DPS School choir..... "at the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall"

Toy Symphony  (United Kingdom première) Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, June 2002

Toy Symphony is an international music performance and education project created by celebrated composer Tod Machover and his team from the MIT Media Lab, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The Project is designed to introduce children (and the young at heart) to creative and sophisticated music making in bold new ways using interactive computer technology and traditional instruments. The concert is the culmination of series of workshops with local school children, MIT Media lab and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. Showcasing the talents of Joshua Bell, one of the world’s most admired violinists, the concert featured every aspect of the project including a host of state-of-the-art Music Toys played by children from the workshops. The concert included 6 new compositions, five of which were written especially for the project. Four of the works featured school children from three Glasgow primary schools performing with interactive electronic Music Toys, and the concert also saw the world premiere of a new work composed by children from neighbouring Barrowfield Primary School using the compositional software, Hyperscore. The finale of the concert was the Toy Symphony itself, which featured the children involved in the concert, a special children’s chorus and Joshua Bell, performing on a specially devised Hyperviolin; this futuristic-looking instrument is driven by special software giving a virtuoso player like Bell a whole new range of sounds. The same software will also be used to enhance the entire BBC SSO.

Composer Tod Machover, taking a bow with our choir

World famous violinist,  Joshua Bell  with our own Mrs Owens