Tod Machover Quotes

#1. I never liked opera growing up. I always liked chamber music or solo music even more than orchestral music.

Tod Machover

#2. I think that one of the things about music is it's supposed to be spontaneous, it's supposed to be real human beings bouncing off of each other whether its from the stage or to the audience, or jamming with friends.

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#3. Why does every society seem to want to make music when it often seems like kind of a frill.

Tod Machover

#4. I think it's maybe because Sergeant Pepper's came out when I was about 13 or 14 and that was a pretty impressionable age, and it was such a kind of radical period. But that period of the Beatles really had a big influence on me and I think are directly related to hyperinstruments.

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#5. The one obvious thing is that the devices are so good now that you can also see their limitations extremely well.

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#6. Music seems to stimulate more parts of our mind than almost every other activity. It combines more parts of our minds. It synchronizes our minds. It allows people in groups to do a non-verbal immediate activity together.

Tod Machover

#7. The way I listen to music goes in waves depending on a lot of things. How busy I am, if I'm in between composition projects, if I'm starting a new project. So, the only time I listen to the radio for music is with my daughter's when I'm driving them to school, or driving them somewhere.

Tod Machover

#8. The basic idea of a hyper instrument is where the technology is built right into the instrument so that the instrument knows how it's being played - literally what the expression is, what the meaning is, what the direction of the music is.

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#9. I did take composition lessons when I was in high school, so I wrote piano pieces. I wrote some chamber music. I don't think any of that was particularly interesting.

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#10. I've done a lot of operas. I've probably done more different kind of operas than anybody.

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#11. My work on hyper instruments started with simple instruments, like the piano.

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#12. Nobody talks about music as having intrinsic meaning, how it engages the mind.

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#13. You have to train your mind and your ears, but they're more like athletic skills. So, part of music you just have to learn those things or you can't practice the art.

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#14. The English learned, in my view, how to use harmony much earlier than the French or the Italians, or the Germans.

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#15. I row for about 40-45 minutes every morning and put in my iPod and it's a huge range. That's when I listen to either things that I just love and know very well and just want to pay attention, it's also where I listen to things that are new that I want to get to know.

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#16. There's just an incredibly rich and interesting relationship between our listening to music and the way our minds engage.

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#17. When I was done with high school, I knew that music was really important to me and I knew I didn't want to be a cellist, but I wasn't really sure if I wanted to be a composer, or think about - I was just interested in the ideas behind music, I was interested in mathematics.

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#18. One of the big mysteries of music is, if you take music without words, it means something to us because we know it's about something. It's about something important humanly, but since there are no words, nobody knows what it's about.

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#19. I love working with technology because it allows me to follow my imagination and to invent new things.

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#20. I think in many ways, the texture of technology actually diminishes human beings. It doesn't augment them.

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#21. Strangely, the thing I listen to 75% of the time, when I'm exercising with my headphones on is English Tudor/Elizabethan music, so music from about 1450 to the early 1600's.

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#22. There were a lot of things happen in the mid-'80's that all of a sudden made it possible to do a lot of very quick interactive music.

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#23. A piano is a machine, but you've got ivory and there's weight behind the keys and you have this really - you feel the resonance in the instrument, you feel the vibration in the pedal. I mean, these a still very crude.

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#24. I listen to a lot of music that teenagers are listening to because I'm around them.

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#25. One of my interests in music has always been what it means, why it affects us the way it does.

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#26. There's many reason music exists and we are beginning to no only understand that, but measure that.

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#27. One of the things I like most of all is being in my study, in my barn, with absolutely no sound anywhere thinking about something. It's extremely important to me.

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#28. The barn where I work, it's only 15 minutes or so from Harvard square, so It's very close to the center of Boston, but it happens to be a total oasis. It's completely quiet in there.

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#29. I think a double bass for me would be too much effort. But the cello, you're really engaged and the sound is kind of right here. So, it feels like being merged, married to an instrument.

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#30. That's the definition of popularity. Something that literally resonates with many, many people.

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#31. I think the seed was planted when I was a teenager, and it took me until I got out of Juilliard. At Juilliard I was just learning to be a composer, but I was also learning how to manipulate computers.

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#32. I like the idea of imagining a sound and feeling a sound and then having it come out through your body, through an instrument. That's an important way to make music.

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#33. Works of art should be stimulating. They should wake people up rather than acting like a sedative.

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#34. After a year, I thought gee I don't really need college anymore, which wasn't correct, but that's what I thought.

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#35. My message is to forget about dichotomies. The 'Brain Opera' is an opera, even if it does not tell a story in the usual way. It is a psychological journey with voice - so I do consider it an opera.

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#36. I listen to new music by composers who are interesting to me. I listen to some; I don't know if I want to call it pop, but it's some interesting artist that gets my attention, I listen to in the mornings.

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#37. I had grown up and gone to high school in New York, so I wanted to get out of the east coast.

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#38. I almost never these days sit down with a CD or my laptop and just listen to a piece with a score. I probably would do that while I'm exercising.

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#39. I'd studied piano first and switched over to cello when I was about seven. I played mostly chamber and solo classical music. I got really involved with rock music when I was a teenager. I wired up my cello.

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#40. All the music we know that's popular is actually commonly shared music that takes things that are similar about all of us.

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#41. I have a big barn that I converted to my music studio, so I go there early in the morning and the first thing I do is rowing. And that's when I listen to a lot of music.

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#42. I love the cello, I love the physical sense of an instrument that's about the size of your body that vibrates enough that even if you play an open string, you feel it.

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#43. I love Bach, I love Beethoven, I love Mozart, I love the Beatles, I love you know, Stockhausen, I love many things. But for some reason I come back to Elizabethan music because it's a little bit like the Beatles.

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#44. England has had a lot of really bad periods of music, but it's had several amazing periods where they've found an incredible balance, not just between music that's a rather complex and also pretty direct. Like the Beatles.

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#45. I went to the University of California, Santa Cruz for a year, which turned out to be a really vibrant, very intensive intellectual atmosphere where you could do a lot of aspect of music without it being a conservatory. And that's why I went there.

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#46. Any Beatles song is perfect. It gets to you right away.

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