News

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.

 

A photo posted by Keifer (@keifer413) on Jul 12, 2016 at 5:24pm PDT

 

A video posted by Dutcher Snedeker (@dutchersnedeker) on Jul 12, 2016 at 11:09am PDT

 

A photo posted by Ken Thomson (@clusterhocket) on Jul 11, 2016 at 9:54am PDT

A photo posted by Nave Graham (@navegraham) on Jul 12, 2016 at 7:57pm PDT

A photo posted by robby bowen (@robbybowen_) on Jul 12, 2016 at 12:37pm PDT

A video posted by robby bowen (@robbybowen_) on Jul 12, 2016 at 2:34pm PDT

A photo posted by Emily (@emilyblanchy) on Jul 12, 2016 at 12:05pm PDT

A photo posted by Čörį (@death123_) on Jul 10, 2016 at 2:04pm PDT

A video posted by Ian McCollum (@ian.mccollum) on Jul 27, 2015 at 10:38am PDT

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.

 Tickets On Sale Now

When John Luther Adams first conceived of the percussion-driven roots of Ilimaq in the mid-1990s, he was still uncertain of what direction the music wanted to take, and whether it could sustain itself as a sound installation or as a fully developed performance piece. Glenn Kotche, who happened to be a fan of JLA's work, and reached out to him when Wilco was on tour in Alaska in 2008, turned out to be the collaborator Adams was looking for. A drummer himself, JLA began to envision a piece of music that would demand physical endurance, mental stamina and in turn, almost a "trance state" from the performer. And as he writes in the liner notes for Ilimaq: "All these years later, in Glenn Kotche, I've found the drummer I always imagined I could be."

Ilimaq merges ambient soundscapes, based on electro-acoustic and environmental sounds that were recorded and edited by Adams in Alaska, with the powerhouse drumming of Kotche, who recorded his parts at Wilco's loft studio in Chicago. Split into five sections but meant to be a continuous listening experience, the 48-minute piece conjures up multi-hued references to the work of Brian Eno, Luc Ferrari and even Can and Cream, all in the course of a dream-like "spirit journey" that lives up to the original Iñupiaq (Alaska Inuit) meaning of the word.

You can get the double-disc package now (in stereo and 5.1 surround sound) at the Bang on a Can store.

Julia Wolfe's Pulitzer Prize-winning oratorio for chorus and instruments, Anthracite Fields, is now streaming exclusively on Apple Music for one week. The pre-release album is also available exclusively on iTunes. Cantaloupe Music will release the CD package worldwide on September 25.

Wolfe wrote the piece after doing extensive research about the coal-mining industry in an area very near where she grew up in Pennsylvania. Her text draws on oral histories, interviews with miners and their families, speeches, geographic descriptions, children's rhymes and coal advertisements. The recording features the Bang on a Can All-Stars and The Choir of Trinity Wall Street, under the direction of Julian Wachner.

Hear Anthracite Fields on Apple Music and iTunes now.