The New-Music Man : With his computer-driven compositions and such creations as the Conductor’s Glove, Tod Machover has a sound grasp of the future

If exuberance alone were a fossil fuel, Tod Machover would be OPEC.

If jump starts were called for, he’d be the booster.

If today was the day the music stopped, Machover would know how to reboot the system.

Exaggerations? Hyper-hyperbole?

You decide.

But there is something electric and energetic about this 38-year-old American composer and computer button pusher who is currently in town ready to push some more buttons. Monday night at the Japan America Theatre, Machover will introduce his latest computer-driven, electronically enhanced work--the viola concerto “Song of Penance.” The concerto’s premiere is part of the L.A. Philharmonic’s New Music Group’s Green Umbrella series with Kim Kashkashian playing a wired viola and Stephen Mosko conducting the traditionally acoustic small orchestra.

Within the last five years, Machover has emerged as one of the younger and more visible practitioners of new music forms. He has enhanced acoustic instruments--such as the viola and cello--by playing them through computers (he calls them hyperinstruments ), and has contrived instruments powered by electronic systems, using technology to create new compositions for inquiring ears.

In the last year Machover’s career has accelerated, including: the commissioned concerto for hyper-viola and voice in Los Angeles; last summer’s presentation at Tanglewood of his composition written for, and performed by, Yo-Yo Ma on hyper-cello; in Baltimore, a performance of his hyper-instrumented symphony “Towards the Center”; and in Montreal, a hyper-cello presentation of his own work.

He is writing the music and working on a libretto for a cloaked-in-secrecy opera project with another force, Peter Sellars. Then there’s “The Brain Opera,” a project with a Japanese company that would be a new form of operatic experience, a virtual musical and experiential theme-park ride through the mind.

“The reason we have technology is because it allows us to be more creative and more expressive and more human if we develop the right kind of tools and instruments,” says Machover, whose conversation crackles with technospeak, his hands moving in constant keyboard cadence. “Technology can increase the joy of making music.”

In composing for computer instruments, Machover combines some of the traditional processes with the new. His early thinking and planning for his works follow those of many composers. He thinks through what he wants to deliver then moves beyond that, releasing his imagination to consider sounds and ways of playing that don’t exist. “I might say while composing, ‘Wouldn’t it be interesting if this super cello I have in my mind could play just one note, but if the bow changes or it’s flicked slightly or is played heavier, then in that certain measure 10 cellos would be heard and, depending on how long the note is held, what other sounds might be produced?’ I imagine these things, then I work with several researchers to see how that could be done.”

Director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab since 1986 and an associate professor of music and media there, Machover received his musical training at Juilliard, UC Santa Cruz, Columbia, MIT, Pierre Boulez’s IRCAM in Paris, and along the way with composers Elliott Carter and Roger Sessions.

His early roots come from two seemingly opposite forces.

He learned piano and cello from his mother, the classic European musical forms as well as the then-emerging new music composers such as California’s pioneering Morton Subotnick. His first experiences in composition were in games his mother taught him, writing notations based on household objects.

He learned about a new technology from his father, a pioneer in this country in computer graphics.

“I was very interested in music as a way of expressing ideas,” Machover says of his growing up. “And I was interested in technology as a very exciting way of expressing new ideas, as a way of expanding what people could do. So now we have a sort of reconciliation of cultures. It’s not so much how you take technology and hook up a machine to musical instruments, it’s really how you take the idea of expressing one’s self through an artistic form and science to solve problems--and make both art and science work together so that both sides become enriched.”

The pursuit of computer-based music reaches back just into the late ‘50s when computers were programmed to write, not produce, music. Later, innovators would concentrate on synthesized sounds, electronic instruments, and compositions that would carry forth new sets of intonations. The work continues to advance and grow, primarily at universities. (UC San Diego, CalArts and Stanford are some of the California institutions with major efforts in developing various computer-music forms.)

Machover’s creations are designed to enhance and expand the work of the human performer, he says. There is, for example, the Conductor’s Glove, known earlier as the Dexterous Hand Master. It’s dream stuff for a movie monster, a special effects person’s fantasy. It’s an electronic-laced mitt that fits over the conductor’s left hand. The right hand remains free to keep time. The left hand, still capable of signaling to the orchestra the conductor’s ideas about loudness and timbre, now takes on a further function.

The conductor becomes an orchestral instrument. That computer-linked mitt produces a sound of its own as it moves through the air, its manipulation emitting tonal variations while controlling the other sounds of computerized instruments.

“The glove,” Machover says, “is an example of how we now can go beyond traditional instruments. Now just by moving the body or the arm the conductor can control his own musical instrument. A subtle movement of each finger translates into sounds through the computer. In one 15-minute piece the hand produces 10 different effects, from doing the traditional pointing at a member of the orchestra, or signaling louder or softer, to actually grabbing someone’s sound and throwing it around the room and having it bounce off the walls.

“I call this finger painting--finger painting with sound--and the conductor can take the normal sound of an instrument and turn it into a voice and change its quality by where he or she is or moves.”

Machover can see “perhaps in five years” another use for the glove outside of the concert hall. Home music lovers will be able, he says, to conduct through their computers and through specially prepared compact discs the recorded music of, say, the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

But for now he sees musicians tied in with computers able to expand their virtuosity, their techniques and their interpretations. “Each instrument has an electronic slave that allows the players to reach the heights of their capabilities, and perhaps beyond.” The slave fits on the player’s hand, another is attached to the instrument.

Machover’s major fear for the future of electronic music, however, is the Milli Vanilli thing, musical performances being prerecorded and pieced together in studios with the human relegated to mouthing mockeries--sonic puppets. “You can go into recording studios now,” he says, “and camp out for three weeks. Every instrument, every layer of sound in the piece is put in with a tweezer, bit by bit. There’s almost no live performance left at the end. It’s all like making a collage on a huge mixing board. The quality of the sound that emerges is so controlled that there are musicians now who fear live performances. They can’t duplicate what the studio has done.

“But live performance remains extremely important. It allows different generations to take note of the core idea, the score of a piece, to reinterpret it, to rethink it with their own set of values. It allows a connection between the person performing and therefore interpreting it and the public. We are in real danger of arriving at a state where nobody will want to perform in public because they can’t do as well as they do on their records.”

Thus another reason for computer instruments, he believes. Players would have instruments that would enhance performance, their “musical power,” Machover says, to a maximum level, allowing them to match their output with their computer input. “They can control the equivalent of the incredible recording studio during their live performance,” he says.

Machover uses traditional notation forms but has invented his own symbolic language that with training helps the performing musician with the nuances of the technology. How this works is seen in the development of Monday night’s work, which was commissioned two years ago in Los Angeles by patron Betty Freeman. Machover and violist Kashkashian met six months later to discuss the project. She asked for text--songs--that would go with this new, unfamiliar music. Machover thought the two wouldn’t work but got a friend, Rose Moss, to write a text. Meanwhile he planned to make the hyper-viola, which Kashkashian had never used, to also control the accompanying recorded voice.

They met again last October with Machover demonstrating the cello work he had written for Yo-Yo Ma. It was the violist’s introduction to a hyper-instrument. Then Machover recorded her playing in a New York studio. In December she received the new score. Since then the two have used trans-Atlantic fax messages--Kashkashian lives in Germany, Machover in Boston--with Machover indicating by fax where the computer and text would kick in.

Two weeks ago she received the orchestral score with marks indicating where the violist would control the computer part of the program. They were to meet in Los Angeles only last Thursday where Machover, two assistants with four computers, conductor Mosko and the soloist were to review the music. This weekend they were to rehearse with orchestra and computer-stored text.

If all goes well Monday night, Machover will have nothing to do but sit in the hall at the sound mixing desk. His colleague, Joe Chung, who has written the computer’s software, may also have nothing to do except watch the master computer and audit the performance, ready as will be Machover to push buttons.

But wait. This is electronics.

What about glitches?

Violists, we know, can play around a broken string. An oboist can quickly replace a disturbed reed. But as any user of electronic toys and computers knows, hard drives crash and on-switches can fail. Whole telephone systems can go down. Cable systems are far from perfect. In typical full-score-ahead expression, Machover faces that question: “You just can’t have the thing break.

“You can’t have the soloist come to measure 35 on the down beat and you have a giant orchestra sound programmed and then have nothing happen.

“It has to be reliable.

“We try to build our systems so sophisticated and solid enough so that they don’t break.

“They respond the way we want them.

“We can’t have anything that won’t work. Music, you see, becomes an excellent way to test technology.”