BIOGRAPHY
Tod Machover
Tod Machover has been called "America’s Most Wired Composer" by the Los Angeles Times and is celebrated for creating music that breaks traditional artistic and cultural boundaries. He is Professor of Music & Media and Director of the Opera of the Future Group at the MIT Media Lab, and is also Visiting Professor of Composition at the Royal Academy of Music in London. He studied with Elliott Carter at The Juilliard School, and was the first Director of Musical Research at Pierre Boulez’s IRCAM Institute in Paris. Machover’s music has been commissioned and performed by many of the world’s most important performers and ensembles, and has received numerous international prizes and awards, including the Chevalier des Arts et Lettres from the French Culture Ministry and the 2010 Arts Prize from the World Technology Network (co-sponsored by Time Inc. and CNN). Machover is also acclaimed for inventing new technologies for music, such as his Hyperinstruments that augment musical expression for everyone, from virtuosi like Yo-Yo Ma and Prince to players of Guitar Hero, which grew out of his Lab. Machover is particularly noted for his radically inventive operas, which include VALIS (1987), "a mind-expanding journey" (amazon.com) based on a novel by Philip K. Dick, the Brain Opera (1996/7) which has just celebrated its 10th year of permanent installation at Vienna’s Haus der Musik, and Skellig (2008), based on the best-seller by David Almond, which premiered in 2008 at the Sage Gateshead (UK) to rave reviews. Since launching Death and the Powers in fall 2010, Machover has also premiered Spheres and Splinters at the Aldeburgh Music’s Faster Than Sound series in England. He is currently completing a new piece for the Kronos Quartet based on the life and work of Noam Chomsky, which will premiere in April at MIT'S FAST Arts Festival.