Eagleman and Eno perform Sum
Brian Eno and I have twice performed a musical version of Sum, once at the Sydney Opera House, and once at the Brighton Dome. Brian wrote twelve new pieces of music for mutually selected Sum stories, and then he played these pieces as an underlayer over which I and other readers read the stories on stage.
The Sydney performance drew 1000, and the Brighton performance drew 1200. We’re hoping to do some more performances soon — right now Japan and San Francisco are the main places on the radar screen. Check back here for updates.
For those (few!) who don’t know him, Brian is a talented musician (albums include Music for Airports, Here Come the Warm Jets, and Before and After Science), a mega-producer (of bands like Coldplay and U2), a public intellectual, and a terrific guy.
In a separate venture, German composer Max Richter is turning SUM into a full-length opera to be performed at the Royal Opera House in London in May 2012. Stay tuned for further details as that project develops.
"A popularizer of impressive gusto...[Eagleman] aims, grandly, to do for the study of the mind what Copernicus did for the study of the stars."
- New York Observer
"David Eagleman offers startling lessons.... His method is to ask us to cast off our lazy commonplace assumptions.
- The Guardian
"What Eagleman seems to be calling for is a new Enlightenment."
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"David Eagleman is the kind of guy who really does make being a neuroscientist look like fun."
- New York Times
"Eagleman has a talent for testing the untestable, for taking seemingly sophomoric notions and using them to nail down the slippery stuff of consciousness."
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"[A] neuroscientist and polymath."
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"David Eagleman may be the best combination of scientist and fiction-writer alive."
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