The Moscow State Tchaikovsky Conservatory, established in 1866, is widely known as one of the greatest musical center of the world. It was among the first Russian cultural institutes who began to develop its own Internet projects, official or not.

Our online history started in 1996, when Dr.Sergey Lebedev with the help of Alexandr Kharuto, started to work on the Moscow Conservatory website, which is now hosted under the Conservatory domain mosconsv.ru.

In the same year the student Boris Lifanovsky with friends started the MCUIP (Moscow Conservatory: Unofficial Internet Presence), which soon was transformed to the Moscow Music Herald, the largest source of the classical music information in Russia.

In 1996 Alexey Tcharykov, the musician and computer enthusiast, entered the Conservatory as tubist. He wrote the first multimedia presentation dedicated to the Conservatory. In 1998 Alexey, already being the known web specialist, opened the KONSA.net - the Konsa-related web-board.

In 1999 KONSA.net, supported by Rusign company, became the local web-portal, positioned as a "start page" for the Conservatory entry-level web users. It included the e-mail center, chat, old good web-board and the musical links directory, created by Julia Dmitryukova, the music theory student.

Now you're exploring the latest KONSA.net web portal edition, which stands on the new technology level, provided by our partners - Ruz.Net and TOR-Info. Outstanding design, real-time newsline, editable by students, interactive polls, mailing-list, advanced forum - that's what we call KONSA.net 2k. Of course, its pages are mostly in Russian, but you can drop a message to our international board as your greeting to the Moscow Conservatory, which brought so many first class musicians to the world. Now it brings to you the interaction - with the input of KONSA.net.

Alexey L. TCHARYKOV,
Moscow, Russia, 2000.