already and not yet, concerto for orchestra with electronics
Tod Machover was born in Mount Vernon, New York, on November 24, 1953, and lives in Waltham, Massachusetts. He composed already and not yet on a commission from the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Andris Nelsons, Music Director, through the generous support of the New Works Fund established by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, a state agency. His primary collaborator on the artificial intelligence system used in the piece is researcher and musician Manaswi Mishra. These are the world premiere performances. The work is in three movements, played without pause.
The score of already and not yet calls for a standard orchestra of piccolo, 2 flutes (2nd doubling alto flute), 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 2 trombones, bass trombone, tuba, timpani, percussion (3 players: I. vibraphone, crash cymbals, 3 suspended cymbals, tam-tam, snare drum, bass drum; II. crotales, marimba, crash cymbals, 3 suspended cymbals, 2 tam-tams, side drum, bass drum; III. xylophone, crash cymbals, 3 suspended cymbals, tam-tam, temple blocks, snare drum, tenor drum, bass drum—plus other non-pitched metal and wood instruments ad lib.), piano, electronic MIDI keyboard (electronics trigger)/laptop; AI computer and software, and strings (first and second violins, violas, cellos, and double basses).
Electronic sound and samples are triggered via a MIDI-capable electronic keyboard; sounds are broadcast throughout the auditorium. The AI system created for already and not yet is controlled live onstage by Manaswi Mishra, who also designed the system. Music performed live by the orchestra is picked up by microphones for AI response, also broadcast via speakers.
I’ve worked for a long time with music and technology, and for a long time have had a feeling that technology can expand the sound of music, the expression and very meaning of music, and the connection between musicians and audience.
—Tod Machover
Tod Machover is an accomplished cellist.
While that might not be the first or best descriptor of the acclaimed composer, conductor, inventor, and educator, Machover’s early and continued dedication to performance as a practice has informed all his work as a composer and music-technology pioneer. His connection to music as a deeply human and physical pursuit has kept the artistic individual and the receptive listener at the center of his thinking as a creator.
Machover has long been associated with institutions whose names are synonymous with cutting-edge technology. He worked at IRCAM, the Paris-based center for computer-aided music research, for seven years. In 1985 he was recruited by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to become an original faculty member of the newly founded Media Lab, where he is now Faculty Director. He is also MIT’s Muriel R. Cooper Professor of Music and Media and director of the Opera of the Future group.
Machover’s research and teaching pursuits have always paralleled his work as a composer, and vice versa; his engagement with technology began as a means to achieve his artistic goals. He grew up in a highly creative environment, learning piano from his mother, Wilma, a Juilliard-trained piano teacher who wrote a book on unlocking children’s creativity. His father, Carl, was an engineer and himself a pioneer in the development of computer graphics and computer-aided design software. Their aggregate musical tastes spanned the classical and pop worlds, and, as a teenager in the 1960s, Machover was enamored of the Beatles, who to this day he counts as an influence, and started a rock band with still-collaborator/friend Wesley Strick called Hot Toddy Went West.
Machover began his advanced training at the University of California, Santa Cruz, before returning to New York to study at Columbia University and the Juilliard School. He spent a year in Italy as an undergraduate, studying with Luigi Dallapiccola, and worked extensively with Roger Sessions and Elliott Carter at Juilliard while also performing as a cellist. He honed his interest in music technology at MIT and Stanford before arriving at IRCAM in 1978 at the invitation of director/founder Pierre Boulez, who named him the first director of musical research there in 1980.
Machover had gone to Juilliard mostly to compose orchestral music, but found himself imagining sounds and structures that lay way outside of traditional notation or playing technique. Through Juilliard professor Milton Babbitt, he found someone to teach him the Fortran programming language so he could realize his musical visions. One of his first such projects was to create a computer realization of a very complex string trio he had written, as a way of training—and convincing—an ensemble to perform the piece. The music he created while at IRCAM already sought collaborative equilibrium between electronic and acoustic forces.
Machover was and continues to be powerfully influenced by the cognitive scientist and artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky, whose book Society of Mind posits the idea of specialized systems or “agents” whose interdependence results in an emergent intelligence. Machover’s major opera VALIS, from 1987, is notably based on Philip K. Dick’s novel whose premise, in many ways, parallels Minsky’s ideas, and the composer’s 1996 Brain Opera is based directly on Minsky’s work. VALIS, commissioned by Paris’s Centre Pompidou for the center’s 10th anniversary, used six singers with only two live musicians whose performances were enhanced and expanded in real time via the first application of his “Hyperinstrument” concept. The technology available at that time limited the realization of Machover’s plans for the 1987 production at Centre Pompidou, but more recently a production mounted at MIT employed a custom AI system to realize the composer’s original vision. Among Machover’s other operas are Resurrection, commissioned by Houston Grand Opera, Death and the Powers, written as part of a collaboration that included Opéra de Monte Carlo, Cambridge’s American Repertory Theater, Opera Boston, and Chicago Opera Theater; and Schoenberg in Hollywood, commissioned by Boston Lyric Opera. VALIS, Resurrection, and Death and the Powers were all released as commercial recordings.
The alternative-culture origin of VALIS mirrored a broadening of Machover’s musical language that took root in the opera. His early compositions were informed by his modernist teachers, but in the 1980s his music expanded to embrace his rock influences and other styles. Another work in this trajectory was Bug-Mudra, a piece for two guitarists (one acoustic/amplified and one “hyper”), hyperpercussion, and conductor. The conductor wears a special glove that, via hand gestures, modifies the live acoustic and MIDI signals of the other performers. The title of the piece references the idea of a computer “bug” (influencing the instrumental sound) and the Indian musical-gestural “mudra,” mirroring the human/technology balance of the piece. Stylistically, Bug-Mudra blends virtuosic performance, sophisticated harmonic architecture, and a frenetic, rock-influenced groove emphasized by the guitars.
The Hyperinstruments Machover began developing in the late 1980s resulted in one created for his own instrument, the cello, in collaboration with the endlessly curious Yo-Yo Ma. Sensors on the bow, the instrument itself, and the player’s wrist send signals to a system that expands the instrument’s sound-world electronically. Ma played a piece composed for him and that instrument, Machover’s Begin Again Again…, in recital at Tanglewood in 1991. (Many of Machover’s works, including Bug-Mudra, have been performed at Tanglewood since the mid-1980s.) Machover also created a Hyperviolin for Joshua Bell. His multipart Hyperstring Trilogy combines Begin Again Again… with Song of Penance for Hyperviola and chamber orchestra and Forever and Ever for Hyperviolin and orchestra into a work of more than an hour’s duration. Machover’s Hyperpiano was featured in the concerto Jeux Deux, a Boston Pops commission premiered by pianist Michael Chertock under Keith Lockhart’s direction at Symphony Hall in 2005. Those performances also featured live interactive computer “drawing,” projected on a screen above the orchestra, that transformed in response to the music as a visual complement to the live electronic sound enhancement.
Machover’s recent musical research and activities have expanded into the realm of health and well-being. “Pharmamusicology” (a phrase coined by MIT Media Lab PhD student Kimara Lecamwasam) is a collaboration with neuroscience and medical researchers to study whether music and sound can be used in a targeted way to treat conditions such as anxiety disorder or to reverse diseases such as Alzheimer’s. Machover’s piece Gammified for string quartet and electronics is an artistic study in therapeutic potential of 40 Hz gamma-frequency sound waves. Gammified was performed by the Lydian String Quartet as part of a program called “Composing for the Future of Health” at Symphony Hall in April 2024. Much of this work is documented in Machover’s co-authored article “Composing the Future of Health” in the 2024 book Music and Mind, edited by Renée Fleming.
Groove, melodic lines, clear harmonic movement, and a sure sense of narrative flow characterize Machover’s music even as it has expanded into never-before-heard sound-worlds ranging from the very pretty and pure to the very gnarly and noise-adjacent. It’s in the nature of the AI systems he and his collaborators have developed to base this auditory language substantially on the sounds produced by live instruments and voices. Some of the more unusual sounds are derived from artifacts we often don’t notice in performance, for example a pedal release on the piano, the first moment of a bow strike on a cello string, or the click of a clarinet’s keys. These types of sounds can be pushed in the direction of inharmonic noise. On the other end of the spectrum, an AI enhancement may adhere closely and audibly to a purely “musical” tone and obey harmonic rules written into the piece.
While the seeds of the present AI system developed by Manaswi Mishra for already and not yet were planted in the 1980s, more recent projects have informed the details of its refinement and operation. The most relevant of these in this context is Machover’s FLOW Symphony, written in 2024 for Sejong Soloists and premiered in Seoul in August of that year. The sonic world of FLOW Symphony is based on the myriad and subtle sounds of a Vermont river. Machover recorded the river, notated musical translations of the sound, and asked the performers to improvise in imitation of the river’s sound. The AI system was trained using the river sound and the performers’ pre-recorded reactions to it and, as in already and not yet, responds to the ensemble’s live performance of Machover’s score. The creative constraints on the piece are the typical work of the composer: creating the melodic, harmonic, and textural arcs of the piece, developing the narrative, and, for the AI, defining its limits while still allowing for the serendipitous.
Unlike the FLOW Symphony, already and not yet uses no material from outside its own ecosystem of the orchestra, a keyboard triggering sounds crafted in Machover’s Waltham barn studio (including some based on recordings made especially for this piece with the Carduus vocal ensemble conducted by Holly Druckman), and the AI system itself that reacts immediately to the live orchestra. Manaswi Mishra’s work has been fundamental not only to the technical side of developing the AI system but also in its live deployment. He and Ana Schon, who mixes the electronic and acoustic signals in a live performance, are both integral to the project. Like turntablists in early hip-hop and later laptop electronic music performers, Mishra represents a new type of performing collaborator being asked to make artistic choices, like those of traditional performers, in service to the composer’s score and vision.
Machover’s approach to the orchestra itself is rooted in modern tradition. While there are few extended instrumental techniques, ensemble virtuosity is a constant. The first movement, SMASH UP, is an orchestral tour-de-force. Each individual or section part is written almost as if for a soloist, with intricate, changing rhythms, well-defined, wide-ranging melodic segments, and extensive interplay.
In the second movement, WAKE UP, the texture opens up, the players becoming individually identifiable and being afforded opportunities for limited improvisation. The movement is assembled from short solo phrases outlining the melodic motto of the symphony, with the AI system interacting with the specific performers and emphasizing their individuality. In the finale, STAND UP, the interaction becomes more globalized. Reacting to the entire orchestra, the AI system here ideally encourages the orchestral players to strive toward an idealized balance among them, as the composer relates below.
Regarding the title: Machover encountered the phrase “already and not yet” in an essay by New York Times opinion columnist David French about the film The Testament of Ann Lee, a feature about the resilience of the founder of Shakerism in America. In his essay, French referenced this phrase from his religious upbringing that asks one to focus on the foundations of the past and the concerns of the present as well as the promise of the future, what he calls “the gap between American hope and American reality.” Working through challenges toward the betterment of the community as a whole: already and not yet is a musical model of that ideal.
Robert Kirzinger
Composer and writer Robert Kirzinger is the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Director of Program Publications.
Tod Machover writes about already and not yet:
already and not yet was composed between Summer 2025 and Summer 2026 for the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
The title of the piece refers to the state of the world and of our country, prepared to be shaped and with much to appreciate, but unfinished, imperfect and urgently in need of pushing forward. The first movement—SMASH UP—is a clash/crisis; the second—WAKE UP—is an awakening; and the third—STAND UP—is a growing depiction of a possible future for democracy as I imagine it, as well as a musical call to action.
Electronics enhance the orchestra throughout, but the work’s live AI system, developed specifically for this composition at the MIT Media Lab, becomes prominent in movements 2 and 3. In movement 2, it is used to spin enhancements and variations on solo lines that sweep through the orchestra, emphasizing the individuality of—and differences between—the performers. In movement 3, the AI system pulls in the many-layered orchestra and creates—I hope—a new kind of sound that balances detail and wholeness, polyphony and holistic texture, and also allows the sound to extend off the stage into the hall, embracing the audience.
Tod Machover
July 4, 2026