The Overstory
Composer Tod Machover brings Richard Powers’ Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Overstory to operatic life. Both a hymn to the life of trees and a passionate appeal to environmental consciousness and activism, the production—directed by Jay Scheib, with a libretto by Simon Robson—will be musically transportive, technologically groundbreaking, scenically immersive, and dramatically thrilling. Developed through Machover’s Opera of the Future group at the MIT Media Lab, the project integrates music, immersive performance, AI-assisted technologies, environmental design, and biological and material research to bring the hidden life of trees—and our interdependence with them—into an immediate, shared experience.
- Project Leads
Tod Machover, MIT
Jay Scheib, MIT- Research Areas
Immersive Performance
AI & Interactive Music Technologies
Environmental Design
Material & Biological Research- Links
Overstory Overture (opens in new tab) (Seoul, March 2023, World Premiere)
The New York Times Preview Article, Overstory Overture (opens in new tab)
MIT News Q&A: Tod Machover on Overstory Overture (opens in new tab)
The Overstory is conceived as a journey of the senses, combining state-of-the-art technology with enhanced physicality in exciting and surprising ways. Rather than a traditional opera production with a fixed scenic design, the work will create a living, transformable environment around the audience that reshapes itself over the course of the performance. At the center of the story is a disparate group of characters who are ultimately drawn to activism to halt the destruction of the natural world. Beginning with peaceful protest, their actions become increasingly extreme, leading to tragedy and, ultimately, a new vision of human/nonhuman synergy and community.
Literally “growing a forest” during the show, The Overstory will use extended reality alongside organic materials to immerse audiences in the macro and micro wonders of the woods: from the cellular level, to vast networks of roots and mycorrhizal fungi, to the vertiginous treetops where the “overstory” perspective is experienced, literally and metaphorically. The opera extends the musical world developed for Machover’s critically acclaimed Overstory Overture for mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato and Sejong Soloists, blending the sounds of nature’s inner workings, the acoustic layerings of wood-based instruments from strings to percussion, and subtle electronic enhancements powered by bespoke AI to create soaring melodies, searing rhythms, and powerful textures.
The project is being developed through an interdisciplinary process at MIT, with technology specially designed at the MIT Media Lab and research spanning immersive performance, AI and interactive music technologies, environmental design, and biological and material systems. Workshops are scheduled for 2027, with a world premiere planned with Boston Lyric Opera in Spring 2028 and subsequent presentations envisioned in the U.S., Europe, and Asia.