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Beat by Beat | In With the New
Musical Futures
WENDALYN BARTLEY
For the adventurously minded, the act of music making can be
all about paving the way for the future of music to unfold. If you
were to think 50 years ahead or even 25, what would your prediction
be for how music will be created, experienced and listened to?
This year’s New Creations Festival presented by the Toronto
Symphony Orchestra from March 2 to 9 will be an opportunity to
catch a glimpse of what may be in store for the music lovers of 2050.
When the TSO invited American composer and technology wizard Tod
Machover to both curate the 2013 festival and compose a new work for
it, Machover began dreaming big.
He started with the question — what does the city of Toronto sound
like? He added to that question the vision of opening up the creative
process to anyone who wanted to participate. This new symphonic
work was to be a collaboration on a massive scale with the citizens of
Toronto, resulting in something that could not have been done by any
one individual. And with this mandate before him, Machover stepped
onto the road of future music making where he envisions collaboration
at the core of each piece, and professional musicians moving
beyond teaching and mentoring people to the act of “making things
with them.”
With such an expansive vision to live up to, the tools required for
creating A Toronto Symphony: Concerto for Composer and City
included both new ways of composing and the invention of new technologies.
And since Machover is renowned for his technological
prowess as a major player at the MIT (Massachusetts Institute of
Technology) Media Lab, designing new musical technologies is at the
heart of how he thinks and creates.
The collaborative activities began by inviting people to upload audio
recordings of what they considered to be distinctive Toronto sounds.
People responded to the call with a wide variety of sounds, harmonies
and melodies that represented their experience of the city. Originally
Machover thought that these exchanges would take place online, but
by early July of last year, he knew that something more was needed.
His answer was to get on a plane and fly north to engage directly with
people by recording sounds, trading music and trying out various
ideas. He met with musicians from the TSO, indie bands at Toronto
Island’s All Caps Festival, cyclists attending the Toronto Bicycle Music
Festival and a group called FYI Kids atop the CN Tower.
Now what to do with this array of sounds and music? For someone
like Machover, the answer was obvious — develop software tools for
collaborative composing. Three music apps were designed by his colleagues
at MIT: Constellation, Media Scores and City Soaring. These
gave people easy ways to create their own mixes and textures from the
bank of sound recordings, to paint the quality of a composed melody
and to contribute their own variations on music that Machover had
already written. No previous skill required, just an open mind, a sense
of play and inquisitive ears.
We’ll all get to hear the fruits of this groundbreaking process
on March 9 at Roy Thomson Hall in the third concert of the New
Creations Festival. For those of you who want to dive deeper into the
various components of this undertaking, the whole story — including
access to the music apps — is chronicled on Facebook: facebook.com/
ComposerAndCity.
The Toronto Symphony’s New Creations Festival begins on March 2,
just as this month’s WholeNote cycle ends. When looking at the
entirety of this year’s landmark festival curated by Machover, it is
striking to see the weaving together of visionary innovation amidst an
homage to the past. Symphony audiences will be introduced to composers
not that well known in this city — people such as Mason Bates,
composer-in-residence with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and
Steven Mackey. Both these American composers turn to music from
other sources for their inspiration. In Bates’s work Alternative Energy,
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