We are going to the opera tonight, and I’m remembering the last opera we saw, by MIT Media Lab innovator Tod Machover.
It was called Death and the Powers, and it was about a genius who wanted to live forever and figured out how to convert himself into a sort of computer after death. Given that it had lyrics by former poet laureate Robert Pinsky, I thought it would be great, but it was nowhere near as good as Machover’s Resurrection, a Tolstoy story adapted by MIT’s Laura Harrington. (The robots in Death and the Powers were cute anyway.)
Machover is a tremendously interesting and prolific musician. Here he talks about how music can bring back memories, not unlike Proust’s petit madeleine.
Below he explains how his “hyper instruments” have drawn people of all types, including the elementary school classes he visits, into the joy of music making.
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