Check out this splendid recording of the world premiere of Tod Machover’s FLOW Symphony. The piece was performed by the Sejong Soloists on August 24, 2024, at the Seoul Arts Center.
Here are Machover’s program notes about FLOW Symphony:
FLOW Symphony is the second work that I have composed for Sejong Soloists, after Overstory Overture that the ensemble premiered in New York and Seoul in March 2023. FLOW Symphony is scored for string orchestra, electronics, and Al enhancement. The ca. 15-minute piece is inspired by the “flowing” nature of rivers, constant in the rush or trickle of water but also everchanging through alwaysdifferent droplets, in the slowly evolving interaction between water and rocks and riverbanks, and in our changing perception as we watch and listen to a river run by. I rediscovered these “river-esque” qualities in September 2023 as I started to work on this composition. I was staying in a remote cabin in a mountainous part of Vermont (U.S.A.) when I was attracted to the gentle, beautiful sounds of a river close by. By spending hours listening to it, I was amazed at how many layers of sound I could perceive – beyond the initial impression of pleasant sameness – as my mind grew stiller and my senses opened up. Soon each stone sounded a different tune as water caressed it, a tilt of the head changed the overall tone quality, and drawing attention to near or far activity revealed a symphonic richness of counterpoint and rhythm. I was so attracted to this river that I returned a few weeks later with a battery of recording equipment and spent two days listening, moving, and capturing river sound from diverse angles, distances and positions. These hours of recordings became one source of sound for FLOW Symphony and also provided a guide to the composition itself. I worked with Sejong Soloists in New York to “translate” the sound and feel of the river into instrumental language, and then worked in my studio back in Boston to create hybrid blends of strings and water, as well as new sounds that extend and connect both.
FLOW Symphony proposes a “musicalized” version of this process of discovering the river’s sonic secrets. The piece is organized into eight sections that increasingly reveal inner patterns and musical potential found in the river. Starting with the river sound itself, more and more subtle details emerge as the rushing currents morph into rapid string passages, always propelled by a constantly developing melody, evolving finally into a texture that is very calm but also swarming with active detail. This is not a long piece, but the musical and emotional journey is extensive.
To enhance the interplay of natural and musical sounds in FLOW Symphony as well as to provide a new kind of everchanging musical “flow,” we created an Al system especially for this work. Designed and programmed by Manaswi Mishra, a PhD researcher at the MIT Media Lab, “FLOW Al” serves two functions for: first, it reacts to live ensemble playing in parts of the piece and adds unusual hybrid sonorities in appropriate but surprising ways; and second, by using a new ”.Al Radio” system developed in our group at MIT, it allows an online version of the composition to play out differently at each hearing, preserving the essential feel and “flow” of my music while allowing listeners to dial in changes to duration, complexity and overall feel. The first “Al Radio” version of FLOW Symphony can be experienced at QR Code*, and a final version will be available in Spring 2025. I hope that these novel Al enhancements, added to the flowing melodies, overlapping harmonies, pulsating rhythms and twinkling textures of FLOW Symphony, will leave listeners as captivated, refreshed and intrigued as I was while listening to “my” Vermont river.
Opera of the Future 