Boston Globe
July 14, 1996

PLAYING THE FUTURE: TOD MACHOVER BRAINSTORMS A MAKE-YOUR-OWN OPERA, COMPLETE WITH WEB SITE

By Richard Dyer, Globe Staff

Tod Machover is standing in The Cube at MIT, about to enter a mysterious forest of technology -- 40 new musical instruments suspended like exotic tropical exfoliations from branches of piping. "I want people to feel as if they were walking into somebody's mind," Machover explains about the array.

This is the entrance into the world of "Brain Opera," the aesthetic and technological extravaganza that will be a linchpin of the new Lincoln Center Festival in New York: From July 23 through Aug. 3, there will be eight performances a day to accommodate the demand. Opera is the ultimate multimedia experience; it has always been a collaborative and assimilative art, and Tod Machover sees no reason that its evolution should not continue into the present, and beyond. His new opera involves the audience in the creation and performance of the work, live and on the Internet. This is not "Aida."

Machover has spent more than two years assembling and working with a team of more than 50 collaborators from MIT's Media Lab and elsewhere to convert his most recent multimedia vision into virtual reality -- at a cost of over $3 million.

Because the audience becomes actively and interactively involved in "Brain Opera," only 175 people can participate in any given performance. After New York, "Brain Opera" will tour to Copenhagen, Berlin, Tokyo, West Palm Beach, Fla.; Singapore and Linz, Austria, and requests for further dates are pouring in from all over the world. There are even hopes to present it next spring here in Boston, where it was created.

Even with this kind of advance schedule, Machover and his collaborators were eager to enlarge the potential audience, so they created a web site on the Internet, and a "hyperinstrument" that can be "played" on home computers. Those who are interested and wired can therefore share in the sights and sounds of "Brain Opera," and join in the communal aspect of creating the work anew in each performance (the web site is http://brainop.media.mit.edu).

Machover, 42, devised the structure of the work, invented the instruments that create its sound world, and composed both music and a design for involving the musical intuition of the audience. The composer's point of departure was probably the seven years he spent as director of research at IRCAM, Pierre Boulez's center for musical exploration beneath the Centre Pompidou in Paris. When he arrived there, in the late '70s, Machover soon noticed a very definite hierarchy. Musicians were in charge , and treated scientists as their servants -- very much as musicians throughout history were treated as servants by their royal or ecclesiastical patrons. Machover witnessed a shouting match between a leading scientist and the visionary composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. "If I could do some of the things you want," the scientist said, "I would be a university professor at MIT or Stanford. If I could do some of the others, I would win the Nobel Prize. If I could do the rest, I would be God, because your demands violate the laws of physics!"

When he came to MIT, 11 years ago, Machover hoped he would discover, or could help develop, a new kind of culture involving a different kind of collaboration between technology and art. Most of his projects have worked toward the accomplishment of that purpose, and "Brain Opera" is the most ambitious of them to date.

Another point of departure is the work of MIT professor and artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky, particularly his book "The Society of Mind." In Minsky's model for the way the brain works -- a conductorless orchestra of democratically interacting agents -- Machover found a new definition for opera, a concept for his work and a model for how it should be created and performed. "Minsky talks about deep things in simple ways," Machover says.

Like many other musicians today, Machover has also been concerned about how difficult it has become for the general public to find access to music. He also worries about how exclusionary the mystique of music seems even to people who have been exposed to it. He wanted to create a work that would provide an opportunity for people to release the music within them, music they feel but don't know how to express.

Machover conceived "Brain Opera" in three parts. The workroom for the first part is the forest of new instruments. These instruments have user-friendly names like "melody easel," "singing tree" or "harmonic driving.' Actually they are more than instruments; they are hyperinstruments, to use the term Machover chose to describe the electronic extensions of traditional instruments he invented for Yo-Yo Ma and others. At the melody easel, for example, members of the audience can trace the contours of their own interior melodies -- which emerge into the world in the timbre of mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt, one of the several prominent singers who become electronic members of the "cast" of "Brain Opera" by contributing to its sound world (oth er human vocal elements were contributed by Anne Azema, Karol Bennett, Christopheren Nomura, Sanford Sylvan and members of the Boston Camerata). Most of the new instruments have visual components as well. You create your ideal musical image on the hyperinstrument; the music in turn generates a changing visual image.

"These new instruments," Machover says, "are not like Yo-Yo's hypercello, because anybody can play them. But they are not toys." As their names imply, they explore the various parameters of musical expression (melody, harmony, rhythm, gesture, singing); they respond both directly and subtly to how audience members touch them, sing into them, manipulate them.

The hyperinstrument that will probably get the most attention, and draw the longest lines, is Harmonic Driving. The player sits before a screen with a steering wheel, a joystick and a foot pedal at his disposal; he can navigate a course through the flow of music by changing the flow. From the controls, he can alter hamony, tempo, accent, texture, color in various combinations. The music can be cool or hot, rough or smooth, depending on the path you take.

Harmonic Driving looks like a video game -- a comparison that does not quite please Machover, who says, "Well, it's the way video games should be. This is meant to stimulate the imagination."

All the audience's creative play goes into the computers, and parts of it emerge in Part 2, the "Performance" of a 50-minute work in three sections.

The audience will experience the work in a specially designed performance space. Moving images will be projected on walls, floor and ceiling, and the audience will be encouraged to move around, even dance, as if it were in a nightclub.

Three people, one of them Machover, will create the performance according to the structure Machover has already laid down. The performers will manipulate not only the raw materials gathered in the first part but also the music Machover has created -- some of it composed in the traditional way, some of it "designed" in the manner of John Cage to create an environment and opportunities for music to grow out of. The backbone, Machover writes in his program note, is a reworking of the six-part Ricercare from Bach's "Musical Offering"; Minsky reading his own texts is an important voice in the polyphony, or an element in the collage.

The finale introduces the contribution of audience members who have joined the performance on the Internet. The climax comes in a kind of cosmic dance; members of the audience can dance on a "sensor carpet" that creates another jubilant line in the music. Then the work closes with a quiet moment, bringing us back to first things and to Bach.

"Brain Opera" represents both actual collaborative creativity and a metaphor for the way the brain works, and the way the human community ought to be able to work together.

Machover seems far from exhausted from his creative and organizational efforts as he walks through the evolving chaos of the "Brain Opera" setup at MIT. In fact, he seems renewed by those efforts, and says that's how he wants his audience to experience the piece too, as a "coherent dramatic journey into very rich territory. It's about making a synthesis of different points of view, different cultures, different attitudes. I want `Brain Opera' to be a visceral experience, and I want people t o come out feeling not only as if they have lived through something, but as if they have participated in it, and maybe even come out with a new and productive way of thinking about order and disorder in music, and in society.

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