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Meet Shimon, the marimba-playing robot that can improvise with fluency and skill exceeding that of most professional musicians. This atypical frontman’s band isn’t your average performance group either: Shimon’s band of humans hails not from a conservatory, but from the Center for Music Technology at Georgia Tech. And did we mention the drummer lays the rhythm with a bioni...
No one knows the restorative power of music better than the musicians who make it (although brain scientists keep learning more). In collaboration with Jazz Aspen Snowmass, well-known artists performing at the June festival talk about the history and origin of the music they perform, share personal stories about their own relationship to music, and riff on its link to heal...
Atlanta-based defense attorney and #BillionDollarLawyer Drew Findling discusses the intersection of criminal justice, race, and hip-hop. These issues, common themes in hip-hop music, reflect deeply rooted societal schisms which play out endlessly in the collateral consequences of criminal conviction and mass incarceration. This session will explore how recent events like M...
Research supports the idea that creatives of all types are over-represented in the population dealing with mood disorders and other psychiatric challenges. Certainly some of the world’s greatest musical masterpieces were composed by musicians who struggled with mental illness. Was it a source of inspiration for their creativity, or did they turn to art to help them heal? R...
Playwright Anna Deavere Smith and opera director Yuval Sharon explore how this extraordinary moment in our history will both influence their work as artists and compel all of us to reinterpret art from the past. While social change has emboldened artistic expression throughout history, evident in ancient Greek plays and centuries-old Shakespearian dramas, artistic expressi...
Music exists in every human culture and drives a multibillion-dollar industry, and yet the vast majority of people who enjoy music do instinctively, without any formal training. So where does music come from, and what is is good for? Drawing from studies in neuroscience, psychology, clinical science, and data science, Dr. Psyche Loui will discuss why we feel emotions in re...
Acoustics, intimacy, clarity: One could argue that how and where we listen to music is as important to the experience as the music itself. “The orchestra has to feel the audience, the audience has to feel the orchestra,” said architect Frank Gehry on his design of the Pierre Boulez Saal in Berlin, which opened in 2017. “When they do that, the orchestra plays better, and th...
Music can lift the spirits and help heal the body. No musician demonstrates that better than Jon Batiste, a “crowd-thrilling rebel bandleader,” according to Rolling Stone magazine. Viewers of "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert" know him best for the exuberant music he conducts with Stay Human. Accomplished pianist, artistic director at the National Jazz Museum in Harlem,...
Our social nature is a major driver of our creativity: We constantly strive to engage and surprise each other, our inventiveness giving us reasons to tune in. Drawing on The Runaway Species: How Human Creativity Remakes the World, the book he co-authored with neuroscientist David Eagleman, composer Anthony Brandt takes us inside Beethoven’s string quartets to examine what...
Born out of gospel, R&B, and jazz in late 1950s America, soul has permeated music culture so thoroughly that its influence can be heard everywhere from modern country music to rock and hip-hop. So what is it about soul, and how did it become a soundtrack to some of our nation’s most defining moments? The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik and Grammy Award-winning artists share —...
Afghanistan is a silent nation since the Taliban made it illegal to play, teach, or even listen to music earlier this year. Watch a performance by graduates of the Afghanistan National Institute of Music (ANIM), followed by a conversation with Marin Alsop and Renée Fleming, who supported the evacuation of 273 students and faculty from Kabul in December. David Rubenstein wi...
What possibilities unfurl when a symphony reaches Skid Row? How does music create healing on a street corner? Los Angeles Philharmonic violinist Vijay Gupta and internationally renowned soprano Camille Zamora are expanding access to classical music through their organizations Street Symphony and Sing for Hope, which bring music out of symphony halls and into the spaces of...
How can Music Directors contribute solutions to challenges facing their communities today? Join a group of distinguished conductors who are artists, community leaders and cultural thinkers, for an enlightening conversation about musical citizenship. (This session is the culminating event of a symposium convened by Harman-Eisner Artist in Residence Yo-Yo Ma, on music and co...
Whether it is wind, birdsong, thunder, or the gently lapping ocean, the music of the natural world is a primal force that can awe, inspire, influence our moods, and improve our health. Many of the world’s greatest composers, from Beethoven and Mahler to Vivaldi and Rachmaninoff, took their inspiration from nature and recreated it to bring us closer to the seas, mountains,...
Storytelling, music, animation, and podcasts! Watch the magic of innovative content being born as creatives pitch their ideas to a panel of Planet Media judges, each hoping to launch short-form content aimed at helping kids understand climate change.
The Afternoon of Conversation is the Aspen Ideas Festival's pinnacle programming moment. Over 2,000 people gather in the Benedict Music Tent, an open-air venue with acoustics that mimic an amphitheater, to hear from global leaders, community change-makers, journalists, politicians, and more.
The Afternoon of Conversation is the Aspen Ideas Festival's pinnacle programming moment. Over 2,000 people gather in the Benedict Music Tent, an open-air venue with acoustics that mimic an amphitheater, to hear from global leaders, community change-makers, journalists, politicians, and more. Doors open at 2 p.m.
Raised by uncompromising survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, Tara Westover survived extreme adversity, from never being allowed to go to school, to suffering serious physical injuries (and a dad that prohibited doctors or hospitals), to being at the mercy of a volatile and often abusive older brother. How did she not only make it through this childhood, but ultimately...
Our signature event, the 2016 Afternoon of Conversation hosts an audience of more than 2,000 in the Benedict Music Tent. From criminal justice for the most vulnerable, to space exploration, to the changing Supreme Court, to artificial intelligence, and the state of the Grand Old Party, big thinkers and doers engage in serious ideas about their work and our collective futur...
Africa is having a creative moment. Architects, fashion designers, illustrators, furniture designers, jewelers, and others are collecting a continent’s worth of influences and showcasing them on a global stage. Organizations are stepping forward to champion the notion that creativity and design have the power to fuel an economic revolution. One such organization, Design In...