ABOVE: Composer Tod Machover leads a workshop in summer 2012 with students in Toronto as part of his open compositional process for A Toronto Symphony: Concerto for Composer and City. The Toronto Symphony Orchestra gave the world premiere on March 9, 2013. RIGHT: Screenshot of “City Soaring,” a music app created for A Toronto Symphony, allowing users to edit the piece’s “City Soaring” melody.
Since beginning work on A Toronto Symphony: A Concerto for Composer and City about a year ago, Tod Machover “has almost moved to Toronto!” says TSO Music Director Peter Oundjian. The piece—not only a portrait of Toronto but also cocreated by citizens of Toronto—was commissioned by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and Oundjian for the TSO’s annual New Creations Festival, held March 2013. “I was looking for something I could do on the scale of not 10, 20, 30, 40 people, but 100, 1,000, 10,000 people or more,” says Machover. Oundjian remembers the whimsical, quizzical expression on Machover’s face when he asked, “How about a ‘Toronto symphony’? It was so obviously an ideal title for a portrait of Toronto. The collaborative A lot of ideas are very obprocess of vious. So there we are! On helping compose a path to do something A Toronto nobody has ever attemptSymphony will ed before.” make people Machover’s crowdwho hear the sourced symphony has work “feel a heavy tech element, connected to which you’d expect from a piece that’s an MIT-based composer been created who invented the Hyaround them perscore music-notation and inspired by system and has written an them,” says opera, Death and the PowTSO Music ers, featuring a robotic Director Peter stage that comes alive. For Oundjian. this piece, Torontonians recorded sounds from
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places like the beach on Lake Ontario, a certain crossing downtown, and the subway; they then uploaded these sounds via YouTube, SoundCloud, Facebook, and email. But the collaborative process went well beyond that, following Machover’s discovery that virtual interactions were only reaching people who were “already in the Toronto Symphony or in the loop somehow.” He was much more successful after he decided “to build these communities through actually meeting people.” Beginning last summer, Machover worked with young musicians in the Toronto Symphony Youth Orchestra, who listened to some of those uploaded Toronto sounds and analyzed them. “Then together, we took all these sounds, and made them into a little acoustic piece,” says Machover. Machover also sent the composition’s main chord progression to musicians of the Toronto Symphony, asking them to write material riffing on that progression or suggesting different sonorities to go with the chords. “A lot of orchestra musicians sent things back to me,” says Machover. “I
made variations, and then we got together for a live session onstage of a five-minute piece made up of my music and theirs. We took an hour to rehearse and performed it in public. That’s actually the opening section of the piece.” In August, Machover even contacted about 40 indie-rock bands in town for a festival, asking them if they would be willing to make a five-second sound bite—or a one-second bite—to play during the festival. About 35 of them agreed to do it, he says. During the fall and early winter, Machover solicited more feedback, facilitated by a new digital app created by Machover’s team at the MIT Media Lab, where he is on the faculty. The app allowed would-be composers to go to the TSO website and manipulate things like rhythm, melody, repetition, and sonorities, then submit their versions to Machover for him to consider including in the final musical work. Hundreds of Toronto schoolchildren also created original music compositions about Toronto, working under the guidance of their music teachers at school. Parts of these contributions were incorporated into the final version, which includes a “wild and jazzy” movement called “Toronto Dances,” and “City Soaring,” evoking a vision of floating over the city of Toronto. The TSO premiered symphony
SPRING 2013
Photos at top of page courtesy of Toronto Symphony Orchestra
Sian Richards
Crowdsourcing in Toronto