Hailed as a “musical visionary” and “America’s most wired composer,” inventor, composer, professor, and Faculty Director of the MIT Media Lab Tod Machover will deliver the address for the Peabody Conservatory’s 2026 Graduation ceremonies on Wednesday, May 20. Machover will attend both the morning ceremony for undergraduates and the afternoon ceremony for graduate students, and will receive the George Peabody Medal for Outstanding Contributions to Music and Dance in America, the highest honor bestowed by the Peabody Institute, presented annually since 1980.
“The breadth and depth of Tod Machover’s career—his work in participatory opera, as an educator and Faculty Director of the MIT Media Lab, his genuinely groundbreaking and prescient work at the intersection of music and technology, along with an overall and broad impact on the American music scene—make him an ideal recipient for the Peabody Medal,” said Fred Bronstein, dean of the Peabody Institute. “Today, Peabody’s own innovative and expanding tech-based arts training programs are built upon the foundation created by Tod Machover and other early leaders in the field, and Machover continues to provide inspiration especially in the fast-evolving relationship between AI and the creative process. We are honored to welcome to campus a true pioneer and thought leader.”
Tod Machover is recognized as one of the most innovative composers active today, praised for creating music that breaks traditional artistic and cultural boundaries and for developing technologies that expand music’s potential for everyone, from celebrated virtuosi to musicians of all abilities. Machover was the first Director of Musical Research at Pierre Boulez’s IRCAM in Paris. He is Faculty Director of the MIT Media Lab, where he is also Muriel R. Cooper Professor of Music and Media and Director of the Opera of the Future Research Group. Machover is also Visiting Professor of Composition at the Royal Academy of Music in London. His compositions have been commissioned and performed by many of the world’s most prestigious ensembles and soloists, and his work has been awarded numerous prizes and honors by such organizations as the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Fromm and Koussevitzky Foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, the German Culture Ministry, and the French Culture Ministry, which promoted him recently to the second-highest level of Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Machover was inducted as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2024. Machover is especially known for his visionary operas—as varied as they have been groundbreaking—including the AI-infused VALIS (1987), based on Philip K. Dick’s sci-fi classic, commissioned by the Centre Pompidou in Paris and presented at MIT in 2023 in a revised version; Brain Opera (1996/8), based on the work of AI pioneer Marvin Minsky, which invites the audience to collaborate live and online; and the “robotic” opera, Death and the Powers (2010), which was released on BMOP/Sound in 2021. He is currently working on his next opera, The Overstory, based on Richard Powers’ Pulitzer-prize-winning novel of the same name for premiere in spring 2028. Machover’s FLOW Symphony, scored for string orchestra, live AI system and electronics, premiered in Seoul and Boston in 2024, and his new work for orchestra and live AI that presents a vision of the future of democracy, already and not yet, will be premiered by the Boston Symphony Orchestra in fall 2026. Machover is also working on the latest in his series of “City Symphonies” for Seoul, Korea, where it will premiere in August 2027.
Machover joins a roster of previous George Peabody Medal winners that includes Rakim, Stevie Wonder, Misty Copeland, Terence Blanchard, Herbie Hancock, Renée Fleming, Tori Amos, Leon Fleisher, Yo-Yo Ma, Jessye Norman, Wynton Marsalis, Ella Fitzgerald, and Leonard Bernstein.
This year marks the Peabody Conservatory’s 144th Graduation exercises, at which 95 Bachelor of Music degrees, nine Bachelor of Fine Arts degrees, 120 Master of Music degrees, eight Master of Arts degrees, 27 Graduate Performance Diplomas, one Artist Diploma, and 30 Doctor of Musical Arts degrees are scheduled to be conferred. The Johns Hopkins Alumni Association Excellence in Teaching Award will be presented to Voice Professor William Sharp. Graduating students Olina Kilbury and Caitlin Glastonbury have been selected as the student speakers for the undergraduate and graduate ceremonies, respectively.
The undergraduate ceremony begins at 10:00 am on Wednesday, May 20, and a second ceremony for graduate degrees follows at 2:00 pm. Both ceremonies will take place in the newly renovated Miriam A. Friedberg Concert Hall on the Peabody Institute’s Baltimore campus and will be available to view via livestream. In-person attendance is ticketed and reserved for graduates and their families and guests. Additional details are available at peabody.jhu.edu/graduation.