From Tod Machover’s Facebook:
Just did a live interview on BBC Scotland for my FESTIVAL CITY project for the Edinburgh International Festival. We talked about the idea of collecting sounds of the city, mixing those with music, and the hosts had even made their own collage of Edinburgh sounds for me to listen to. You can participate in the project at www.eif.co.uk/festivalcity or follow our blog at edinburgh.media.mit.edu.
Listen to the interview here.
From Tod Machover’s Facebook page:
Did a fun live interview today on BBC Radio Scotland about my new Edinburgh “Festival City” collaborative symphony project. It was for a brand new show – The Culture Studio with Janice Forsyth – that premiered…today! My segment starts at 1:34:00 and runs to the end of the show http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01rlrmh. There is also a fantastic interview with David Hendy (at 1:21:00), a UK media historian, who talks about the role of noise in human history (and even plays a soundscape from an imagined early 19th century Edinburgh. Plus a superb interview with Annie Lennox (at 0:04:21). Enjoy the lot of it!!
Listen to The Culture Studio with Janice Forsyth here, with guests Annie Lennox, Kristin Scott Thomas, David Hendy and Tod Machover.
Check out this wonderful interview with David Almond on the BBC’s Desert Island Discs series. David discusses children’s literature and the music he’d want if he were a castaway. Thirty minutes into the interview he talks about the opera version of Skellig, on which he collaborated with composer Tod Machover. Here’s what BBC program says about David:
Most of his work is for children but the adults who populate the juries of heavyweight literary prizes really like it too. The accolades began with his first novel Skellig published in 1998 when he was 47; it won the mighty “Whitbread Children’s” award and then many others besides.
Ever since, he’s been acclaimed for his ability to craft complex, philosophical narratives with strikingly down to earth characterisations.
Listen to the interview here: BBC Desert Island Discs with author David Almond.
David Almond (from the BBC)
Photo by JC Dhien Photography
Check out the CBC’s MetroMorning interview with Tod Machover. Click here.
Toronto Symphony Orchestra conductor Peter Oundjian and composer Tod Machover talk about the genesis of Toronto’s new “crowdsourced” symphony. Sneak preview of “A Toronto Symphony” in rehearsal. Read the story and watch the video by clicking here -> A Toronto Symphony: CN Tower light show to accompany world premier
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:
Mark your calendars! San Francisco’s public radio TV station KQED will be airing a one-hour-long interview with Tod Machover this week. Here’s the scoop:
Meet musician and inventor Tod Machover, the creator of technologies behind “Guitar Hero” and ”Rock Band.” Computer History Museum’s John Hollar speaks to the influential composer, whose work has been performed internationally, about the future of digital music and his research as the professor of music and media at MIT Media Lab, where he directs the Opera of the Future group.
UPCOMING BROADCASTS:
• KQED Plus: Tue, Feb 26, 2013 — 7:00pm
• KQED Plus: Wed, Feb 27, 2013 — 1:00am
• KQED Plus: Wed, Feb 27, 2013 — 11:00pm
• KQED Plus: Thu, Feb 28, 2013 — 5:00am
Visit the KQED program page and scroll down. You can have an email reminder sent to you.
“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?
Read the full article: Q&A: Tod Machover, composer and inventor
Check out this post on PBS’s MediaShift blog about Tod Machover’s project for the Toronto Symphony. The interview focuses on how the project is exploring and extending what it means to engage in a creative collaboration, and the role technology plays in mediating that interaction. There’s fresh interview material, a nice collection of videos and a sneak peek of what’s coming later this week:
On December 6, Machover will issue his latest challenge, simultaneously debuting a new software tool called Mediascore, which lets “different collaborators talk to each other and shape sections (of a musical composition) without necessarily knowing how to write music” — composing, for example, by drawing lines and choosing colors.
Read further: How Tod Machover and the City of Toronto Are Creating a Symphony
Elliott Carter (photo by Meredith Heuer)
Starting at midnight November 13, New York City’s classical music station WQXR will be airing a 24-hour marathon in honor of the late Elliott Carter.
Listen to the Elliott Carter marathon here
Tod Machover pays tribute to his most important mentor in a series of interviews with a diverse group of people, including Fred Sherry, Ursula Oppens, Charles Rosen, and others. who knew and worked with Carter.
Listen to the tributes in “Remembering Elliott Carter”
Correction: We previously wrote that the series of interviews was with a group of contemporary composers. The group includes many individuals who performed and championed Carter’s work.
