Tod Machover

American composer. Born November 24, 1953 in Mount Vernon, New York. Machover received his degrees in musical composition from The Juilliard School, where he studied with Elliott Carter and Roger Sessions. From 1978-1985, he was Director of Musical Research at Pierre Boulez's IRCAM institute in Paris. Since 1985, he has worked at the MIT Media Lab (Cambridge, USA), where he is currently Professor of Music and Media and head of the Lab's Opera of the Future group. He is also a Founding Member of Media Lab Europe in Dublin. Machover's music has been performed and commissioned by many of the world's most prestigious arts institutions, including the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the San Francisco Symphony, the Centre Pompidou, the London Sinfonietta, the Houston Grand Opera, Lincoln Center for the Perfoming Arts, the Ensemble InterContemporain (Paris), the Ensemble Modern (Frankfurt), and the Tokyo String Quartet. His work has received numerous awards and prizes, including a "Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres," one of France's highest cultural honors, and the first DigiGlobe Prize in Interactive Media from the German government. He has composed five operas, including the science fiction VALIS, the celebrated audience-interactive Brain Opera (permanently installed at Vienna's House of Music), and the more traditional Resurrection, the CD of which has been released on Albany Records. Machover is currently Composer-in-Residence with the American Composers Orchestra at Carnegie Hall, and is working on opera projects for the Opèra de Monte-Carlo, New York City Opera and Los Angeles Opera.