EDITORIAL DIRECTOR
Leah Talatinian
Senior Officer for Marketing and Communications
Acclaimed keyboardist Jordan Rudess’s collaboration with the MIT Media Lab culminates in live improvisation between AI and artist A crowd gathered at the MIT Media Lab in September for a concert by musician Jordan Rudess and two collaborators. One of … Continued
How Artist Jackson 2bears Reimagines The Haudenosaunee Longhouse and Creation Story In the beginning, as one version of the Haudenosaunee creation story has it, there was only water and sky. According to oral tradition, when the Sky Woman became … Continued
Celebrating the connections between minimalism and pop with the clarinet In his recent concert, Evan Ziporyn Solo: Moondog, Riley, Glass, the composer and clarinetist premiered works by three major figures in American minimalism, while also performing arrangements of pop … Continued
The iconic sci-fi opera VALIS reboots for a new generation In the mid-eighties, composer Tod Machover came across a copy of Philip K. Dick’s science fiction novel VALIS in a Parisian bookstore. Based on a mystical vision Dick called … Continued
A new opera by MIT music lecturer Elena Ruehr turns the real-life inventors of modern computing into crime-fighters Over the course of her career, the composer Elena Ruehr has found inspiration in very different writers and very different worlds: … Continued
An MIT residency unlocks the dreamlike world of dance-theater piece The History of Empires I’ve thought about it before, living in the country…it seems to me, if you’re out there alone, maybe with a farm and fields and trees and … Continued
A contemporary reinterpretation of an 18th century ballet at MIT reveals the fragility of orientalist fantasies A faraway island. An evil magician. A prince transformed into a teapot. A princess on a rescue mission. When the first performance of … Continued
In the late days of January in 2020, Matthew Ritchie staged a beta version of his VR game, The Invisible College, in the U-shaped atrium of MIT’s Physics building, a former century-old courtyard. On the bright grid-like floor designed by … Continued
Reserve your ticket to The Silence, part of the MIT Performing Series The Silence Work-in-Progress Performance Directed by Jay Scheib December 12-14, 2019 / 7:30pm Free for students, $5 general admission MIT Theater Building W97, 345 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA … Continued
Spider’s Canvas was performed February 16-18, 2019 at the MIT Building W97 Main Theater. Visit sounding.mit.edu for more information. Following the live performances, the piece was displayed in the MIT.nano Building 12 in Spring 2019. Spider’s Canvas / … Continued
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
Object Lesson is an ongoing blog series that highlights some of the art, artifacts, machines, devices, books, instruments and tools that give physical form to ideas that enhance the MIT campus and community. What is the Noam Chomsky puppet? This … 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
Every spring, the Cambridge Science Festival (CSF) makes science accessible, engaging and fun for everyone through multifaceted, multicultural events. In spring 2018, Arts at MIT created a list of of CSF events that taking place on the MIT campus. We … 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
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
The word Ba, represented by a bee-sign in hieroglyphs, meant ‘soul,’ ‘honey’ and ‘bee’ to Ancient Egyptians. This ancient commingling of our fate with bees isn’t lost on MIT assistant professor of theater arts Charlotte Brathwaite, whose new project Bee … Continued
When I was an art student in New York in 1999, David Bowie visited our school and offered to host images of our work on BowieNet, an ISP he had launched the previous year. Glimpsing Bowie was enough to blow … 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
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
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
