Hyperstring Trilogy

All of my music is somehow biographical, and the Hyperstring Trilogy was composed during a particularly turbulent period in my life, from 1990 to 1993, that started with a broken marriage, moved through serious and unexpected family illness, finally leading to a new relationship and remarriage. New ideas about music, and my relationship to it, accompanied these personal experiences. When I first discussed with Yo-Yo Ma in 1990 the idea of developing a hypercello for him and composing a work for the instrument, I decided to make this the first of a series. I couldn't have predicted the "plot" of my life for the following few years, but did immediately imagine Dante's Divine Comedy as a backdrop for the form and feeling of the three pieces. I also imagined the three as both independent compositions - with increasingly larger orchestral forces - as well as three movements of a single work. The three pieces that make up the Hyperstring Trilogy: Begin Again Again..., Song of Penance, and Forever and Ever, were performed together for the first time, as they were intended, at the Lincoln Center Festival in July 1996.

After a series of compositions closely related to the musical ideas and technology of my opera "VALIS" (1987), the Trilogy represented some major new directions for me. Whereas my work from 1986-90 dealt primarily with the bright colors and sharp rhythms of electrified rock music, I tried in the Trilogy to reincorporate the warmth and subtlety of acoustic instruments, and especially strings. In "VALIS" I attempted to create a harmonic and melodic language of extreme directness and simplicity, whereas in the Trilogy contours are more blurred and boundaries more complex. And whereas in the "VALIS" period, my hyper-music was performed by musicians playing on commercially available MIDI controllers (like keyboards, percussion, and guitar), I turned my attention in 1990 to trying to measure the musical expression communicated through string instruments, whose subtlety and richness have usually been beyond the analysis capabilities of digital computers (and their programmers!).

With Joe Chung, I had started the development of Hyperinstruments at the MIT Media Lab in 1986, for the purpose of enhancing and expanding performance virtuosity through technology. Partly motivated by the negative example of sophisticated digital studio recording that risked taking the spontaneity and intuition out of music-making, we sought to develop techniques that would allow the performer's normal playing technique and interpretive skills to shape and control computer extensions to the instrument, thus combining the warmth and "personality" of human performance with the precision and clarity of digital technology. In fact, the whole hyperinstrument idea is an extension of my general musical philosophy: conveying complex experience in a simple and direct way.

Working on hyperstrings, we were able to greatly extend the hyperinstrument model. When Neil Gershenfeld joined the group in 1990, we started to develop sensors to measure the physical gesture of performance; in 1991, Andy Hong brought a sophisticated knowledge of analysis techniques for the acoustic sound of these instruments; and in 1993, Joe Paradiso helped us to "unplug" our hyperstring instruments, making them wireless and therefore even more natural and intuitive to play. Interestingly, this work to develop better techniques for interpreting highly virtuosic performances has simultaneously led us to explore the kinds of natural and intuitive music interfaces found in the Brain Opera hyperinstruments for general audiences.

And also paradoxically (although intentionally), as the Hyperstring Trilogy progresses, more and more diverse musical influences are incorporated into a simpler and more unified musical expression, as more and more sophisticated hyperstring instruments become increasingly absorbed into a blended and seamless sonic whole.

Tod Machover's "Hyperstring Trilogy" was also given its world premiere at last summer's Lincoln Center Festival, and has received several important performances since then (see attached press comments). The Trilogy has been widely recognized for its scope, invention, subtlety, originality, and dramatic impact, and its release on the Erato/Warner label in 1998 could have - as noted by David Patrick Stearns in "USA Today" - "a profound artistic and technological influence."