On Sept. 9, 2015, the Lucerne Festival Academy Orchestra offered the world premiere performance of Tod Machover's Symphony for Lucerne.

Over the course of a year, Machover invited people to use their smart phones to record sounds from around Lucerne. Machover himself returned to the city each month to record conversations, environmental sounds and musical performances. He then assembled the sounds at the MIT Media Lab, where he heads the Opera of the Future group, and incorporated them into his orchestral composition.

The Symphony for Lucerne is very literally meant to represent the sounds of the city, offering an aural portrait as experienced by Lucerne's residents and visitors.

​Listen to the full performance at the top of this page, and hear WQXR's Jeff Spurgeon interview Machover about the project below.

By Peter Dizikes. 

A new symphony that incorporates the sounds of the city it was composed for, and a concert where the musicians move around and use technologically enhanced instruments analyzing their performances — these are just two highlights of Tod Machover’s term as composer-in-residence for this year’s prestigious Lucerne Festival in Switzerland, including two world premieres later this month.

​Machover, the Muriel R. Cooper Professor of Interactive Media Design at the MIT Media Lab, has written three new pieces in all — one already debuted, in August — and an updated performance of one of his classic works, “Hyperstring Trilogy,” originally written in part for the famed cellist Yo-Yo Ma.

By Allan Kozinn. 

​Tod Machover, the prolific composer of electronic works and the inventor of several hyperinstruments – hybrids in which standard instruments are enhanced with computer and synthesizer technology – has been appointed composer in residence for 2015 at the Lucerne Festival. His main project will be “Symphony for Lucerne,” a work meant to capture the spirit and culture of the city, and an installment in a series of city works that already includes “A Toronto Symphony: Concerto for Composer and City” (2013), “Festival City,” for Edinburgh (2013) and “Between the Desert and the Deep Blue Sea: A Symphony for Perth” (2014).

Tod Machover, der die Sinfonie für Luzern komponieren wird und beim Lucerne Festival im Sommer 2015 auch die Rolle des Composer-Inresidence übernehmen wird, gilt als einer der signifikantesten und innovativsten Komponisten unserer Generation. Seit 30 Jahren demonstriert er mit seiner Musik eine aussergewöhnliche stilistische Bandbreite, die dazu beigetragen hat, die Definition der Musik selbst und ihre Wirkung auf  die Gesellschaft weiterzuentwickeln.

Machover ist für seine innovativen Werke bekannt wie zum Beispiel die Roboter-Oper „Death and the Powers“, die für den Pulitzer Preis 2012 in der finalen Auswahl stand. Seit 2012 arbeitet Machover an einer Serie von Stadt-Sinfonien, so entstanden in Toronto, Edinburgh und Perth (Australien) ähnliche Sinfonien wie die geplante in Luzern.

​Er wurde 1953 in New York geboren, studierte an der Juilliard School bei Elliott Carter und wirkte an Pierre Boulez‘ IRCAM in Paris als Composer-In-Residence und als erster Director of Musical Research.