an adaptation of Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain in Lithuanian, a Soviet-era operatic treatment of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, and Igor Levit tackling one of the Himalayan peaks of the piano rep. Kiddies, meanwhile, could enjoy the children’s opera Die Kluge (brilliantly done), a Nazi-era allegory on the rise of Hitler by Carl Orff, a composer they love here but whose politics are shall we say, um, complicated. (Pleasingly, I’m not sure the festival understands the concept of cancellation.) People always think Salzburg is pretty and fun. It’s not. It’s dark and primal, with a festival that is far more uncompromising and exhilarating than a global-elite bun-fight in provincial Austria has any right to be.