From: To: Cc: Cynthia Solomon on behalf of Margaret Minsky <1 Subject: Marvin Minsky Up ate:: usic ymposium Background Date: Mon, 28 Jul 2014 23:57:06 +0000 Attachments: Beethoven_Improvisation_Symposium_One_Pager Titles.pdf Dear Jeffrey, Here is background on the Music Symposium in October. You can see how our publication energy surrounding Marvin's music has led to this intellectual gathering. We have gathered advisors to help us put this together. Not only do we hope that you participate on Oct 29, and at the speakers' pre-dinner on Oct 28, we especially welcome your ideas for how to tune this up to be the best it can be. We are expecting a great combination of senior academics and artists along with the finest students. As of now, sponsors include Stanford, MIT, the World Wide Worksop Foundation, and we are almost ready announce CASIO as a sponsor. Reconstructing Beethoven's Improvisations is an invitational Symposium with five to seven top experts who are equipped to re-imagine, reconstruct, and imagine beyond Beethoven's improvised music. The agenda of the workshop is to: understand the mind; in particular how improvisation informs us about music and mind. understand improvisation's role in musical genius, journeyman music, and the roles and skills of musicians. reconstruct or reimagine Beethoven's improvising, which he was known to do frequently both in public and private. reconstruct or reimagine the relationship of Beethoven's improvisation process to his composition process. discuss and play with ideas about improvisation, thinking, and learning. Marvin Minsky's ideas about thinking, his life in music as a classical improvisor, and his paper "Music, Mind, and Meaning", are inspirations for this symposium. The music world and popular conception of Beethoven seems to be moving away from the former caricature of Beethoven as an angry, lonely genius toward a more nuanced view: that Beethoven was a driven artist with a loyal pack of