But it was not until Erica Funkhouser sent a compilation of student poems on the pandemic that the vision for the piece became clear. The emotional openness, simplicity, and at times aching sadness of their writing was my guiding light, and informed all compositional decisions.
Reading their selected lines, and the longer poems from which they were drawn, I began to get a sense of the impact of the pandemic on young people — its larger significance given their fewer years on the planet, its limiting force on a time that should for them be exploratory and expansive, and its uncomfortable place in a matrix of unfolding calamities brought on primarily by human inattention and hubris. The current moment feels hopeful; the birds sing of new life.
Our young people know this in their bones. We should listen. To the list of things that make me sad, I add each day each day The color goes. This is the world: Just gray and gray and gray. Longing is the same in both directions. Look at the sky and remember Everything beautiful lies both forwards and backwards. Overwriting the written constellations I create my own new map I trace my finger along the lines. July 20, June 4, Public interest lawyer and social justice activist will address the Class of on June 4.
February 4, Though the MIT community was spread around the world due to Covid, graduates and their families celebrated magic moments through social posts. June 3, The online ceremony featured virtual reality, crowdsourced music, a surprise visit from space, and more. May 29, William H. It is a meditation on the fragility of our lives, on the paradoxical sense of them being both long and brief, and on the need and wish and desire to live presently, fully, and with intention.
It was a gift to the MIT Wind Ensemble and to Fred Harris, and it gives me great pleasure that it has found a place in this time of loss and uncertainty. It was in some way a guide to the composition. Who made the world? Who made the swan, and the black bear? Who made the grasshopper? This grasshopper, I mean— the one who has flung herself out of the grass, the one who is eating sugar out of my hand, who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down— who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face. Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away. I don't know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? All rights reserved. For the names of performers, please see our list of thanks and acknowledgments. Comusica is a participatory music experience featuring the voices of hundreds of graduates and alumni, stitched together into one of the largest crowd-sourced pieces of music ever undertaken.
Read about Comusica in The Boston Globe. Details and full list of credits at the Comusica website. A team of MIT students and alums have built an immersive augmented reality experience to complement the online event The Volaroid team also will collect these memories to create an archive of the graduates of MIT.
MIT welcomed Bryan Stevenson, founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, as the guest speaker for the Commencement online celebration program. Stevenson, Aronson Family Professor of Criminal Justice at the New York University School of Law, is a public interest lawyer and social justice activist who is also the author of the best-selling memoir, Just Mercy and the visionary creator of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which commemorates the Black victims of lynching in the United States.
For the full list of performers, please see our page of thanks and acknowledgments. Fred and Gayle had specific ideas about the architecture and tone of the piece: it should begin with a pensive fanfare, it should progress from dark to light, and it should incorporate text in some way. I find such guidance helpful in narrowing the scope of a composition and making it possible to begin writing. But it was not until Erica Funkhouser sent a compilation of student poems on the pandemic that the vision for the piece became clear.
The emotional openness, simplicity, and at times aching sadness of their writing was my guiding light, and informed all compositional decisions. Reading their selected lines, and the longer poems from which they were drawn, I began to get a sense of the impact of the pandemic on young people — its larger significance given their fewer years on the planet, its limiting force on a time that should for them be exploratory and expansive, and its uncomfortable place in a matrix of unfolding calamities brought on primarily by human inattention and hubris.
The current moment feels hopeful; the birds sing of new life. Our young people know this in their bones. We should listen. To the list of things that make me sad, I add each day each day The color goes. This is the world: Just gray and gray and gray.
Longing is the same in both directions. Look at the sky and remember Everything beautiful lies both forwards and backwards. Overwriting the written constellations I create my own new map I trace my finger along the lines.
I am the little blade of light Blade of light from the crack in the door. I am the orange wedge Of sun Of sun Through your window. This is the beginning of the story we tell again and again It is the beginning of the story we tell Who will listen? We are fragile we are precious we are fragile We are fragile we are precious we are fragile We are fragile we are precious Who will listen?
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