Mozart vs Machine

An electronic essay collage opera mashing-up Mozart, electronic sound and video.

Mozart vs Machine is a high-octane mash-up of Mozart opera, electronic sound and video projection, bringing some of history’s most iconic artists together in a theatrical sci-fi-gameshow encounter.

Alone in his Manhattan research laboratory, Raymond Scott, the father of electronic music, is developing a machine to generate random musical patterns. When one of his devices accidentally tears a hole in the universe it distorts time and brings him face to face with classical composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

What follows is a fantastical journey through ideas of art and ownership, time and music shaken up through unexpected directions and random chance, culminating in a surreal, vaudevillian show trial. All with a little help from film-pioneer Georges Méliès, Lewis Carroll’s logic games, and composers John Cage and J S Bach.

In Mozart vs Machine, composer Dominic Robertson (the artist formerly known as Ergo Phizmiz) pieces together ideas and notes from across history into an irreverent collage of music and theatre that blurs the boundaries of opera and performance art. Think you know Mozart? Think again…