Tod Machover
From Mount Vernon
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About
Tod Machover is the kind of composer who thinks traditional instruments are just a starting point. Working out of MIT's Media Lab, he invented hyperinstruments, technology that extends what a performer can do by translating their physical expression into layers of morphing sound across an entire orchestra's worth of timbres. Yo Yo Ma, Joshua Bell, Peter Gabriel, and Penn & Teller have all worked with systems he designed. His opera work pushes just as hard. Brain Opera, premiered in 1996, was built around the idea that anyone could perform it using natural gestures, no training required. Death and the Powers, which earned him a Pulitzer Prize finalist spot in 2012, merges sculptural objects with electronic sound to wrestle with questions of legacy and what it means to be human. His 2018 opera Schoenberg in Hollywood takes on the tension between artistic integrity and mass appeal, using Arnold Schoenberg's story as its lens. He also coined the term hyperinstrument back in 1986, and has spent decades making the concept richer and stranger.
