Revolutionary Interactive Application Puts Centuries of Classical Music at Your Fingertips
Take a sound-drenched musical tour through centuries of Western and other musics with Music in the Air (MITA), an interactive, immersive music platform unlike any other.
Created by UCLA music professor Robert Winter and software programmer/designer Peter Bogdanoff, MITA allows subscribers to listen, read and watch their way to a depth of music understanding never before possible in one application. MITA’s unparalleled integration of music’s stories, languages and performances covers centuries of Western classical music along with dives into jazz, popular and global sounds. Created not just for educators and students but anyone who has longed for more understanding, MITA runs on any Mac or Windows computer.
MITA’s digital tools and features include the following:
1. A millennium of music organized eight ways for easy accessibility
2. World-class recordings
3. Hundreds of custom videos
4. 2,000 definitions at a click
5. More than a thousand full-screen images
6. Listening guides for beginners and experts
7. Interactive scores anyone can follow
8. Pathways that enable users to follow their own interests
9. Engaging sections on jazz, pop and world music
10. And much more!
The process of bringing MITA to life was nearly 20 years in the making and required assistance from one of America’s premiere music attorneys, Don Franzen; the backing of Robert Freeman, one of the most eminent music school deans of the last hundred years (including a 24-year stint leading the Eastman School of Music to national prominence); and an investment from distinguished philanthropist Paul R. Judy (responsible for the Institute for Music Leadership at the Eastman School). Thanks to this remarkable combination of efforts, MITA launched fully at the end of 2019, bringing a sweeping array of unique tools to help novices discover their ears and seasoned listeners deepen their relationships with the world of music.
Born and raised in Miami, Florida, Robert Winter’s childhood and adolescence were consumed with baseball, basketball and physics. A chance encounter with a music-major classmate at Brown University changed his direction overnight to a life of music. Winter went on to earn a Ph.D. in the History and Theory of Music from the University of Chicago and an MFA in Piano from the State University of New York at Buffalo. While on the music faculty at UCLA he introduced more than 20,000 students to the joys and mysteries of all kinds of music. A recipient of multiple teaching awards, Winter is also a writer, pianist and media artist who has been profiled in The New York Times, Wired, Newsweek, People Magazine and The Wall Street Journal. His hobbies include travel, renovating homes and exploring the emerging world of podcasts.
Videographer, designer, musician and MITA programmer Peter Bogdanoff is a southern California native. He received his B.A. and M.A. degrees in Music Composition from California State University, Los Angeles, and then went on to study composition, theory and electronic music at Indiana University, Bloomington. In 1989 he returned to California where he and Winter began their interactive work at The Voyager Company, a pioneer in interactive media. Bogdanoff turned an early interest in filmmaking into videography and art gallery installations at UCLA, Stanford University and elsewhere. He has also collaborated with scholar and writer Joseph Horowitz to create visual presentations for humanities-infused orchestral programming. He is married to violinist Wendy Bricht, daughter of Austrian emigre composer Walter Bricht, and they have two children.