How a Musician Listens | Tod Machover | Big Think

How a Musician Listens

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Tod Machover thinks back to his first composition, and describes his process for ingesting music.

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Tod Machover:

Tod Machover is head of the Media Lab's Hyperinstruments/Opera of the Future group. An influential composer, he has been praised for creating music that breaks traditional artistic and cultural boundaries; his music has been performed and commissioned by some of the world's most important performers and ensembles. In 1995, he received a "Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres," one of France's highest cultural honors, and in 1998 he was awarded the first DigiGlobe Prize from the German government. He has composed five operas and is the inventor of Hyperinstruments, a technology that uses smart computers to augment virtuosity. Hyperinstruments have been used by performers such as Yo-Yo Ma, Prince, and Peter Gabriel. Machover is also the creator of the Toy Symphony, an international music performance and education project. His research group is currently examining ways to use music in therapy for emotionally and physically challenged individuals. His newest opera, Death and the Powers, to premiere in Monte-Carlo 2010, is being developed by an extraordinary creative team of international artists, designers, writers, and theatrical luminaries, as well as by an interdisciplinary team of Media Lab graduate and undergraduate students. Scored for a small ensemble of specially designed Hyperinstruments, Powers will feature a robotic, animatronic stage—the first of its kind—that will gradually “come alive” as the opera’s main character. Machover, who was formerly director of musical research at Pierre Boulez's IRCAM institute in Paris, received both his BA and MA from the Juilliard School in New York.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: What was the first song you composed?

Tod Machover: I don’t actually remember the first song I composed. I think probably the first, you know, we did a lot of these creative activities growing up. I think, I laugh because my mom is also, on one hand an incredibly creative pedagog and is very good at drawing people out too. But she is also a pretty strong personality, so I’m thinking the probably the first piece I composed is probably when she told me, “Oh, you should probably write a piano piece.” “Are you writing your piano piece?” Or something like that maybe. So, there’s probably some piece maybe when I was in middle school that I can’t remember now.

I did take composition lessons when I was in high school, so I wrote piano pieces. I wrote some chamber music. I don’t think any of that was particularly interesting. I don’t remember too much of it.

I went to Fieldston here in New York, quite an interesting creative school. And I actually have more close friends who have stayed friends from high school at Fieldston than I do from Juilliard, as a matter of fact. There are a lot of like-minded spirits. And one of my friends there was a very good writer; he is now a big screenwriter in Hollywood, and a terrific musician. So, the two of us had a king of two-man musical group. And I’d put headphones, there was no such thing as am amplified cello at that point, so I took headphones, turned my cello on it’s side, kind of like a gigantic bass, and put headphones and clamp them around the belly of the cello so they were like a microphone, they amplified the cello, and he played guitar and keyboard and we wrote a lot of songs together.

So, the first songs that I really like, were actually pop songs that we did together and we had tape recorders at home and I used to go into the studio and record multiple tracks, or change the quality of the sound, things like that.

And then, the first music that I remember really investing in that I composed was kind of the second I got to college, to the University of California, Santa Cruz. And they started out being for a music history course, or a music theory course, or a composition course. So, not really where you’d expect to do anything interesting, but I think the bug of writing music had just been growing in me and that was the right environment for me to say, “Oh my gosh, this is me.” I’ve got a million ideas and I want to have people play these pieces. And there are things I want to think about in terms of structure, or how I want people to listen. So, I wrote quite a bit that first year at Santa Cruz and kind of kept going.

Question: What is your process for listening to music?

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