SECTION: MONTH YEAR

Tod Machover's Brain Opera Installed Permanently in Vienna

Tod Machover Photo courtesy of Tod Machover

n June 15, 2000, the definitive version of Tod Machover's groundbreaking Brain Opera was permanently installed and unveiled at the opening of the new House of Music in Vienna, Austria. The Brain Opera has been widely acclaimed for inviting the general public to participate in the musical process through a vast array of specially designed, interactive hyperinstruments.

Brain Opera premiered at the 1996 Lincoln Center Festival and has since toured the United States, Europe, South America and Asia, evolving and growing along the way. Mark Swed of the Los Angeles Times said it was "radical…full of wonderful music that crackles, quite literally, with electricity." Tokyo's Ongaku no Tomo called it "the future of music."

The Brain Opera found an ideal home at Vienna's House of Music, which offers a new kind of sophisticated, hands-on musical experience for the general public, and is expected to become one of Vienna's top tourist attractions and a mecca for music lovers from around the world. For the House of Music, Machover has added a totally new culminating experience to the Brain Opera - the Music Blender - which allows visitors to pick their favorite music and sounds and "blend" them in a "Sensor Chair," thus creating an ongoing stream of ever-changing, collaborative music.

The musical core of the Brain Opera will be available in Fall 2000, when a CD of Machover's complete musical score to the work is released. The music combines Bach and rock; amateur and professional voices from around the world; music submitted via the Internet; and some of Machover's most luscious melodies.

Tod Machover has been called "America's most wired composer" by the Los Angeles Times. He is recognized for music that breaks traditional artistic and cultural boundaries, offering a unique synthesis of acoustic and electronic sound, of symphony orchestras and interactive computers, of operatic arias and rock songs delivering serious and powerful messages.

Machover was recently named Director of the Center for Future Arts at the MIT Media Lab, where he is Professor of Music & Media. He will also play a leading role in establishing MediaLabEurope, to open in Dublin, Ireland this summer. He is currently working on Toy Symphony, a project designed to revolutionize the way children are introduced to creative music-making, by using special Music Toys to facilitate collaboration between children, symphony orchestras and world-renowned conductors and soloists. He is also working with celebrated juggler Michael Moschen on E-Motion, an opera of shapes, objects, and sounds commissioned by the Monte-Carlo Opera; and Twelve Looney Tunes; Schoenberg in Hollywood - about the collision of high art and popular culture - commissioned by a consortium of American and European opera companies.