It is with great pleasure and great honor that I pick up the duty of welcoming all scientists, musicians and other attendees to the International Computer Music Conference 2001 held in one of the most beautiful places in the world, La Habana, Cuba.
As many of us know, since its inception in 1974 the International Computer Music Conference has become the preeminent yearly gathering of computer music practitioners from around the world. The ICMC's unique interleaving of professional paper presentations and concerts of new computer music compositions creates a vital synthesis of science, technology, and the art of music.
All ICMC's have some unique aspects that are deeply rooted in the diversity that characterizes the computer music community; a diversity that is to be intended as one of the greatest riches rather than a dividing factor.
Without denying these aspects, it is clear that some ICMC's get to be memorable under another important account: the fact that they unlock the doors of computer music to different cultural universes. Such were the 1982 ICMC held in Venice, Italy (first time in Europe) and the 1993 ICMC held at Waseda University in Japan (first time in the Far East).
The ICMC 2001 is indeed one of those memorable ones, dare I say the most memorable of them all: it opens the doors of the Latin American continent, and it does so in Cuba, where music is indisputably considered one of the main resources of the nation (how many other nations take music so seriously?). Electro-acoustic and computer music is no less important in Cuba, with a long standing tradition of research, production and organization of events devoted to it.
But this ICMC is also the Conference that open doors to a different world, one that perhaps many of us are not really aware of: that of a nation that strongly and fiercely has declared its distance from global consumerism and third-world exploitation. And that for this precise reason has been violently punished with one of the longest and hardest (and still lasting) embargoes that history recalls. Indeed, it is a great pleasure to welcome you all here, and to be able to show the world that no economic isolation can bury visions and ideals.
Of course, in complex situations like this one many people and institutions deserve deep gratitude for the enormous effort they have faced and will continue to face until the end of the conference and beyond: first and foremost the Istituto Cubano de La Musica (ICM) and all the staff of the Laboratorio Nacional de Musica Electroacustica (LNME), starting from its founder and honorary president Juan Blanco and his son Emmanuel (director of the laboratory and of the ICMC organizing committee); the international coordinators Andrew Schloss and Marco Trevisani; and last but not least the staff of the Centro Tempo Reale which has often worked beyond the call of duty for this ICMC.
Welcome to the ICMC 2001, certainly a memorable one.
La Habana, Cuba, September 2001