Tod Machover's ALREADY AND NOT YET to Premiere at Boston Symphony Orchestra

On October 22-24, the Boston Symphony Orchestra premieres a new work by visionary composer, inventor and faculty director of the MIT Media Lab Tod Machover: already and not yet, a highlight of this season’s BSO subscription series and the anchor event of BSO’s humanities series in October, “Technology and Our Humanity,” which complements the premiere. The premiere is presented in coordination with the MIT Media Lab’s 40thAnniversary celebrations, taking place the same weekend.

already and not yet by Tod Machover

For Tod Machover — composer, inventor, and faculty director of the MIT Media Lab — the question was never whether AI could make art on its own. It’s whether technology can deepen what human artists create, and how audiences experience it. That conviction has driven his work since the 1980s, when he began building new technologies for music, and since 1987, when he wove AI elements into his opera VALIS. With already and not yet, this work takes its most ambitious form yet. The Boston Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Kent Nagano, will give the world premiere of Machover’s new symphony, a work about democracy in peril, and about the possibility of building a better, stronger, more equitable democracy in the future.

The title, already and not yet, refers to the state of the world and of our country: there is already much to appreciate, but it is unfinished and imperfect and urgently in need of pushing forward. This plays out in the first movement as a clash/crisis, in the second as an awakening, and in the third as an unfolding depiction of a future democracy as Machover imagines it. Throughout, the symphony is powered in part by a new, specially designed "live AI” system created with Machover’s team at the MIT Media Lab.

“Electronics enhance the orchestra throughout,” says Machover, “but our Live AI system becomes prominent in movements 2 and 3. In movement 2, I use it to spin enhancements and variations on solo lines that sweep through the orchestra, emphasizing the individuality of—and difference between—each player. In movement 3, the AI system pulls in the many-layered orchestra and creates—I think—a new kind of sound that balances detail and wholeness, polyphony and texture, and also allows the sound to extend off the stage into the hall, embracing the audience and enhancing the impact of this unusual musical journey.”

In early October, Tod Machover will be in Berlin to launch a new 3-year collaboration with the Hasso-Plattner Institute to create the next generation of AI-enhanced tools for music creativity and discovery for both experts and amateurs. But already and not yet will offer a glimpse of AI’s positive potential and where it might be going.

The premiere of already and not yet anchors BSO’s multi-season focus on technology, which offers concerts and talks that consider one of the most urgent questions of our time: How is technology reshaping not only music, but also our understanding of ourselves and one another?

On Saturday, October 24 at 6:30 pm, prior to the 8pm performance, Machover is joined by composer, Columbia University professor, and AI-music pioneer George Lewis for a pre-concert conversation about where musical AI has been and where it could be headed. These two pioneers in the fields of AI and music discuss Lewis's software Voyager, built in the 1980s and continually updated since that time, and one of the first computational systems to create live improvisational dialogues with human musicians. The two composers explore questions of subjectivity, social intelligibility, and ultimately, what it means to be human, offering a "possible, positive vision" for the future of shared creative life, and of democracy itself.

On Sunday, October 25 at 2pm, Machover moderates a conversation among several generations of MIT Media Lab alumni (at MIT’s Thomas Tull Concert Hall, 201 Amherst Street in Cambridge) exploring what has made the Lab an especially fruitful environment for investigating out-of-the-box music technologies, forms and impacts (from the Hypercello to Brain Opera to Guitar Hero); what unusual trajectories and projects students have pursued post-Lab; and what this all might indicate for the future of music. Panelists include: Teresa Marrin Nakra (Stevens Institute of Technology), Alex Rigopulos (Harmonix), Anna Huang (MIT), Ben Bloomberg (sound/technology designer and producer), and Nicole L’Huillier (transdisciplinary artist).

The MIT Media Lab has been a center of bold interdisciplinary exploration for 40 years, with a creative community of artists, scientists, engineers and designers innovating in areas as diverse as Affective Computing, Tangible Media, Biomechatronics, Sculpting Evolution, and Lifelong Kindergarten. Music has been at the core of this culture since the very beginning, led by founding faculty Marvin Minsky, Barry Vercoe, and Tod Machover and nurtured by several generations of contributing researchers, collaborating artists (from Yo-Yo Ma to Jacob Collier to the BSO), and truly remarkable students from around the world.

Other events in this series include a preview of the new nostalgia-soaked '80's-influenced multimedia song cycle composed by William Brittelle for Roomful of Teeth to be performed by the group along with members of Metropolis Ensemble (Tuesday, October 20 at 7:30pm) and a talk with composer and artist Holly Herndon, who offers an inside look at how her studio builds machine learning systems as a form of musical practice (Sunday, October 25 at 3:30 pm).