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. …
Continue reading "Wanna help write a symphony? There’s an app for that"
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 …
The November issue of Wired UK is devoted to the M.I.T. Media Lab. Fun to see so many friends and colleagues profiled in it! The article on Tod Machover provides a grand sweep of his career, from Tod's first encounter with the 4X synthesizer at IRCAM to his current work on "A Toronto Symphony" and …
Continue reading "Wired UK on Tod Machover’s Music Projects"
From Tod Machover - Just read the news that Elliott Carter passed away today, a month short of his 104th birthday. What a big loss, what an inspiring life. I was lucky enough to study with Elliott at Juilliard and have always considered him my mentor. He remained imaginative, brilliant, searching and expanding to the …
"...But Not Simpler..." is on the cover of the current issue of Fanfare magazine. Fanfare also houses a collection of articles about Tod Machover's music. Here's a terrific interview by Carson Cooman that provides excellent background on Tod's work along with some interesting observations. We like this: Whatever the next directions his work takes, there’s no …
Music and media are two worlds that are evolving technologically at a head-spinning pace today. How is technology helping or hindering? How has technology itself become the subject for musical and media investigation? And if you want to get really meta, how is technology altering the very profession of being a media commentator about the …
Reposted from A Toronto Symphony This weekend, Tod will join 50 other presenters (from Robert Wilson to Atom Egoyan to Lang Lang!) at the University of Toronto's Convocation Hall for an extraordinary gathering of “Dreamers Renegades Visionaries" to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the iconoclastic pianist and boundary breaker's birth. Check out this terrific article about the …
Listening to the brief excerpts from Skellig the other day brought back a deluge of memories about its wonderful run at the Sage Gateshead in 2008. Few people have heard the opera because it has not yet been recorded. We thought you might enjoy this glimpse from the first act. Matthew Long sings the role …
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 …
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 …
Opera of the Future 