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Maya Beiser and David Lang, with special guest actor Kate Valk, celebrate the release of their new Cantaloupe Music album, the day, with a live performance at Paula Cooper Gallery. Receive a download of the new album with your ticket purchase. Doors at 7:30PM, performance starts at 8PM.

Composed by David Lang, the day was commissioned in 2016 by cellist Maya Beiser as a “prequel” to world to come (2003), which Lang also wrote for Beiser in response to the tragic events of 9/11. Both pieces are meditations on life, but from very different perspectives.

“'the day' looks at ways we review our lives,” Lang explains, “exploring remembered moments as a chronicle of a life.” Lang sourced the text from the internet by searching for the phrase “I remember the day that I...,” and then cut and compiled lyrics based on his findings. The spoken word accompaniment by actor Kate Valk lends an emotional charge to Beiser’s poignant cello lines, which gradually build in multi-tracked layers to emulate a small string ensemble.

In 'world to come', Beiser echoes the cello with her own voice, with the separation between the two growing more pronounced as the piece progresses. It’s a metaphor for the separation of the soul from the body at the moment of death, and their struggle to reunite in a peaceful, post-apocalyptic spiritual world.

From now through August 5th, catch multiple concerts a day in potentially every gallery space in MASS MoCA by performer and composer fellows of the Bang on a Can Summer Festival (aka Banglewood), including swaths of world premieres, and a first workshopping of Gordon/Lang/Wolfe's upcoming collaborative work "Road Trip". 

Take a look at the festival schedule, which features 1:30p and 4:30p recitals nearly every day, including solo shows by Bang on a Can All-Stars and festival faculty.

Festival Schedule

July 20-21, July 24-28, and 31-Aug 4 the festival fellows present recitals at 1:30 all over the galleries!

Weds July 19, 4:30pm - Mark Stewart performs the music of Pauline Oliveros & all folks present(!) on the wonderful musical instruments of Gunnar Schonbeck. The Return of the 9 foot Banjo!! Come and join in. No experience required.

Thurs July 20, 4:30pm - Ashley Bathgate performs  new works for solo cello by Martin Bresnick, Emily Cooley, Pamela Madsen, Jascha Narveson, Alex Weiser, and the world premiere of It Is Not A City by Randall Woolf, with the poetry of Tongo Eisen-Martin.

Fri July 21, 4:30pm - The keyboard duo of Ray/Kallay (Vicki Ray and Aron Kallay) will play two works for microtonal keyboards by Dylan Mattingly and Rand Steiger. Also - Vicki will play three short works for solo piano: spring and greene by David Lang, On Debrosses Steet by Michael Gordon and East Broadway by Julia Wolfe.

Fri July 21, 10pm - The Bang-MoCA MASSive Latin Big Band led by Gregg August, Joe Gonzalez, and Ben Lapidus, the Bang on a Can fellows perform for free at the American Legion bar. Bring your dancing shoes.

Sat July 22, 4:30pm - Karl Larson plays Robert Honstein's Grand Tour for Solo Piano

Saturday, July 22, 11:30am KIDS CAN TOO! Our annual perforance for kids. tickets

Saturday, July 29, 4:30pm - A tribute to Pauline Oliveros

Saturday, July 29, 8pm - Bang on a Can All-Stars ROAD TRIP
Bang on a Can co-artistic directors Michael Gordon, David Lang, and Julia Wolfe have collaborated to create  Road Trip, an evening-length work for the Bang on a Can All-Stars, directed by Michael Counts with rock show lighting and projections designed by CandyStations.  The piece is about journeys and people who make them. Physical journeys, geographical journeys, emotional journeys, spiritual journeys.  There is a road, but it is no simple highway. tickets

Sunday, July 30, 4:30pm - Mark Stewart and festival fellows perform on the spectacularly original instruments of Gunnar Schoenbeck, an new exhibit at MASS MoCA, curated by Mark!

Monday, July 31, 4:30pm WORLD PREMIERE COMPOSER CONCERT Over 40 young composers and performers from around the world debut NINE NEW WORKS written especially for the festival.

Tuesday, Aug 1, 4:30pm - Music from Central Asia - Musicians from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan perform on traditional instruments from their countries, including the chopo choor, rubab, and dombra.

Wednesday, Aug 2, 4:30pm - Festival fellows perform the sextet version of Philip Glass' monumental Symphony #3, and the minimalist classic Music for Similar Motion

Wednesday, Aug 2, 7pm CONCERT AT THE LAKE Our annual blow-out avant-variety show!! Bring a blanket! WINDSOR LAKE, NORTH ADAMS | FREE

Thursday, Aug 3, 4:30pm - Festival fellows perform works by a pioneer of electronic and interactive music, George Lewis.

Thursday, Aug 3, 7:30pm  - A special concert with this year's guest composer, Dutch master Louis Andriessen.

Aug 3, 4 - 10pm AFTER HOURS AT THE CHALET Spontaneous music with the fellows in our summer beer garden, which careens wildly from bluegrass to jazz to salsa to avant-ballads.

Friday, Aug 4, 4:30pm - Festival fellows perform music by downtown New York's alt-vocal maverick Meredith Monk.

Saturday, Aug 5, 4–10pm BANG ON A CAN MARATHON
More musical "happening" than concert, the Bang on a Can Marathon closes out the Festival in suitably audacious style. The eclectic program includes works from our 2017 guest artist Louis Andriessen, as well as Steve Reich, Jeffrey Brooks, Michael Gordon, Judd Greenstein, David Lang, Vanessa Lann, Mary Jane Leach, Gyorgi Ligeti, Nicole Lizee, Dmitri Tymoczko, Lois V Vierk, and Julia Wolfe. Share the experience with hundreds of adventurous listeners, dozens of brilliant performers, great food and drink and of course, big bold art EVERYwhere. tickets

Throughout Robert Rauschenberg’s six-decade career, he moved freely between the worlds of visual art and avant-garde music. Beginning in the early 1950s, he worked closely with the composers and performers associated with the New York School, including such pioneering experimental figures as Earle Brown, John Cage, Morton Feldman, David Tudor and Christian Wolff. This rich dialogue shaped Rauschenberg’s approach to art making as well as that of his musical collaborators. In conjunction with the exhibition Robert Rauschenberg: Among Friends, Pulitzer prize–winning composer David Lang and the celebrated music collective Bang on a Can present a pair of concerts featuring commentary exploring these artistic exchanges and their legacy for contemporary music.

Tuesday May 23 and Wednesday May 24 at the Museum of Modern Art, NYC

Coal is never far from the surface in northeastern Pennsylvania — as a shared heritage, if not always as actual deposits. So anticipation was already running high last week when the composer Julia Wolfe brought Anthracite Fields, her Pulitzer Prize-winning choral work honoring the sacrifices of Pennsylvania coal miners, back to her native state.

Then, just before the concerts, coal became front-page news when President Trump moved to roll back pollution regulations in the name of trying to bring coal jobs back, promising miners and coal company executives assembled for a photo op that “you’re going back to work.” Ms. Wolfe’s 2014 oratorio on work, exploitation and unionization took on new overtones as coal became a central part of the Make America Great Again hymnal.

“It feels to me like kind of a romanticization of coal miners — and that doesn’t feel good,” Ms. Wolfe said of the president’s action before a performance of Anthracite Fields on Saturday at Bucknell University here in Lewisburg, a college town nestled between coal regions.

Read the full story.

The Bang on a Can Marathon will celebrate its 30th anniversary in a new home across the East River. After many years in downtown Manhattan, the annual eight-hour celebration of contemporary classical music will take place at the Brooklyn Museum on Saturday, May 6.

The concert will be a part of the museum’s yearlong project “A Year of Yes: Reimagining Feminism,” and will include works by Meredith Monk, Julia Wolfe and Joan La Barbara. Ms. Wolfe, a co-founder of Bang on a Can and a Pulitzer Prize winner, will present her piece “Steel Hammer,” a folk ballad about John Henry and other railroad tales.

The Young People’s Chorus of New York City will perform Ms. La Barbara’s “A Murmuration for Chibok,” and two marathon mainstays, the Crossfire Steel Orchestra and the Asphalt Orchestra, will play sets. Amir ElSaffar will bring his Two Rivers Ensemble, playing a blend of Iraqi music and contemporary jazz.

While previous marathons have been free, this performance will require admission to the museum (although admission is free after 5 p.m. on its Target First Saturdays program).

The first marathon was organized by Ms. Wolfe, Michael Gordon and David Lang in 1987 in a SoHo art gallery; it has since been an annual fixture of downtown genre-crossing experimentalism. More information is at bangonacan.org.

reblogged from The New York Times

The Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival at MASS MoCA, the annual musical utopia for innovative musicians in the beautiful Berkshire Mountains of Western Massachusetts, is officially underway in for its 14th year.

 

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Glenn Kotche’s Drumkit Quartets explores the timbral, textural, melodic, and rhythmic possibilities of the drumkit through a series of pieces that were all written in different cities while Kotche was touring extensively with his rock band, Wilco. The quartets are paired with Kotche’s Migrations, which plays in the softest range of the instruments, with the players using fingers, bows, and even hair combs to coax the sounds out. In the second half of the program, Steve Mackey’s Before It Is Time features vocalist Shara Worden of My Brightest Diamond with the percussion group, in a piece inspired by the poetry of Isaac Maliya. The evening culminates with a Timeline, a sort of companion piece to Before It Is Time, composed by Sō Percussion and Shara Worden together.

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