tician and composer Jan Beran, and the mathematician and musicologist Daniel Muzzulini. In a next step the members of a prominent patronage could be won over to this idea (Wolfgang Auhagen, Valentin Braitenberg, Manfred Eigen, Heinz Götze, Walther von Hahn, Michael Leyton, Ernst Lichtenhahn, Helga de la Motte, Hellmuth Petsche, Roland Posner, Peter Stucki, Ernst Terhardt, Walter Thirring, Heinz-Gregor Wieser).

The association’s board succeeded to manage the periodic information of the members of the association and the members of the patronage, to organize annual meetings and symposia with scientific and artistic musical themes. The last such event took place in 2002 in Zürich on the occasion of the Third Seminar on Mathematical and Computer-Aided Music Theory, where two pianists, a music performer and an interactive multimedia environment were engaged.

The Virtual Institute:
Pure Virtuality (1999-2003)

The association successively gained recognition, which culminated on the one hand in the collaboration of the association with the MultiMedia Lab of the Computer Science Department of the University of Zürich, directed by the patronage member professor Stucki. And on the other in the successful funding by the VW Foundation of a MaMuTh research group at the Technische Universität Berlin, directed by the association’s vice president Thomas Noll. Moreover, the collaboration with the IRCAM in Paris was intensified and made concrete in the MaMuPhi and MaMuX seminars, co-organized together with the IFM association.

As the internet became more and more omnipresent, the IFM association also recognized that the physical presence of an institute is no longer the reality which is of primordial importance. Instead, the IFM association succeeded in the foundation of a virtual institute for music science, named i2musics = internet institute for music science.

One should recognize that these synergies also implied a number of academic success stories, for example the habilitation of Joachim Stange-Elbe in a computer-generated analysis and performance of Bach’s “Art of Fugue” at the University of Osnabrück, just to name one case.

Perhaps the most successful result of the IFM collaboration is the book “The Topos of Music”, which was published in autumn 2002 by Birkhäuser and testifies a collaboration of Mazzola with 19 collaborators and contributors from Mexico, USA, France, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland--many of them IFM members. The present book is however a second strong proof of the vital energies of this movement, in particular of its expanding competences from abstract mathematics to concrete software experiments on prominent musical material.

Nonetheless, the i2musics has progressively developed an existence of pure virtuality. This means that our efforts to build a working virtual institute were not paralleled by a successful implementation of a software for collaborative virtual music science, although a prototype of such a platform was implemented by two very gifted students.