New Music + Technology Festival pushes the boundaries of musical performances

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campus experience 1:43 New Music + Technology Festival pushes the boundaries of musical performances

By:

Lee Friesland

8 Oct 2025 248

The Virginia Tech New Music + Technology Festival is a multi-day festival presented biannually celebrating experimentalism, new music, performance, multimedia, and interdisciplinary research at the cutting edge of what is possible.

Music and art is a living tradition. It constantly is evolving, especially the kind of music and the kind of research that we're engaged in is not fixed in the past. We're trying to imagine what the future could be and imagine new ways of integrating ideas and concepts and trends of today into this kind of performance. One of the things that we are thinking about this year is the way that people are interacting with the Cube. One of the wonderful things about working here is that we have this meek in the world kind of facility and ways that we take this work and give it an afterlife in facilities and venues around the world and peer institutions with other kinds of similar spaces and the ways that those can be adaptable from one space to the next. We're always featuring faculty artists and the work that we're making interdisciplinary, the ways that we can take the kinds of works and the kinds of interests that we have and combine those together in new and interesting ways for our space and our festival. We don't have one fixed idea of what music is. Music is always constantly evolving. I mean, if you listen to music from even just 50 or 100 years ago, it sounds very different. And so the way that people are interacting with ideas changes as the culture changes, as time changes. And so being able to have a facility like that allows us to explore new and interesting ideas to see what works and to see how we can integrate those ideas into performance.