The Composer’s Black Box: Making Music in Cybernetic America New York Performances

At Roulette, *The Composer’s Black Box: Making Music in Cybernetic America* approaches classical performance as a report from the mid-century lab, where composers borrowed ideas from control systems, feedback, and early computing. Featured performers MIXOLOGY and Ted Gordon move between score, circuitry, and listening as a form of measurement. The work frames “cybernetic” music not as a style but as a way of thinking about authorship and agency. In New York, that lineage resonates with the city’s long traffic between downtown experimentation and institutional concert life.