In her home country, the Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth (1968) is seen as the enfant terrible of the avant-garde. From 1985 until 1993 she studied in San Francisco (composition, film and fine art), at the Hochschule für Musik in Vienna and at the Paris IRCAM institute for electronic music. Neuwirth's music is characterised by a fascination for sound, which she developed listening to the spectral music of her teacher Tristan Murail and the late works by Luigi Nono. In her musical universe, avant-garde music is frequently interspersed with elements from popular music and radio-play-like recordings. She also tends to include references to film, literature and architecture. Neuwirth had her international breakthrough in 1991 at the Wiener Festwochen, where she presented a series of mini operas based on texts by Nobel Prize for Literature winner Elfriede Jelinek. Together with Jelinek she also developed Lost Highway (2003), a total theatre experience with recorded video imagery, based on David Lynch's eponymous 1997 film. In 2011, Neuwirth and Jelinek teamed up again for American Lulu, an adaptation of Alban Berg's opera Lulu with a distinctly jazzy score written by Neuwirth. As well as works for music theatre, Neuwirth also likes writing chamber music and solo pieces, invariably combining their live performance with video or sound, as evidenced in her work Torsion (2003) for bassoon and tape. Neuwirth has won several music awards. In 2010 she was the first woman to receive the Grand Austrian State Prize.