EDITORIAL DIRECTOR
Leah Talatinian
Senior Officer for Marketing and Communications
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
MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte predicted in 1995 that “being digital” would have us entering a realm increasingly unconstrained by the materiality of the world. Two decades later, our everyday lives are indeed ever more suffused by computation and calculation. But unwieldy … 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
“The central story I was thinking about when developing the idea of ‘embodied montage’ [for my SM Thesis in Comparative Media Studies at MIT] was the myth of Orpheus. Eurydice dies and Orpheus goes back to hell to save her. … Continued
Adam Strandberg graduated from MIT in 2014 with a degree in physics. While a student, he was in 20 theatrical productions, from David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow to Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman to William Shakespeare’s The Tempest. He received the Wiesner Student … Continued
MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte predicted in 1995 that “being digital” would have us entering a realm increasingly unconstrained by the materiality of the world. Two decades later, our everyday lives are indeed ever more suffused by computation and calculation. But unwieldy … Continued
MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte predicted in 1995 that “being digital” would have us entering a realm increasingly unconstrained by the materiality of the world. Two decades later, our everyday lives are indeed ever more suffused by computation and calculation. But unwieldy … 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
The recent spike in sales of George Orwell’s 1984, which hit No. 1 on Amazon’s best-seller list last week, says something about our dystopian times. If the future gets bleaker, we’ll need literature that not only records civilization’s collapse, but … Continued
Creativity according to Mugaritz and MIT “When you take the off-road and not the well-traveled road, it is much more painful, but it is exciting and it is worth it, even knowing that I am going to fail by trying … 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
CAST Visiting Artist Jacob Collier is well known for his YouTube videos, which the 22-year-old musical phenom performs and produces in his bedroom in North London. Collier’s work has garnered praise from such jazz icons as Herbie Hancock and Quincy … 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
A jetty, concrete tunnels, salt lakes, small towns, and long drives. Day one on the Landscape Experience Field Trip proved as expansive and jam-packed as the itinerary proposed. By Jessica Varner Laying out a plan for a trip collapses time … 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
The editors of Experience: Culture, Cognition, and the Common Sense, Caroline Jones, David Mather and Rebecca Uchill, describe the unusual material features, artistic interventions and intellectual provocations that make this book object something more than a typical codex. … 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
The MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST) is pleased to announce the 2016-17 Visiting Artists in visual arts and writing: Pedro Reyes, Tomás Saraceno, Karim Ben Khelifa, Agnieszka Kurant and Christian Bök. From repurposed and reimagined weapons to … 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
Now that new media has freed us from the tyranny of print, we can experiment with multiple publishing platforms to collect and disseminate texts and other cultural artifacts. “On the Record,” a series of programs focused on the public side … Continued
Composer and MIT professor discusses the enduring legacy of Visiting Artist Alvin Lucier.
