October 16, 2012

COLUMBIA — Tod Machover has designed instruments for musical artists such as Yo-Yo Ma and Prince. He has also served as a visiting professor of composition at the Royal Academy of Music in London.

“He is as much an inventor as he is a composer,” said Robert Shay, the director of the MU School of Music.

In addition to his talk, the symposium will feature performances by renowned cellist Matt Haimovitz and the Grammy Award-winning group Eighth Blackbird.  Haimovitz will perform Thursday, and Eighth Blackbird will perform Friday, both at Jesse Auditorium.

Machover’s presentation will be Thursday in Whitmore Recital Hall on the MU campus. On Friday, a panel discussion, “New Media and the Future of Classical Music,” will be held in the Fred W. Smith Forum at the Reynolds Journalism Institute.  The panel will be made up of Machover, Haimovitz, members of Eighth Blackbird and the journalists Tim Page and Greg Sandow.

Both journalists are long-established music critics. Page has won a Pulitzer Prize and is currently a faculty member at the University of Southern California, while Sandow teaches at the Juilliard  School of Music in New York.

The event was made possible by a $20,000 grant given to the School of Music and the Missouri School of Journalism by the Mizzou Advantage program.

“Mizzou Advantage promotes inter-disciplinary events and lectures that showcase innovative efforts,” said Andrea Heiss, assistant professor of journalism at MU.

After receiving the grant, Shay and Heiss organized the symposium to highlight the connections between music and journalism.

“New media taps into both,” Heiss said.  “We wanted to help both journalism and school of music students see the benefits and creativity between the two fields.”

Shay said new media can be any type of technology that affects the performance or dissemination of music, and that this new media also affects how music news is reported.

Heiss said it’s important to bring musicians who experiment with technology to campus.

“Music truly is a universal language,” Heiss said. “And this symposium can motivate us to envision the type of music we will be hearing in the future.”

Tickets to the performances can be purchased through the University Concert Series.

BY Grant Hahn

Read at: Missourian