Tag: Bang on a Can

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Frisson of the New at Mass MoCA

The Boston Musical Intelligencer reviews Mass MocA.

Just who cares about new music these days? Classical music is so busy dying, hardly anyone checks in on its red-headed stepchild. I mean, I guess I care. I follow the news, learn the new names, listen to recordings. But I’m a connoisseur, and we’re horses of a different color. And at the marathon concert held at the Bang on a Can summer festival at MassMoCA in North Adams on August 1, my species was not the only one in attendance.

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Music innovator Charles Dodge honored at Dartmouth

Dartmouth will honor Charles Dodge. And if you haven’t heard Dodge yet, you’re in for a treat.

A Dartmouth music professor whose compositions changed the course of electro-acoustic music will be celebrated as part of Dartmouth’s 31st Annual Festival of New Musics. The festival is a program of free concerts, lectures and informal sessions featuring visiting artists and Dartmouth composers and performers, from Wednesday, April 29, to Sunday, May 10. All events are free and open to the public.

Visiting Music Professor Charles Dodge, who broke new ground with works that combined speech synthesis and live performance and will retire this spring after 16 years on the Dartmouth faculty, will be featured in the festival’s main event, a concert on Tuesday, May 5, at 7 p.m., in Spaulding Auditorium.

Titled “Charles Dodge: A Celebration of His Legacy in Electronic Music,” the concert features Christopher Redgate, a British oboist considered one of the leading wind players in new music; and Australian-American performer and Bang on a Can All-Stars co-founder Lisa Moore, called “New York’s queen of avant-garde piano” (The New Yorker).

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Bang on a Can All-Stars – The Audience Calls the Tune

The Times reports how fan funding is allowing Band on a Can to play works of young composers.

When concertgoers think about how music is commissioned, they tend to consider it other people’s business: somehow the money is raised to pay for the works, and presumably the musicians decide what composers to invite. But the composers who run Bang on a Can, the new-music organization, decided that it would be good for the audience to have a stake in the creation of new pieces, and in 1997 they established the People’s Commissioning Fund — a grassroots project through which listeners could make donations toward commissioning works from young composers.

The resulting scores are performed by the Bang on a Can All-Stars in an annual People’s Commissioning Fund concert that is also part of the New Sounds Live series at Merkin Concert Hall.

The composers who benefited from this populist largesse this year were Lok Yin Tang and Kate Moore, whose works were played on Thursday evening.

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Performances Reviews

Eno’s “Music For Airports” Live Review

From Black Plastic Bag:

I’ll have more thoughts on yesterday’s Bang on a Can Marathon at the University of Maryland later, but the highlight of the day came early for me. Watching the Bang on a Can All-Stars perform a beautifully arranged version of Brian Eno’s Music For Airports was a real treat. This is not how Eno envisioned the music would be heard: it was not meant for live instrumentation, and was not meant to be listened to in a concert setting, with an audience sitting and watching the performers intently.

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Performances Reviews

Ethel, Alarm Will Sound and Bang on a Can All-Stars Perform

A review from NYTimes.com:

As a prelude, the idiosyncratic string quartet Ethel gave the premiere of Phil Kline’s “Space” as a free concert in the hall’s large new public area. The quartet’s players were deployed individually to the north, south, east and west of the restaurant and waiting area, and a loudspeaker in each corner carried the amplified, electronically processed sound of one musician. (The sound designer, Jody Elff, was given equal billing with Mr. Kline.)

Mr. Kline’s hypnotically attractive 45-minute work begins with the quartet playing a tremolando figure that gradually shifts to new harmonies and textures before moving through the lexicon of string ensemble effects. Along the way it explores sustained tones and lightly dissonant harmonies, with a bagpipelike timbre; pizzicato figures supporting soaring, lyrical viola and cello lines; and ornate violin solos bathed in tape delay that created an almost fugal illusion.

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Bang on a Can All-Stars in NY Reviewed

Terry Riley
Image via Wikipedia

A recent BOAC performance gets reviewed.

Le Poisson Rouge, the West Village club that opened in the summer, has fast become one of the city’s main alternative spaces for classical music events, with many presented by the Wordless Music series, an inventive venture that programs rock, classical and indie music together.
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Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

Terry Riley, left, and Evan Ziporyn of Bang on a Can All-Stars, at Le Poisson Rouge.

On Saturday a well-attended concert there by the Bang on a Can All-Stars — the genre-blurring group that meshes elements of jazz, rock, classical and world music — fell into the classical camp. But were it not for the music on the musicians’ stands, you might at times have assumed it was an impromptu jam session by the sextet of clarinet, cello, keyboards, electric guitar, bass and percussion.

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