Symphony in D

Machover is no stranger to Detroit, having presented a program of his music — including Hyperinstruments and Hyperscore — for Peter Oundjian’s "8 Days in June" festival in 2008. His new Symphony in D has been underwritten by a generous grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which approached Machover with the idea of bringing the project to The Motor City. This is his fifth "collaborative city symphony" — after Toronto, Edinburgh, Perth and Lucerne — and the first in the U.S. Machover conceived this series of projects as a way of creating sonic portraits of cities using traditional musical elements — melody, harmony, rhythm, timbre — as well as by listening to the city and using its real sounds in the piece as well. And in each city, he invites residents to collaborate on every stage of the composition, from helping to collect sound, to discussing the "story" of Detroit, to trading words and music in all kinds of contexts, and finally to working together on the shape and "narrative" of the final composition.


But even though Machover had been to Detroit before and had composed four other collaborative symphonies, he says he was "overwhelmed by the public response in Detroit, by the richness of the city’s history, by the incredible diversity of sounds and ‘voices’, and by the pulsation — literal and figurative — that courses through every aspect of Detroit." In fact, Machover and his team from the MIT Media Lab collected far more sound from Detroit — over 15,000 samples and more than 100 hours of audio, from the roar and purr of cars, to the crackle and snap of Motown, to the gentle rhythms of urban gardening — than from any other city so far. He met with classical musicians and indie rockers, 3rd graders and senior citizens, techno masters and beat-making novices, civic leaders, passersby on the street, poets, sculptors, urban gardeners, choristers, young entrepreneurs, factory workers and factory guides… an experience that Machover says was "inspiring, complex, thought-provoking, and very moving." And he says that "although the rhythm and bass — the crackling energy — found in the streets and parks, everywhere, in Detroit has shaped this symphony, it is the people I have met here — an extraordinary collection of visionary, independent, courageous individuals — who have most deeply impacted the sound and feel of the work." Machover was so impressed with the people he met during the project, that he has invited a number of them to participate in the performance of Symphony in D, something that he had not imagined when he started the project. Including remarkable people from the city in the piece itself, of all backgrounds and ages, seemed to Machover to be the best way to "create a collective portrait of this moment in Detroit’s history, where everything is being rethought and anything is possible." After visiting Detroit numerous times for an entire year, and collecting all of these audio, compositional and narrative contributions, Machover has crafted Symphony in D as a five movement work of about thirty minutes duration.


The piece starts gently — with the iconic sound of Henry Ford’s original Kitchen Sink Engine — but quickly builds, layering multiple rhythms into a pulsating sound collage that Machover says "is as complex as Detroit itself." Movement 2, "Black Bottom Bass," celebrates the sensation Machover developed that all music here grows from the ground up. The movement crackles with energy and syncopated pulses, coming together at the end with the Symphony’s main connecting melody. Movement 3, "Belle Isle Interlude," is a contemplative movement that "lets the orchestra sing gently, celebrating the many quiet, surprising oases in this metropolis." Movement 4, "Dreams and Memories," is also gentle, but layers many community improvisations and sonic contributions (always rotating around the note ‘D’) while stories from poets, kids and seniors are shared live on stage. Movement 5, "Together in D," is the Finale, building gradually around a pulsating bass line and a rising melody, combining the virtuosity of the orchestra with the contributions of a number of Detroit musicians from wildly different traditions, and ending with a (quite low) bang!


Throughout the piece, the acoustic orchestra blends with city sounds, melodies and harmonies intertwine with Grand Prix cars and the lapping of the Detroit River, and multiple conversations — very verbal and purely musical — are heard. DSO Music Director Leonard Slatkin says, "The concept of utilizing the sounds of our city, both those found and those submitted by others and then incorporating them into an orchestral work is quite amazing… Clearly this is a project of unique interest to all those interested in the power of collaborative thinking." For Machover, the challenge of creating Symphony in D has been "to capture the beauty and intensity of Detroit, to express the driving, pulsating quality of the city while also representing its quiet, gentle side, to provide an uplifting and inspiring vision without simplifying the city’s complexities, and to share Detroit’s unique power and potential with everyone — both here in Detroit and around the world — at this special moment and far into the future."


—Charles Greenwell (October 2015)