Keynote Presentation: Tod Machover
Tod Machover has been called “America’s most wired composer” by the Los Angeles Times. He is Muriel R. Cooper Professor of Music and Media at the MIT Media Lab, and Director of the Lab’s Opera of the Future Group. Machover is widely recognized as one of the world’s most significant and innovative composers, and is also celebrated for inventing new technology for music, from “Hyperinstruments” for virtuosic musicians such as Yo-Yo Ma and Prince to the technologies behind Guitar Hero, which grew out of his Lab. Machover studied with Elliott Carter and Roger Sessions at The Juilliard School and was the first Director of Musical Research at Pierre Boulez’s IRCAM in Paris. Machover is particularly known for his visionary operas, including the Philip K. Dick-based VALIS, the audience-interactive Brain Opera, and the “robotic” Pulitzer Prize-finalist Death and the Powers, which will be released on CD and DVD in 2015. Machover is currently working on a series of collaborative City-Symphonies, inviting communities around the globe to work with him to make meaningful musical portraits of that place and time. After critically acclaimed City-Symphonies in Toronto, Edinburgh and Perth, 2015 will see new works created in Detroit and Lucerne, where Machover will be Composer-in-Residence for the Lucerne Festival in summer 2015.