"I have always tried to bring together worlds that don't seem to quite belong: popular and serious, acoustic and electronic, straightforward and mysterious, active and contemplative, humanistic and technological."
~ Tod Machover, Technology and Creative Expression (1995)

On November 7-20, Boston Lyric Opera will present Tod Machover's fifth opera, Resurrection, which is based on Leo Tolstoy's final novel. The opera was given its premiere by Houston Grand Opera in April 1999 and a live recording made from those performances will be released later this fall on Albany Records. One of the defining elements of Tod Machover's music is his combining of the traditional forms and sounds of classical music with the most current computer technology. His first four operas are a perfect reflection of this: Valis (1987), a science fiction opera, was performed with virtual scenery in a specially built theater, with an electronic orchestra of two; Media/Medium, a mini-opera composed in 1994, was created for magician/comedians Penn and Teller and premiered at Bally's in Las Vegas; Brain Opera was made for the 1996 Lincoln Center Festival and created in part with the audience's interaction; Meteor Music (1998), a walk-through opera, is a permanent installation at the Meteorite Museum in Essen, Germany.

How were his ideas born? "I grew up in New York in a family in which music and technology existed side-by-side. My mom is a pianist and music teacher and is well known for her innovative ways of teaching children and my dad is a pioneer in computer graphics. My mother was from a rather intellectual European family. My dad grew up in Iowa and his family was much more oriented toward popular culture. While growing up, I listened to all kinds of music, from Beethoven to Cage to Coltrane to the Beatles. I am a cellist and played a lot of orchestral and chamber music. Mozart was really my first influence. In fifth grade we studied The Magic Flute and the people who were most interested and did the best on the project got to go to the Metropolitan Opera to see it. I remember hearing Mozart's Symphony No. 40 in junior high school and knowing I wanted to be a musician.

"In high school, I formed a rock band and learned a lot about recording and studio techniques, experimenting with tape recorder-type manipulations of sound. At the same time, I was listening to all the Mozart operas, late Beethoven - the Missa Solemnis, Fidelio, the last quartets and piano sonatas - and eventually Wagner, and Bach, of course. I knew the Passions very early on, as well as his music for solo instruments. A lot of people have noted that something of Bach ends up in my music in my way of using bass lines and textures. Throughout Resurrection there is material that has a feeling of the St. Matthew Passion, some of it direct and some not-so-direct. After high school I went to University of California at Santa Cruz for a year and then to Italy and eventually ended up at The Juilliard School in the mid-'70s. I had continued to go back and forth between classical/contemporary music on the one hand, and rock music on the other. For me that wasn't contradictory; it was just hard to figure out how to bring them together.

"At Juilliard, I was studying with Roger Sessions and Elliott Carter and I began to think about bringing classical music and technology together with the idea of making serious and involving music that was very direct and also about something. I started imagining this amalgam of acoustic sound - everything you can do with acoustic instruments - together with another layer of sounds you could only make in a studio. I was trying to pack my music with as much intensity as I could and I started writing pieces that were very complicated, playing with the instruments moving in and out of rhythmic synchrony and playing at different tempi. But they turned out to be quite difficult and I had a hard time finding players for them.

"Computers were pretty new then. The Moog synthesizer age was over and nobody at Juilliard was interested in electronic music or in doing anything with computers and music together. I was never interested in analog synthesizers and all that kind of stuff, but I was very much attracted by computers, by the idea of a machine you could program and therefore shape any way you wanted, and I imagined building an instrument, or an orchestra, or an environment to realize the sounds I was hearing in my head. There was a guy at Juilliard who supposedly was teaching electronic music, but there was literally nobody in the class. I got him to tutor me and teach me some of the early languages using punch cards. At that time you wrote out the programs, typed them onto punch cards, gave the punch cards to a computer operator, and a week later, you would get back a reel-to-reel tape with the music on it.

"Pierre Boulez was conductor of the New York Philharmonic then. I had met him when I was in Italy and we had kept in touch. Boulez had a strong conviction that technology had a place in music and that music of the future would be designed and put together by people from different disciplines. He had opened IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique) in Paris in 1977 and they were looking for a young composer who had some intuition about and background in technology. They invited me there as composer-in-residence for a year and I ended up staying for seven. After the first year I became head of Music Research and was in a position to really think about how to develop the tools and instruments and sounds that I had been imagining.

"IRCAM was the one place in the world that had the resources to attract the most interesting composers. There was a full-time chamber orchestra devoted to contemporary music. When I arrived in the fall of 1978 they were testing the first real-time digital synthesizers, which allowed the composer to get his music back immediately. But even though the computers were getting faster, it was still like having a tape recorder. You had to think of everything ahead of time, write your score, feed it into the computer, and then push a button to have it played back. You couldn't really do anything to the sound while it was being played. For me, the problem was that I loved performing. I really believe that the fundamental idea of music is to share it in as direct a way as possible. Studio music is great, but that isn't the essence of music. I realized that one of the important things about combining technology and music was to be able to actually play an instrument while having the ability to shape and blend the sounds and structures in a way that couldn't be done normally. I had a strong desire to have a computer you could play and during this period I experimented with combining acoustic and electronic instruments, aiming for a seamless interaction between the two. What I imagined was having the best of both worlds, the spontaneity and the physicality you have when you are playing an instrument combined with the precision, power, clarity, and the various layers you can achieve with a computer.

"In 1985, I returned to the States because we opened the MIT Media Lab, and shortly after that I developed the concept of hyperinstruments. The idea behind hyperinstruments was to create computer systems that could monitor and eventually 'understand' every nuance of musical performance, so that the musician's interpretation could lead to an enhanced performance. We developed techniques to measure what somebody was playing - the notes, the dynamics, the sound quality, the phrasing, the tension in the music - and how he or she was interpreting it.

"The original hyperinstruments were designed for highly skilled performers who could master all the subtleties needed to control such systems. I wanted to use instruments that had the richest sound and that required very subtle and sophisticated playing techniques. Because I play the cello, I was interested in seeing what I could do with it. Yo-Yo Ma was living here in Boston and we got together and discussed the idea of a hypercello. When I started working with Yo-Yo, my dream was to have him play his Stradivarius with a microphone in front of it, and to have that beautiful and varied sound be pulled into the microphone and analyzed by the computer. The analysis would tell us that Yo-Yo was playing a certain note with a certain timbre and tension, and it would take the sound and add various other layers and ornaments. However, I realized we would have to take information not only from the sound but from the instrument itself as it was vibrating, and from the bow as it was moving, and from his body as he played. When we started talking about taping and nailing things to his cello, as nice a guy as Yo-Yo is, we realized that wasn't going to work. So we built a hypercello from scratch. The hypercello allows the cellist to control an extensive array of sounds through performance nuance, wrist measurements, bow pressure and position sensors, and left hand fingering position indicators. Through direct sound analysis and processing, the computer can measure, evaluate and respond to all the aspects of the performance, and the entire sound world is conceived as an extension of the soloist. So, the focus of all this work has been on designing computer systems that measure and interpret human expression and feeling along with the actual sound that is being produced.

"Since the early '90s, I have become more interested in developing hyperinstruments that allow 'ordinary' people to participate actively in the music-making by using gestures or word descriptions (such as musical 'adjectives') to influence the real-time interactive environment. In 1996, I wrote Brain Opera, which was inspired by the work of Marvin Minsky, a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence. I wanted to create an opera about how the mind works and, more specifically, about what it feels like to develop coherent ideas from a mass of fragmented sensory inputs. Unity from diversity has been a theme of mine for a long time. In addition, I wanted to create an artistic work that blended art and science, theory and practice. Brain Opera is not a normal opera at all. It is about your mind while you are listening to the opera, and the audience actually gets to help make the piece." After its premiere at the 1996 Lincoln Center Festival, Brain Opera toured the world and now has been updated and permanently installed at the House of Music in Vienna, Austria.

Resurrection

Though men in their hundreds of thousands had tried their hardest to disfigure that little corner of the earth where they had crowded themselves together, paving the ground with stones so that nothing could grow, weeding out every blade of vegetation, filling the air with the fumes of coal and gas, cutting down the trees and driving away every beast and every bird - spring, however, was still spring, even in the town. The sun shone warm, the grass, wherever it had not been scraped away, revived and showed green not only on the narrow strips of lawn on the boulevards but between the paving-stones as well, and the birches, the poplars and the wild cherry-trees were unfolding their sticky, fragrant leaves, and the swelling buds were bursting on the lime-trees; the jackdaws, the sparrows and the pigeons were cheerfully getting their nests ready for the spring, the flies, warmed by the sunshine, buzzed gaily along the walls. All were happy - plants, birds, insects and children. But grown-up people - adult men and women - never left off cheating and tormenting themselves and one another. It was not this spring morning which they considered sacred and important, not the beauty of God's world, given to all creatures to enjoy - a beauty which inclines the heart to peace, to harmony and to love. No, what they considered sacred and important were their own devices for wielding power over each other.
~Leo Tolstoy, Resurrection, Ch. 1.

Joyce di Donato as Maslova in Houston Grand Opera's 1999 production of Resurrection. Photo courtesy of HGO.

Resurrection is, in a way, the most surprising of Mr. Machover's operas because it is written in a traditional form, for mostly traditional forces, and is performed in a traditional opera house. How did this come to pass?

"There was a long gestation period for Resurrection. David Gockley [General Director of Houston Opera] came to see Valis in Paris in 1987, which had been commissioned for the tenth anniversary of the Pompidou Center. He didn't know anything about me, but he liked Valis and came backstage and told me he would be interested in having me do an opera for Houston. We started a correspondence shortly after that and I started thinking about creating something that would have a strong connection to the tradition and would feel at home in a large opera house. It would obviously be my music, but it would reach out to a normal opera-going public that didn't have any particular interest in contemporary or electronic music.

"Everything about Valis had been directly related to the venue - the Pompidou Center - which is a space normally used for the presentation of the visual arts. There was no opera house or orchestra or stage hands. I could have hired all those people of course, but I thought instead that it was a chance to rethink a lot of the traditional aspects of opera. We built a special theater inside the enormous entrance hall, which is almost like an airplane hangar. People could see the opera from above and from the sides. The scenery was purely electronic, invented a different kind of 'orchestra' and, in some sense, we attracted a completely new audience. Thousands of people came through the Center each day, many who were being exposed to 'opera' for the first time.

"Valis is based on the novel by Philip K. Dick. It basically takes place inside somebody's head. The main character is the alter-ego of the writer who had an experience in the mid-'70s that completely changed his life. One day he was hit by a blasting pink light that lasted most of the day. He wasn't sure whether it was a nervous breakdown, a religious experience, some kind of drug flashback, or somebody experimenting with technology that got out of hand. The experience brought him all kinds of knowledge but disturbed him a great deal. The story of Valis is about him trying to figure out his own mind and reconcile experiences that are beyond explanation, and about the place where high technology, magic and God aren't so different.

"In terms of the orchestra, I wanted the richness of the sound and the different instrumental qualities of a full orchestra, but I wanted to be able to rehearse it like a rock band, where you have weeks of rehearsal and the musicians can really refine the playing. I knew I couldn't achieve that with a traditional orchestra, so I decided to see how I could use the fewest number of players but have the most expressive control over the largest amount of sound. I came up with an orchestra of two: hyperkeyboard and hyperpercussion.

"If Valis was about how an individual grows and becomes the fullest person he or she can be, I wanted the opera for Houston to be about how one gets out of oneself and makes a difference in the world, and about how it is possible in this day and age to have realistic optimism and hope (an even bigger challenge since September 11th). I looked at a lot of different stories before remembering Resurrection. I had always been a Tolstoy fan - he is probably my favorite writer, as a novelist, a thinker, a visionary and an inspiration - and Resurrection is one of my favorite books. It is the last of his three novels and is much less known in the West than Anna Karenina and War and Peace (although it has always been a favorite in Russia). It was written near the end of his life after he had achieved quite a lot of success and was living as an aristocrat on a beautiful estate. He had started to feel that writing fiction, even though it might be successful, was not having a direct impact on the world. He wanted to write books that were simpler, that set out a way to live, and went through a period of writing pieces that were almost like tracts.

"Resurrection is about an aristocrat, Prince Nekhlyudov, who is shocked out of his bored and useless existence when he is called for jury duty. One of the people on trial is Maslova, a woman who worked for his aunt ten years before and with whom he was in love. She is a prostitute now, and Nekhlyudov realizes he ruined her life. He sees that his life has been without values and completely rudderless and, little by little, he is shaken out of his complacency. Maslova is falsely convicted and sent to Siberia, which sets them both on a very long path to finding their real humanity. The story is incredibly dramatic. There is the trial and conviction and the march to Siberia; there is brutality and incredible tenderness; and a very uplifting triumph of human will reminiscent of Fidelio.

"There was a lot of work to do, though, to condense the novel into something that fit on one stage and into one evening. We hired Laura Harrington, a Boston-area writer, to create the libretto. Braham Murray, the director, came in midway through the process and had a lot to do with shaping it as well. The novel is originally in Russian, of course. It's a huge book - three large sections - and like the other Tolstoy novels, the palette is enormous and there are many subsidiary characters. We had to do a lot of thinking about how to focus on the core relationship between Nekhlyudov and Maslova, and still convey the vastness of the country and the different societies and all the change that occurred.

What should an audience expect Resurrection to sound like? "The sound of Resurrection is primarily acoustic and natural, but I have used the electronics to heighten and enhance things. I used three keyboard players with special sound-shaping devices to add a sonic layer to the overall texture and provide an extra dimension in the larger scenes. In a way, I returned to my musical 'roots' in Resurrection. When I was writing it I thought a lot about late 19th century Russian music - opera specifically. I listened to Tchaikovsky and early Stravinsky and Shostakovich. I thought about Mozart too who was definitely the great master of creating a kind of symphonic structure in which the music carries you from moment to moment in terms of pacing, contrast and expectation, and where each moment is set by a number - an aria or ensemble. I worked incredibly hard on the dramatic progression in the music. You don't want the audience to be outside the music, for their minds to be wandering, to be wondering whether or not they like it. You want them to be in the middle of the story, living with the characters. The music has to convey the drama, the situation, and the psychology. Of course, I want the audience to understand the words and the story, but I would almost go so far as to say that if they didn't, I would like them still to have a powerful experience through the music.

"I've always been a melodist - that is my first impulse - and the opera is full of tunes. There has to be something that is clear and that an audience can grab onto and follow. If it's not a melody, it's a rhythmic pulse, a low pedal tone or something else that is constant as other things change. I often think of it like being in a raft on rapids. Your raft is something you can hold onto physically and it carries you along through an environment that is challenging and changing all the time. There has to be something in your music that is like the raft. In Resurrection, that is almost always the melodies, and they are pretty direct the first time you hear the opera. My 7- and 4-year-old daughters learned them very quickly.

"I've made several changes since the opera was premiered in Houston - cuts and adjustments in orchestration. In Boston, we are going to experiment with the finale which, in my view, wasn't perfect in Houston. Originally, I had written a different finale and now I think it is worth doing something closer to that first version. The recording was made from the performances in Houston. We didn't do any rerecording, but I did a huge amount of editing for the CD release and made adjustments in how the electronics were used. I wanted to combine the directness and spontaneity of the live performance with sonic enhancements I could make in the studio to really make the piece come alive. The version we do in Boston will be closer to the CD than the Houston performances."

What else are you doing at the moment? "One of the projects I am working on is Toy Symphony, which is my exploration of different ways to introduce children to music as a form of communication and sharing. We've invented a completely new line of instruments for children - things you can touch and squeeze and pull - for learning, creating and performing. Joshua Bell is a main collaborator on the project, and we're making a new generation of hyperviolin for him. We'll be putting kids and orchestras and Josh together in a variety of cities around the world for a series of concerts beginning next spring.

"I'm working on two operas. One is sort of a robot opera which has been commissioned by the Monte Carlo Opera, that is about the line between human beings and those we create using technology. And I'm writing a piece for the New York City Opera about the relationship of popular and serious culture and whether it is possible to grab people and change their lives in a significant way while not being elitist. It's about Arnold Schoenberg's time in Hollywood and centers around the famous meeting he had with Irving Thalberg about writing the film music for The Good Earth.

"One of the reasons I am so in love with opera is that it allows us to push music as far as our imaginations will take us, but is still grounded in stories, feelings, and ideas people care about. There are some constraints if you are designing something for a traditional opera house and an audience with traditional expectations. But I find that opera audiences are an eclectic group. They are often people who are interested in film and theater and are much less conservative than symphony orchestra audiences in my view. The word 'opera' can encompass many things now and I think it is a fantastic context to create works that grab people and mean something to them and also are fresh and new. I've written five operas now and each one has grown up so different from the others. They all sound like my music, but each has a very different story. There is no formula.

"Valis was a science-fiction opera and was definitely a story and a construction that was quite radical. Brain Opera was an opera that the audience basically created themselves. Both of those couldn't be more different from Resurrection. Music is the common factor and the liberating factor. Music touches us very deeply; it gets under the skin in a way no other art form does. I think opera is one of the great art forms of the future."

Read more about Tod Machover
    MIT Media Lab
    newmusicbox.org - commentary by Tod Machover
    newmusicbox.org - technology and the future of music
    operaworld.com

and Resurrection
    Boston Lyric Opera
    National Public Radio

The 411 on Hyperinstruments

Discover Tolstoy

Read Resurrection (the novel)
    classicreader.com
    Great Literature Online

Incidentally, Tolstoy's novel was adapted previously by Franco Alfano (1876-1954), best known for supplying an ending to Puccini's Turandot. Risurrezione was popular in Italy during the first half of the 20th century but is not well known today, save for the aria "Dieu de Grace" which was a favorite of American soprano, Mary Garden, among others.

Read more about Franco Alfano
    Biography, works, photos
    Biography