Tod Machover—called "America's Most Wired Composer" by the Los Angeles Times—is widely known for creating music that breaks traditional artistic and cultural boundaries, as well as for developing groundbreaking new technologies for music. He is Professor of Music and Media and Director of the Opera of the Future Group at the MIT Media Lab, and is also Visiting Professor of Composition at the Royal Academy of Music in London. Machover’s music has been commissioned and performed by many of the world's most important performers and ensembles and has received numerous international prizes and awards, including the “Chevalier des Arts et Lettres” from the French Culture Ministry. Machover has designed new music technologies—such as Hyperinstruments—for some of the world’s greatest virtuosi, from Yo-Yo Ma to Prince, but also for young people, families, seniors, and the disabled. The popular videogames Guitar Hero and Rock Band grew out of this Hyperinstruments work in Machover's Lab. His Hyperscore software—which allows anyone to compose original music using lines and colors—has allowed children around the world to have their music performed by major orchestras as part of Machover’s Toy Symphony project. Machover is also noted for his visionary operas, including VALIS (based on Philip K. Dick’s sci-fi classic), the Brain Opera (which invites the audience to collaborate live and online), and Skellig, which premiered to rave reviews in the UK in November 2008. He is currently working on Death and the Powers, a robotic opera with libretto by Robert Pinsky and directed by Diane Paulus, which premieres in Monaco in September 2010.
Whether it is creating genre-breaking compositions for the concert hall, "robotic" operas for worldwide stages, software that allows anyone to compose original music, or musical activities that can diagnose illness and restore health, Tod Machover’s unique vision is shaping the future of music, while producing work after work that touch the hearts of audiences here and now.
Read more about Tod at todmachover.com
A.R.T. Artistic Director Diane Paulus is a director of opera and theater. Her recent theater work includes The Public Theater’s revival of Hair at the Delacorte in Central Park, now transferred to Broadway (nominated for 8 Tony Awards including Best Director, as well as winner of a Drama Desk Award, Outer Critics Circle Award and Drama League Award for Best Revival of a Musical). She is the creator and director of The Donkey Show, a disco adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which ran for six years Off-Broadway, and toured internationally to London, Edinburgh, Madrid, and Evian, France. Other recent work includes Kiss Me Kate at Glimmerglass Opera; Lost Highway, based on the David Lynch film, an ENO co-production with the Young Vic in London, which received The South Bank Show Award for outstanding achievement during 2008; Another Country by James Baldwin at Riverside Church; Turandot: Rumble for the Ring at the Bay Street Theatre; The Golden Mickeys for Disney Creative Entertainment; Best of Both Worlds, a gospel/R&B adaptation of A Winter’s Tale produced by Music-Theatre Group and The Women’s Project; and The Karaoke Show, an adaptation of Comedy of Errors set in a karaoke bar. She directed the Obie award-winning and Pulitzer Prize finalist Running Man by jazz composer Diedre Murray and poet Cornelius Eady for Music-Theatre Group, and Swimming with Watermelons, created in association with Project 400, the theater company she co-founded with her husband Randy Weiner. Other work Off-Broadway: Brutal Imagination, and the Obie-award winning Eli’s Comin’, featuring the music and lyrics of Laura Nyro.
As an opera director, her productions include Don Giovanni, Le nozze di Figaro, Turn Of The Screw, Cosí fan tutte, and all three Monteverdi operas, Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria, L’incoronazione di Poppea, and Orfeo at the Chicago Opera Theater. She is a frequent collaborator with British conductor Jane Glover. In 2002, their critically acclaimed production of Orfeo was presented as part of The Monteverdi Cycle at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York City.
Read more about Diane at The American Repertory Theater and dianepaulus.net
Robert Pinsky is widely considered to be one of America’s greatest writers, and has received numerous international awards and consistently been on international best-seller lists. He has been Poet Laureate of the United States (1997-2000), is currently poetry editor of the online journal Slate, and is also a contributor to The News Hour with Jim Lehrer on PBS. Pinsky teaches in the graduate writing program at Boston University. He is the author of six books of poetry, several volumes of essays, and numerous edited anthologies (including the just-published Poems to Read: From the Favorite Poem Project). In addition, his book The Inferno of Dante, a new verse translation, was awarded the Los Angeles Times Book Award in poetry and the Howard Morton Landon Prize for translation. A Book-of-the-Month-Club Editor’s Choice, it has been celebrated by Stephen Greenblatt as “the premier modern text for English-language readers to experience Dante’s power.” Louis Martz wrote of Pinsky “the most exhilarating new poet that I have read since A. R. Ammons entered upon the scene. In his peculiar and original combination of abstract utterance and vivid image Pinsky points the way toward the future of poetry.” Hugh Kenner has described Pinsky’s ambition as “nothing less than the recovery for language of a whole domain of mute and familiar experience.”
Randy Weiner is a writer/director whose projects span theater, film, and television. He has written over 20 shows for Project 400 Theater Group, including The Donkey Show. He has been commissioned by Music-Theatre Group in New York City and the Ambassador Theater Group in London to create new works for the theater. His collaborators include the Pulitzer Prize nominated duo, jazz composer Diedre Murray and poet Cornelius Eady (Fangs), and Diane Paulus (Swimming with Watermelons, Karaoke of Errors). Weiner also co-wrote Club 12, a hip-hop version of “Twelfth Night,” featuring Grammy Award winning singers Lauryn Hill and Wyclef Jean, presented by the Shubert Organization. He has written music-based film and TV projects for MTV, FOX, HBO, Quincy Jones Entertainment, and Warner Brothers. In addition, Randy has worked for the last seven years in the Internet business. The company he founded, Fan2Fan.com, is one of the leading music marketing companies today. Weiner is a graduate of Harvard, where he currently a member of the Arts Advisory Committee. He is also co-founder and managing director of The Box theater club in New York.
Alex McDowell, for 20 years a design leader in several pop culture fields (including record sleeve graphics and MTV videos), is currently most fully employed as a production designer in Feature Films. Born and trained in London, he moved to Los Angeles in 1986, having designed over a hundred music videos, and began a new career as production designer for many of the most cutting-edge young directors in commercials. In 1991, McDowell was called upon to production design the virtual reality cult film The Lawnmower Man, followed by The Crow; Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas with director Terry Gilliam, Fight Club with director David Fincher, Minority Report and The Terminal with director Steven Spielberg, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and The Corpse Bride with Tim Burton. For Minority Report, McDowell established the first fully integrated digital design department in the film industry, enabling the strands of 2D and 3D design, set construction, camera, prop manufacturing and post-production VFX to be efficiently linked and managed by the Design Team. McDowell is the founder of the revolutionary design and engineering think tank known as ‘matter’, and is co-founder of the 5D Conference of Immersive Design. Death and the Powers is his first opera project.
The Opera of the Future research group (also known as Hyperinstruments) at the MIT Media Lab explores concepts and techniques to help advance the future of musical composition, performance, learning, and expression. Through the design of new interfaces for both professional virtuosi and amateur music-lovers, the development of new techniques for interpreting and mapping expressive gesture, and the application of these technologies to innovative compositions and experiences, we seek to enhance music as a performance art, and to develop its transformative power as counterpoint to our everyday lives. The scope of our research includes musical instrument design, concepts for new performance spaces, interactive touring and permanent installations, and "music toys." It ranges from extensions of traditional forms to radical departures, such as the Brain Opera and Toy Symphony.
Read more at Opera of the Future and The MIT Media Lab