Professor of music and media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Tod Machover, recently premiered his soundscape composition, Symphony in D, with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. The performance featured the mundane sounds of the Motor City comprised into a listenable piece of music.
It's not unusual for the city to act as inspiration for musical composition--just look at West Side Story or even Rhapsody in Blue. While the practice may not be uncommon, using the actual sounds of the city is.
Machover used 15,000-plus sounds from Detroit to capture the essence of what it means to be from the Motor City. He even accepted submissions from local residents who also found music in their surroundings.
Having premiered in the Max M. & Marjorie S. Fischer Music Center on Nov. 20 and 21, it's been reported as a splendid spiral of musical ambition--"using the creative power of the DSO, and live contributions from a diverse host of special guests, too."
Hyperallergic continued to write of the premiere:
"The result was a cacophonous love letter to Detroit, running just under a half-hour without pause between movements. The first three of those movements demonstrated the virtuosity of the DSO, whose players smoothed out the rough edges and added a unifying underscore to the discordant industrial grind and babble of Detroit in sound-bite form: assembly lines churning, laughter, traffic, plus a thousand little pings, screeches, and beats that can't be traced precisely to their sources but form the real-life Foley of a city at work and play."
Opening to warm reviews, Symphony in D is a unique vision into what the sonic quality of a city is really about. Machover and the DSO are exploring a new ground and expanding on that vision.
If you couldn't be in attendance preview the piece below and get in on what everyone's been talking about.
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