EDITORIAL DIRECTOR
Leah Talatinian
Senior Officer for Marketing and Communications
Album Release Celebration: Djesse Volume 1 What do a jazz wunderkind, a Haitian pop star and spider webs all have in common? They’ll all be making appearances throughout the MIT Sounding Series 2018-19 season. The series kicks off with a familiar … Continued
On a recent Friday evening, six people gathered around a table in a mostly-empty studio in MIT’s new Theater Arts building on the western edge of campus. In a few hours time, the group—local actors Marge Buckley and Sarah Bedard, … Continued
The Clarinet The clarinet is not generally considered the most heroic of instruments. In classical music, that honor belongs to the violin. In jazz, it’s the saxophone; in rock, the guitar. But the clarinet, a single reed woodwind that is … Continued
It’s not uncommon, in this day and age, to go to a concert and spot a performer hunched behind a laptop. Head bobbing and fingers flying, she may be doing any number of things: DJing, remixing, playing live backing tracks. … Continued
A Momentous Day April 4, 1968 was a momentous day for Marcus Thompson. That was the day that the young violist made his debut in a recital at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. It also turned out to … Continued
Lou Harrison The great American composer Lou Harrison tried his hand at many things: painting, calligraphy and poetry, to name but a few. He went through a great many musical phases as well, inspired by the experimental work of both … Continued
This fall sees the return of the MIT Sounding series—and, as usual, a penchant for border crossings and experimentation. The season kicks off on October 12 with a tribute concert to the influential composer Lou Harrison, who would have turned 100 … Continued
Back in the mid-90s, the Brazilian-born singer Luciana Souza, who was living in Boston at the time, would sometimes drive down to New York to sit in on a Monday night session at the legendary Smalls Jazz Club in Greenwich … Continued
The program for this year’s MIT Symphony Orchestra concert can be traced back to the day that John Harbison first encountered the music of Joseph Haydn. “I was a string player as a kid. I played violin, but I wanted … Continued
PUBLIC PERFORMANCE Maya Beiser and the Ambient Orchestra perform David Bowie’s Blackstar March 3, 2017 / 7:30pm MIT Kresge Auditorium, W16 48 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA It has been just over a year since the news of David Bowie’s … Continued
The day the two members of duoJalal met in 1998 marked a convergence of musical worlds. Violist Kathryn Lockwood had launched a career in chamber music, while Yousif Sheronick excelled in a gamut-spanning array of percussive traditions, from Brazilian folk … Continued
When he was young, the Swiss pianist and composer Nik Bärtsch was obsessed with rhythm. Once, when his father brought him along to a party, he spent the whole evening drumming on an ashtray. Nowadays he is apt to reach … Continued
Explosively rhythmic music Jacob Collier is not like other YouTube stars. The English 22-year-old rose to fame with inventive video covers of popular songs like Michael Jackson’s “P.Y.T.” and Stevie Wonder’s “Isn’t She Lovely,” the arrangements rendered in dizzying multiplicity … Continued
Sumie Kaneko, an Omnivourous Musician When the Japanese koto and shamisen player Sumie Kaneko was invited to perform with Gamelan Galak Tika for MIT’s World Music Day, she was elated. Kaneko—who holds a degree in traditional Japanese music from Tokyo … Continued
When Erica Azim and Fradreck Mujuru first met, in 1991, Mujuru was waiting tables in the Zimbabwean capital city of Harare and working as an instrument maker on the side. Azim was visiting the country as a student of that … Continued
Back in 2014, the legendary post-bop jazz saxophonist Joe Lovano met his friend and mentor, the great composer Gunther Schuller, for dinner in Boston. At 88, Schuller was in the midst of a particularly fertile period. That year he premiered … Continued
Cvetelin Andreev became enamored with the kaba gaida, a type of Bulgarian bagpipe, eleven years ago, after spending several weeks hiking Bulgaria’s Rhodope Mountain range alone. “If you stay, let’s say, two weeks, only with yourself, you change a bit,” … Continued
Simon Smith remembers vividly his first encounter with the work of Karlheinz Stockhausen. The piece was Trans, a composition for orchestra and recorded sound that the German composer, a giant of mid-century contemporary music, wrote in 1971. “It was immediately like … Continued
A Study in Contrast? If you want to know what the upcoming 2016-17 season of MIT’s Sounding Series is all about, you need look no further than its two inaugural concerts in September 2016. The first, a performance by the … Continued
It’s easy, watching Pamela Z perform, to get distracted by her gadgets: the MIDI controllers strapped to her hands like bionic appendages, the ultrasound-activated box that sings when her fingers flutter past, the laptop with its glowing screen. But if … Continued
It is often said that Morton Feldman’s “String Quartet II” is an experiment in scale. That is a fancy way of saying that the piece is very, very long—approximately six hours. The players—perhaps better described as marathoners—cannot eat or relieve … Continued
Johann Sebastian Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin are Shakespearian in their iconicity. Every serious performer must subject them to study, memorizing a monologue or, in this case, a movement, tracing and retracing the familiar, fleet-footed phrases in the … Continued
Maya Beiser’s recent album of classic rock covers, cheekily titled “Uncovered,” may come as a surprise to those who know her as a daring cellist primarily focused on new classical works. But the Israeli-born soloist (she now resides in New … Continued
