In case you are wondering why Tod didn’t emerge from his barn-studio for the past two months, he was busy orchestrating “A Toronto Symphony.” In this new SoundNotion interview, Tod explains his work process, along with sundry other hot topics from the Media Lab and Opera of the Future. (The interview was recorded over Skype, and you can see bits of the barn in the background.)
A symphony orchestra work has a whole lot of parts! Just to give you an idea, here’s the list of instruments (not including strings) for the piece:
Woo hoo! “A Toronto Symphony” is finished!! Here’s the first page of the score. Tod worked non-stop orchestrating it over the past month, with a major push in the middle of the weekend blizzard to assemble the complete score. He received invaluable help from a hardy band of Media Lab students and producers who trekked through thigh-deep snow to get down the unplowed driveway and out to the barn. The score was sent it off to conductor Peter Oundjian last night, and Tod will fly to Toronto on Thursday to go over everything with the orchestra. There’s still a huge amount of work to get the piece ready for its premiere on March 9th. Reserve your tickets here!
From DJ Poet to the BSO:) Went to Symphony Hall last night to hear the Boston Symphony play a French-Russian program of Dutilleux, Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky and Ravel, conducted by Alan Gilbert. The revelation for me was “La Valse” by Ravel, well-known of course, but ear-expanding after all my current work with the Toronto Symphony piece. No one uses an orchestra better than Ravel, and there are always two or three layers of subsidiary sound murmuring meaningfully beyond the obvious. Subtle, surprising, and perfectly played. One extra “surprise” was that – probably due to more-than-usual empty seats in the hall (not THAT popular a program, I guess), people kept knocking the stern BSO wood-leather seats in front of them, causing the bottom part of the seat to fall down from its propped up position; made weird crashing sounds throughout the concert. Could make a terrific audience-participation element in another context!
“In 50 years, and probably well before that, every piece of music will be some kind of collaboration.”
Photo by JC Dhien Photography
As the ambitious “A Toronto Symphony” project heads into its final phase, journalist Molly Petrilla checked in with composer Tod Machover for an update. In this excellent Smartplanet interview, Tod describes his motivation and vision for this unprecedented collaborative “concerto for composer and city”, and also talks about lessons learned:
Twenty percent of the interesting stuff has been seeded and developed purely online, but about 80 percent has been from contact with real people sitting face to face trading music, trading ideas and trying things. It’s taken a lot of time but it’s been so rich.
It’s important that it ends up being a piece of music people simply want to listen to and that creates an emotional effect and speaks for itself, but I also hope it’s something that everybody who participated feels like it’s theirs somehow — including me. If it feels like something we all made and that none of us could have made without each other, that would be a great success.
Tod also imagines the future of music:
Over these last 30 or 40 years, sound has been liberated. Music is a combination of learning how to listen and learning how to tell stories through sound. We have every sound in the universe in front of us as a possibility now. I think one thing in the future will be a sound where the orchestra is everything around us, and the language that will begin to emerge is a language that makes harmony out of all that — a new kind of harmony where all the elements fit together in ways we can’t quite imagine now.
Do you see this happening already? What are some interesting examples?
As the Opera of the Future team heads into the final stretch of its ambitious Toronto Symphony project, it has released a brand-new web application called Media Scores. The system enables anyone to mold sections of composer Tod Machover’s music like pieces of sonic clay, save their work, and share them with other users, including Machover. It’s all part of an experiment to stretch the boundaries of collaboration between artist and the public.
The first Media Scores activity was just released yesterday. According to the A Toronto Symphony website, it “will allow you to help complete the Finale section (“Toronto Dances”) of the piece, contribute to the accompaniment “texture” of the work’s virtuosic “City Soaring” movement, and experiment with other sections of the composition to build your own unique blend and personalized musical narrative.”
In this CBC News feature, Tod explains his motivation for turning what could have been a straightforward orchestra commission into a high-wire act involving entirely novel technology and attempts to engage a diverse swath of Toronto’s citizens in helping him create the piece:
That said, “it’s pretty unlikely that [a Lady Gaga YouTube cover his daughter makes with her friends] will change Lady Gaga’s next song,” he admitted.
The interactive Toronto Symphony project is his attempt to turn that involvement into true, two-way communication…
What he’s grappling with now is not just creating an abstract piece of music, but developing something that affects people emotionally, “involves being aware, literally and metaphorically, of what your city sounds like” and “doing justice to the richness of what’s coming in.”
Check out this video in which Tod explains how Media Scores works. Then go and try it out!
The spectacular Blue Heron vocal ensemble performing in the MIT Chapel.
Post by Elly Jessop and Rebecca Kleinberger
As part of the Dalai Lama’s visit to MIT, the Opera of the Future Group performed an experiment in collaboration with the vocal ensemble Blue Heron, Affectiva, Elliott Hedman, and Tenzin Priyadarshi, director of the Dalai Lama Center at MIT. During Blue Heron’s stunning performance of early choral music on Monday, we used Affectiva’s Q Sensors to track and measure the reactions of selected singers and audience members over the course of the concert. The wireless Q Sensors, worn on the wrists or palms, measure the wearer’s skin conductance, which increases during emotional states such as anticipation, excitement, surprise, or anxiety. Through the information provided by these sensors, we can examine the similarities and differences in the affective reactions of various singers and audience members.
Tod and Elliott presented some of the affective stories of a few performers and audience members stories on Tuesday at the beginning of the Dalai Lama’s final talk at MIT. Continue reading
The Dalai Lama visited M.I.T. earlier this week to give a series of talks hosted by the Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values. The Opera of the Future group in collaboration with Tenzin Priyadarshi, MIT’s Buddhist Chaplain and Director of the Dalai Lama Center at MIT, and the Blue Heron vocal ensemble, produced a fascinating experiment in the M.I.T. Chapel. Here are a few fun photos providing a glimpse. We’ll be posting more about this later.
In mid-June, Tod officially launched his project with the Toronto Symphony at the ideacity 2012 conference. On the project blog, Tod explains the ideas behind his “launch music”:
To officially launch our A Toronto Symphony collaboration, I created a series of chords last month to serve as a kind of “genetic” code for the project, and also to serve as material that we could share back-and-forth to modify and to make new things. Chord progressions are great because they are both simple – a kind of musical backbone or skeleton – yet complex enough to truly tell a story. Just think of the chords in a classic piece by The Beatles like “Michelle”, or the way Bach squeezes a universe of expression out of his seemingly simple 4-part Chorales. Continue reading
Tod’s current project, “A Toronto Symphony”, is about active, mindful listening to the world around us, in this case the city of Toronto. The composer asks the inhabitants to focus on the sounds that evoke strong feelings, images and memories about their city and their lives, raw sounds that he will transform into music. As an example, Tod turns to his 2008 opera “Skellig”, based on David Almond’s beloved modern classic. About “Skellig”, Tod writes that it is
…an opera about the relationship between the natural world that surrounds us, our everyday perception, and the heightened perception – and action – that comes when we pay close attention – and listen - to what is really there. Hence the opera combines recorded sounds as well as transitions that find the music in those sounds via voices (a young people’s chorus) and instruments (a chamber orchestra).
Tod was in New York on Thursday recording a new song, “Open Up the House,” for soprano and piano, commissioned by Opera America to celebrate the opening of the new National Opera Center in Manhattan next month. Forty new songs – a real cross-section of contemporary American music – have been created and recorded for the occasion. It will be issued in a 3-CD set.
Tae Kim, piano, and Merrin Lazyan, soprano, recording “Open Up the House” in NYC.
From Tod’s Facebook page:
First page of score to “Open Up the House,” brand new song composed for the opening of the National Opera Center next month. I reworked the wonderful poems by Letha Hafferkamp (Kiddie) which she wrote for me almost 40 years ago, and which I set for my very first song cycle, “Three Songs.” I reused and further twisted some of the strange musical hooks from that earlier cycle in this new song. So writing this piece has been a wonderful experience of starting fresh with something from my beginnings…reassuring to know that it seems to have worked out. The song sounded great yesterday and should make a terrific recording.
"Mr. Machover's new quartet, "... but not simpler ...," is a vigorous, exciting study in speediness, full of tremolando figures, racing lines and iridescent passages.."
- The New York Times
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