I first met, and reported on, the American composer Tod Machover 15 months ago. He and his zany team of musical inventors at Boston’s Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) were busy refining Toy Symphony, a radical new educational project to enable school children to create their own composed segments of music, then perform them live with a symphony orchestra as part of extended pieces specially written by Machover and his colleagues.
The idea was that kids would not be performing on conventional instruments, but on wacky musical toys the Boston researchers were developing. These include interactive plastic "beat bugs" which are rhythmically synchronised with the help of infrared
and computer technology.
Machover predicted we’d see it all in action in Glasgow by June 2002. Last week, I caught up with Machover again, this time in Dalmarnock Primary School in the heart of Glasgow’s East End. In a world far removed from the hi-tech gadgetry of the Opera of the Future Lab - the name his MIT research unit operates under - he was at the piano, accompanied by drops of rainwater from a leaking roof, drilling a group of nine to 12-year-olds in the complex singing patterns of the lullaby which will close the Toy Symphony project’s UK premiere tomorrow afternoon at Glasgow Royal Concert Hall.
The ground-breaking project was premiered in Berlin last February by the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, its conductor Kent Negano, and German school children. Last month in Dublin - where a Toy Symphony Lab, working in collaboration with MIT, has been set up under Machover’s guidance - conductor Gerhard Markson repeated the exercise with Irish children and the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland, an occasion that featured violinist Joshua Bell playing another of Machover’s weird and wonderful inventions, the spooky-sounding hyper-violin.
Markson and Bell appear again tomorrow, as part of BBC Music Live, but this time with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. The main focus, however, will be on the pupils of the three Glasgow schools who have undergone weeks of preparation with their own class music teachers, assisted by music animateur Naheed Cruickshank, members of the orchestra, and SSO associate composer Stuart McRae.
Dalmarnock is one of the trio of East End schools Machover has been darting between since arriving on Monday.
"It’s really been the orchestra’s call as to where the kids come from in each city," Machover explains. "The challenges have been different. In Germany, they came from local music schools. In Ireland, many of them had been introduced to creative music projects before in Dublin’s fantastic new Ark Children’s Centre.
"Here, though, the conscious decision was to reach out to normal schools and kids who have virtually no musical background at all. If we get to the same level by the end of the week, it actually means even more."
Joining the singers of Dalmarnock on stage tomorrow are Sacred Heart Primary, whose pupils have been mastering the beat bugs (they performed live last week on Blue Peter), and Barrowfield Primary.
Barrowfield’s pupils, tutored by McRae, have been composing music using the most recently developed part of Machover’s project - Hyperscore - a computer software that takes kids’ computer drawings and translates them into fully fledged, fully scored pieces of music.
"Hyperscore is the most exciting thing to come out of the project so far," says Machover. "First of all, it’s on line, so anyone can download it. The general idea is that you can compose using images, lines and colours rather than standard notation.
If someone just draws a straight line, it’ll come out like Steve Reich - a piece where there are no changes. But give the line contour and shape, and the way it changes determines the ultimate musical texture and harmony. It’s based on a similar concept to artist Paul Klee, who once described his paintings as "taking a line for a walk".
Machover expects two or three of the Barrowfield Primary compositions to be chosen for performance tomorrow. "This is the youngest set of kids we’ve used," he says. "But I heard music the other day by nine-year-olds, who had never written a piece of music, writing things that sounded like Schoenberg - completely non-tonal; very free rhythmically."
If that’s the case, then tomorrow’s Toy Symphony presentation is something that could prove valuable to Scotland’s school music teachers. The potential of hyperscore as a teaching tool is selfevident, particularly when the Higher music syllabus now places considerable emphasis on "inventing". Moreover, many education insiders are saying it’s the part of the course that’s least effectively taught.
"By autumn, adventurous teachers, with a bit of help from us, could easily do some exciting things in the classroom," says Machover. He’s a man of his word.
The BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra perform Toy Symphony at Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, tomorrow. Tel: 0141-353 8000 