For Tod Machover — composer, inventor, and faculty director of the MIT Media Lab — the question was never whether AI could make art on its own. It’s whether technology can deepen what human artists make, and how audiences experience it. That conviction has driven his work since the 1980s, when he began building new technologies for music, and since 1987, when he wove AI elements into his opera VALIS.
This October, it takes its most ambitious form yet. The Boston Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Kent Nagano, will give the world premiere of Machover’s new symphony, already and not yet — a work about democracy in peril, and about the possibility of something better. The three performances are part of the MIT Media Lab’s 40th Anniversary celebration.
The idea behind the title
already and not yet names the state of the world, and of this country: there is already much to appreciate, but it is unfinished, imperfect, and urgently in need of pushing forward.
The symphony traces that arc across three movements. The first is a clash, a crisis. The second is an awakening. The third unfolds as a depiction of a future democracy as Machover imagines it.
A live AI system, built at the Media Lab
Throughout the piece, the orchestra is powered in part by a new “live AI” system designed specifically for the work by Machover’s team at the MIT Media Lab.
“Electronics enhance the orchestra throughout,” Machover says, “but our Live AI system becomes prominent in movements 2 and 3. In movement 2, I use it to spin enhancements and variations on solo lines that sweep through the orchestra, emphasizing the individuality of — and difference between — each player. In movement 3, the AI system pulls in the many-layered orchestra and creates — I think — a new kind of sound that balances detail and wholeness, polyphony and texture, and also (if we can manage it) allows the sound to extend off the stage into the hall, embracing the audience.”
The technology, in other words, is pointed at the humans on stage: amplifying each player’s individuality in one movement, then gathering the whole ensemble into something larger in the next.
Performance details
October 22–24, 2026 — Boston
WORLD PREMIERE by TOD MACHOVER: already and not yet
Boston Symphony Orchestra, Kent Nagano, conductor
Part of the MIT Media Lab’s 40th Anniversary Celebration
Opera of the Future 