Edward and Joyce Linde Music Building Dedication

What a tremendous pleasure to welcome you all – for the very first time! – to the Edward and Joyce Linde Music Building – and to this showcase of so much MIT talent!

And of course, this opening event also marks the triumphant conclusion of years of dreaming, planning, consulting, designing, cajoling, worrying and sustained hard work, by many of you here tonight, including by MIT’s 17th president, Rafael Reif. 

Since so much of this happened before I even arrived at MIT, I feel especially well positioned to say Thank you! I hope you will all bask in the glow of our community’s heartfelt appreciation for everything you did to make the dream of an MIT music building come true.

I want to extend an especially warm welcome to the family of Joyce Linde. Her passion, leadership and irrepressible enthusiasm are the reason we’re all here today. Joyce would have been incredibly excited to experience this inaugural suite of performances with us, in the Thomas Tull Concert Hall. 

Thomas’s support was essential to the creation of this exquisitely tuned performance space. 

Though he had to attend to a family commitment this evening, I know he’d very much wanted to be here. The consolation – for Thomas, and for all of us – is that there will be many more captivating performances here in the months and years to come!

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We are also honored to welcome Kazuyo Sejima, and Ryue Nishizawa, the Pritzker Prize-winning founders of SANAA, the architects behind this incredible building. They came all the way from Japan to celebrate this special evening with us!  

I know we’re all eager to hear our wonderful speakers and performers, so I’ll share just a few impressions:

When I arrived at MIT, I was struck by the sheer number of students involved in music. More than 1,500 enrolled in music classes each year! And more than 30 different ensembles!  Equally stunning is that so many of our students have such extraordinary skill – as performers, conductors, composers, music technologists and more.

Now, frankly, when I tell people that MIT attracts student musicians gifted enough to flourish at any leading conservatory, they’re usually surprised: Why would that be? At a place like MIT? 

Let me reflect on that with a time-honored quote from Geothe. Famously, he once observed that, “Architecture is frozen music.” 

So, to turn that on its head: 

Here at MIT, we know that music is liquid math.  Music is mathematics come alive! 

So it makes perfect sense that the brilliant young people we admit for their exceptional skill and passion for science, and engineering, and numbers, and math so often also have a deep affinity for music.

At the same time – and as our music faculty are quick to explain – music also offers our students a powerful contrast to the pressures of psets and lab work. It’s a creative release. An emotional outlet. A spiritual inspiration. 

And – as anyone knows who has ever sung harmony – it’s an incomparable way to make friends and find community.

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We know that music has been part of the fabric of MIT from the very beginning – though the variety of musical styles on offer wasn’t always quite as extensive. 

For instance, in 1884, 23 years after MIT’s founding, there were already three musical groups: The Glee Club. The Orchestra. And Banjo Club.

How did we get from there to here? 

Clearly, through the efforts of many of the people in this room—and here I want to call out MIT’s unbelievably talented music faculty. 

For example: As many of you know, the highest honor MIT can award a faculty member is the title of Institute Professor. This distinction reflects the highest degree of professional achievement, personal respect, and service to the Institute. 

At any given time, the total number of Institute Professors is 12. So it is meaningful indeed that two of the current 12 are professors of music. 

• Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and Institute Professor Emeritus John Harbison, whose world-premiere composition opened this marvelous program 
• And Institute Professor Marcus Thompson, who will grace us later with his remarkable skill on the viola.

John and Marcus have both served on the faculty for more than 50 years – and they have helped transform MIT’s music program into a world-renowned center of musical excellence, a legacy that will reverberate in this concert hall for generations.

Please join me in honoring them both – and all their departmental colleagues.

Something else I noticed very quickly when I arrived at MIT: Walking around campus, you encounter music everywhere. Formal and informal, inside and out, in every possible genre and style. Sometimes in the grand space of Kresge. But much more often: absolutely anywhere students can find a space!

So it’s an extraordinary moment in the development of MIT that we now have a dedicated building scientifically designed to give our musicians places to play, in every sense – to practice, perform, compose, record, experiment. 

In return for that gift, I know they will fill this space with their energy, their creativity and the joy of sound.

And for all of us – whether we make music ourselves or not – the Linde Music Building is another kind of gift: A wellspring of opportunities to engage with each other, with the neighborhoods around us, with the region and with the world—and to build exciting new connections based on a shared love of music. 

Thank you all, so much again. And thank you for helping us celebrate this landmark moment in the history of MIT.