Presenters and Panelists

Tod Machover – called “America’s Most Wired Composer” by The Los Angeles Times – is widely recognized as one of the most significant and innovative composers of his generation, and is also celebrated for inventing new technology for music. 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. He has been Professor of Music and Media at the MIT Media Lab (Cambridge, USA) since it was founded in 1985, and is currently launching a major new Center for Creativity and Invention there. In addition, he has recently been appointed as Visiting Professor of Composition at the Royal Academy of Music in London. Machover is also the Co-Founder and Chairman of Harmony Line Inc., a Boston-based company devoted to developing musical tools and techniques to extend creative music-making to everyone.

Tod Machover’s music has been commissioned and performed by many of the world’s most prominent artistic organizations. Machover has been particularly noted for his operatic compositions, which including VALIS (1987), a science fiction opera commissioned for the tenth anniversary of the Centre Georges Pompidou, and the audience-interactive Brain Opera (1996/8), commissioned for the first Lincoln Center Festival and permanently installed at the Haus der Musik in Vienna since 2000. He is currently working on two new operas: Death and the Powers, a “robotic” opera with an original libretto by U.S. poet laureate Robert Pinsky, and Skellig, based on the award-winning novel by David Almond. Both operas are schedule for premiere in Fall 2008.

Machover has invented many new technologies for music, most notably his Hyperinstruments that use smart computers to augment musical expression and creativity. He has designed these hyperinstruments for some of the world’s greatest musicians, from Yo-Yo Ma to Prince, as well as for the general public and for children, as in his Toy Symphony project (www.toysymphony.net) which has been touring worldwide since 2002. His music composition software Hyperscore – originally developed for children in the context of Toy Symphony – is fast gaining worldwide recognition as a popular creative tool for people of all ages and backgrounds. In awarding Machover the first Kurzweil Prize in Music and Technology in 2003, celebrated inventor and entrepreneur Raymond Kurzweil wrote: “Tod Machover is the only person I am aware of who contributes on a world-class level to both the technology of music creation and to music> itself. Even within these two distinct areas, his contributions are remarkably diverse, and of exquisite quality.”

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