By MIT Music and Theater Arts

The well-attended event was held last month in the Thomas Tull Concert Hall within the new Edward and Joyce Linde Music Building. Produced in collaboration with the MIT Media Lab’s Opera of the Future Group and Boston’s self-conducted chamber orchestra A Far Cry, “FUTURE PHASES” was the first event to be presented by the MIT Music Technology and Computation Graduate Program in MIT Music’s new space.

“FUTURE PHASES” offerings included two new works by MIT composers: the world premiere of “EV6,” by MIT Music’s Kenan Sahin Distinguished Professor Evan Ziporyn and professor of the practice Eran Egozy; and the U.S. premiere of “FLOW Symphony,” by the MIT Media Lab’s Muriel R. Cooper Professor of Music and Media Tod Machover. Three additional works were selected by a jury from an open call for works: “The Wind Will Carry Us Away,” by Ali Balighi; “A Blank Page,” by Celeste Betancur Gutiérrez and Luna Valentin; and “Coastal Portrait: Cycles and Thresholds,” by Peter Lane. Each work was performed by Boston’s own multi-Grammy-nominated string orchestra, A Far Cry.

“The ICMC is all about presenting the latest research, compositions, and performances in electronic music,” says Egozy, director of the new Music Technology and Computation Graduate Program at MIT. When approached to be a part of this year’s conference, “it seemed the perfect opportunity to showcase MIT’s commitment to music technology, and in particular the exciting new areas being developed right now: a new master’s program in music technology and computation, the new Edward and Joyce Linde Music Building with its enhanced music technology facilities, and new faculty arriving at MIT with joint appointments between MIT Music and Theater Arts (MTA) and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS).” These recently hired professors include Anna Huang, a keynote speaker for the conference and creator of the machine learning model Coconet that powered Google’s first AI Doodle, the Bach Doodle.