in collaboration with Stanford MUSIC and the BRAIN Symposium RECONSTRUCTING BEETHOVEN'S IMPROVISATIONS ADVISORY BOARD Margaret Minsky Multimedia Consultant Jonathan Berger The Denning Family Provostial Professor in Music. Stanford University Cynthia Solomon Educational Technology Consultant Teresa Marrin Nakra Associate Professor of Music.The Coiege of New Jersey. Michael Hawley EG Conference Leader. First Place Van Clibum Competition. Explorer Tom Vignieri Composer, Music Director of NPR's 'From the Top" Radio Show Tod Machover Muriel R. Cooper Professor of Music and Media. M1 Media Lab 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 friends and active social life. Some go further and take the view that he invented many of the 20th century music ideas (and then some!). The Symposium will take place Oct 29, 2014. The venue will be the MIT Media Lab Complex, Amherst St, C