Boulez at 100
2026-27 CAST Visiting Artists
Reimagining Boulez at 100 through performance, technology, and dialogue
About
Pianists Gloria Cheng and Ralph van Raat bring their touring program Boulez at 100 to MIT for a two-part residency hosted by MIT Media Lab Faculty Director Tod Machover. Cheng, a Grammy and Emmy winner on the UCLA faculty, and van Raat, a prize-winning international performer and Naxos recording artist, have developed a program that interweaves Boulez’s seminal piano works, including unpublished works rarely, if ever, performed by others, with music by Cage, Feldman, Zappa, Lindberg, and Messiaen—composers who each echo, anticipate, or challenge Boulez’s vision across modernist, experimental, and boundary-crossing traditions.
The first visit in November 2026 centers on a public performance of Boulez at 100 in the MIT Thomas Tull Concert Hall on November 23. The program includes the opening chapter of Boulez’s Structures, Livre I and the closing chapter of Structures, Livre II, reflecting the trajectory of his thinking across the nine years between the experiments of his 26-year-old self and the completion of Livre II. On November 24, Cheng and van Raat present and closely study excerpts from Machover’s Re-Structures, his homage to Boulez that premiered at the Lucerne Festival. Cheng returns in spring 2027 for masterclasses and expanded student engagement developed in collaboration with the Media Lab and the Emerson/Harris Program. The residency also marks the beginning of a new collaboration with Machover on a composition for piano and AI-infused electronics.
Machover and Cheng both knew and worked closely with Boulez: Cheng through the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and Machover through his seven-year tenure at IRCAM where he served as the first Director of Musical Research. Van Raat has developed a different but equally significant connection to Boulez’s legacy, premiering his substantial early piano works and recording them across two Naxos albums in close collaboration with the Boulez heirs and the Paul Sacher Stiftung. Together, these firsthand and posthumous perspectives offer a uniquely personal lens through which to reconsider Boulez’s impact and legacy, emphasizing a passion and wildness in the music that has often been overlooked and was—in some sense—obscured by Boulez himself.
Schedule
Upcoming Events
Boulez at 100
Monday, November 23, 2026
MIT Thomas Tull Concert Hall, Edward and Joyce Linde Music Building W18
201 Amherst Street, Cambridge, MA
As part of the worldwide celebration of Pierre Boulez’s centenary, acclaimed pianists Gloria Cheng and Ralph van Raat bring their touring program Boulez at 100 to MIT, hosted by MIT Media Lab Faculty Director Tod Machover. The program interweaves Boulez’s seminal piano works with music by John Cage, Morton Feldman, Frank Zappa, Magnus Lindberg, and Olivier Messiaen–composers who each echo, anticipate, or challenge Boulez’s vision across modernist, experimental, and boundary-crossing traditions.
Featuring chapters from Boulez’s rarely heard Structures Books I and II, the concert traces the rich artistic dialogue between Boulez and the composers whose music surrounds his own. Together, these works reveal Boulez not only as one of the twentieth century’s most influential composers, but also as an artist whose ideas have an increasing, surprising potential to resonate across generations, genres, and musical traditions.
Registration and more details coming soon
Boulez at 100 Workshop
Tuesday, November 24, 2026 / 2:00pm
MIT Thomas Tull Concert Hall, Edward and Joyce Linde Music Building W18
201 Amherst St, Cambridge, MA
Following the Boulez at 100 performance, Gloria Cheng, Ralph van Raat, and Tod Machover come together for a public presentation exploring Pierre Boulez’s lasting influence on contemporary music, performance, and technology. Through conversation, musical examples, and excerpts from Machover’s Re-Structures—his homage to Boulez on his 90th birthday for two pianos and electronics—the presentation offers a deeper exploration of Boulez’s artistic legacy, enduring relevance, and passionate expression simmering beneath an intricately rational surface
Drawing on Cheng’s and Machover’s personal and professional relationships with Boulez, the presentation offers audiences a rare opportunity to explore his musical and institutional impact through the perspectives of artists who knew and worked closely with him.
Registration and more details coming soon
Collaborators
Acclaimed for performances of “commanding technique, color, and imagination” (The New York Times), Grammy- and Emmy-winning pianist Gloria Cheng is a leading proponent of the music of our time. Over a varied and distinguished career, she has collaborated with renowned composers across the stylistic spectrum, premiering works by major contemporary figures and championing new music through recitals and festival appearances. A longtime interpreter of Pierre Boulez’s music, Cheng has performed his works as both a concerto soloist and a recitalist.
Two of Cheng’s most distinctive projects involve eminent composers working outside their usual comfort zones. For Montage: Great Film Composers and the Piano, she enlisted prominent film composers to create new works for solo piano. In a similar vein, she commissioned six distinguished improvising artists to compose fully annotated solo works for her latest album, Root Progressions, released in January 2025.
Website: gloriachengpiano.com
Social: Apple Music | Spotify | YouTube
Pianist and musicologist Ralph van Raat takes special interest in the performance of contemporary classical music. He has worked closely with many composers on the interpretation of their piano works, including with John Adams, Louis Andriessen, Tan Dun, György Kurtág, Magnus Lindberg, Arvo Pärt, Frederic Rzewski, and Sir John Tavener. Many of these composers have dedicated their piano compositions to Van Raat.
His recording projects reflect a deep commitment to exploring the complete piano repertoire of individual composers, with particular focus on contemporary works. Van Raat teaches contemporary piano interpretation at the Conservatory of Amsterdam and the Accademia di Musica Pinerolo in Turin, and regularly gives masterclasses and lectures at several European conservatories and universities, sharing his collaborative approach to understanding and performing new music.
Website: ralphvanraat.com
Social: Apple Music | Spotify | Youtube
Called “a musical visionary” by The New York Times, Tod Machover’s career has been marked by a commitment to pushing the boundaries of traditional artistic and cultural norms. He is faculty director of the MIT Media Lab, where he is also Muriel R. Cooper Professor of Music and Media and director of the Opera of the Future group. Machover is known for inventing new music technologies for both virtuosi and amateurs, for designing numerous sonic strategies for promoting health and wellbeing, and for developing AI for creative musical discovery. His latest composition, already and not yet, an AI-infused study about the future of democracy, receives its premiere by the Boston Symphony Orchestra in October 2026. The most recent in his “City Symphony” series is for Seoul, Korea and premieres there in August 2027. And Machover is currently at work on an opera based on Richard Powers’ Pulitzer-Prize winning novel The Overstory, premiering with Boston Lyric Opera in Spring 2028.
Biography: MIT Media Lab
Social: Apple Music | Spotify | YouTube
Credits
Gloria Cheng and Ralph van Raat’s MIT residencies are supported with a Visiting Artist grant from the MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST) and the performance is co-presented by CAST and the MIT Media Lab.
In the Media
“…she showed just how surprising, eclectic and emotionally engaging the contemporary piano repertoire can be…” — Stephen Brookes, The Washington Post
“…her performances often reveal depths of expression in the music that showier performers miss…” – Jonathan Blumhofer, The Arts Fuse
Pianist Gloria Cheng is a master of interpretation – LA Times
‘Ralph van Raat’s playing combines powerful projection with a neo-Romantic sensibility, focusing on important details while rarely losing sight of the music’s dynamic swell and sweep.’ – Gramophone
‘Ralph van Raat immediately exhibited the fact that he is in total harmony with the universe Boulézien… with a mastery and a particularly communicative empathy.’ – Bruno Serrou, Classique d’aujourd’hui
“Machover’s Re-Structures morphs from hardcore 1950s serialism into fresh, rhythmically driving, all-cylinders firing, electronically-enhanced Machover…The thrilling transition is so smoothly natural, you hardly sense it as a transition at all, merely the past foretelling, as it should, what comes next.” – Mark Swed, Musical America