Music and theater arts

As part of MIT’s Artfinity festival - a new festival of the arts at MIT featuring 80 free performing and visual arts events, celebrating creativity and community – this month’s After Dark event on Thursday, March 13^th at the MIT Museum will be free and open to the public, reports Marianna Orozco for The Boston Globe. Attendees will be able to enjoy “a night of activities, including a ‘Flash Portrait’ drawing and textile design, as well as live DJ sets, open exhibits by faculty, and a talk from Behnaz Farahi, the interdisciplinary designer behind ‘Gaze to the Stars,’ which has brought the MIT dome to life,” explains Orozco. 

Prof. Sarah Millholland, Prof. Christian Wolf, Prof. Emil Verner, Prof. Darcy McRose, Prof. Marzyeh Ghassemi, Prof. Mohsen Ghaffari and Prof. Ariel Furst have received the 2025 Sloan Research Fellowship for “being among the most promising scientific researchers currently working in their fields,” reports Michael T. Nietzel for Forbes. “Sloan Research Fellows are chosen in seven scientific and technical fields—chemistry, computer science, Earth system science, economics, mathematics, neuroscience, and physics,” explains Nietzel. 

CBS News reporter Chris Tanaka spotlights the 20^th anniversary of the Catalyst Collaborative – a collaboration between MIT and two non-profit theater companies aimed at creating and presenting plays that deepen public understanding of science and technology. "I think some of the scientists gave ideas, stories of science to the theater people, some of which later became plays,” says Prof. Alan Lightman on the Catlyst Collaborative. “And I think the scientists learned the way that artists think.”

MIT’s Artfinity festival kicked off with a performance of “SONIC JUBILANCE” at the newly opened Edward and Joyce Linde Music Building, reports Maddie Browning for WBUR. The campus-wide festival, which runs through May 2, is open to the public and features student, faculty and staff participation in “concerts, augmented reality experiences, exhibitions, films and more,” writes Browning. Artfinity is an opportunity "to show that the arts are very important and very central to the lives of people at MIT,” said Prof. Marcus Thompson, festival co-lead.

MIT’s Artfinity Festival kicks off on Saturday, February 15^th with a celebration of the new Edward and Joyce Linde Music Building and Thomas Tull Concert Hall featuring a free afternoon open house and evening concert, writes A.Z. Madonna for The Boston Globe. “What this building brings to us is support for performance of all different types of music, whether it’s classical or jazz or world music, and then the ability to support various functions with our students,” says Keeril Makan, associate dean of SHASS. 

Cambridge Day reporter Susan Saccoccia spotlights the new Edward and Joyce Linde Music Building, which opens to the public on Saturday, February 15^th, with a celebratory concert called “Sonic Jubilance,” the start of a “monthslong festival of 80 events across the campus, free and open to the public.” Prof. Marcus Thompson notes: “The extent of art-making on the MIT campus is equal to that of a major city. It’s a miracle that it’s all right here, by people in science and technology who are absorbed in creating a new world and who also value the past, present and future of music and the arts.”

Boston Globe reporter Malcom Gay spotlights the new Edward and Joyce Linde Music Building, a “new hub for music instruction and performance” for MIT’s 30 on-campus ensembles and more than 1,500 students enrolled in music classes each academic year. Gay notes that: “The more than 35,000-square-foot structure offers a variety of classroom, performance, rehearsal, and studio spaces.” He adds that there will be “more than 25 concerts at Tull Concert Hall that are open to the public this spring.”

Prof. Tod Machover joins GBH’s The Culture Show to discuss artificial intelligence in music, from exciting new tools to debates about licensing. Speaking with host Jared Bowen, he says “the field is changing so fast right now, it’s so important to keep up and also to decide how to influence it, because we’re trying to push this towards a positive end.”

A celebration in Killian Hall featured recent works composed by Professor Peter Child and honored the musician as he prepares to retire after 37 years of teaching and composing at MIT, writes Boston Musical Intelligencer reporter Mark DeVoto. “All of these very different kinds of music demonstrated the protean spirit of Peter Child, showing him as one of the most interesting and heartily youthful composers anywhere in America today,” writes DeVoto. 

Maya Levy '21 speaks with Boston Globe reporter Steve Annear about “The 24-Hour T Ride,” a play written by Levy and friends as part of their work with the MIT Shakespeare Ensemble group. The group is “known to produce 24-hour shows in which only the title is decided on beforehand,” explains Levy. “You can expect silly incredibly local scenes that would not hold up if you performed it anywhere else. You can expect the actors to be having a wonderful time.”

WBUR’s Lloyd Schwartz spotlights Prof. Tod Machover’s revival of “VALIS” at MIT, staged by Prof. Jay Scheib. “The score is an inventive and often hauntingly beautiful arrangement of synthesizer, live instruments, and electronically expanded instruments,” writes Schwartz, “which Machover calls ‘hyper-instruments,’ a compelling amalgamation of minimalism, medieval, Wagner and rock.”

AP reporter Ronald Blum spotlights the premiere of Prof. Jay Scheib’s augmented reality-infused production of Wagner’s “Parsifal” at the Bayreuth Festival in Germany. “We sort of focus on a future society in which myth has become possible again," says Scheib. "But at the same time, we’re not that far in the future and the third act is set around a broken lithium-ion field. We’re set in a world that is somehow post-planet and post-collapse of energy production.”

Boston Globe reporter A.Z. Madonna spotlights “The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage,” an opera with music by MIT lecturer Elena Ruehr, presented by the MIT Center for Art, Science and Technology, MIT Music and Theater Arts, and Guerilla Opera. Madonna writes that the show “may be the rarest of rare birds in modern opera: an actual comedy!”

Collage New Music, Boston’s longest-running contemporary music group, will be performing at MIT’s Killian Hall on March 12, 2023, reports Lloyd Schwartz for WBUR. Schwartz also notes that Professor Emerita Ellen Harris will be introducing the Boston Camerata production of “Dido and Aeneas” on March 18 at Pickman Hall.

Writing for The New York Times, Prof. Emily Richmond Pollock and University of Michigan Prof. Kira Thurman explore how the idea that performing or listening to classical music is an apolitical act flourished in the wake of World War II due to the process of denazification. “In moments of war and violence, it can be tempting to either downplay classical music’s involvement in global events or emphasize music’s power only when it is used as a force for what a given observer perceives as good,” they write.