Bang on a Can Celebrates Summer 2018 with Concerts at The Noguchi Museum, The Jewish Museum, and MASS MoCA
By: Macon Prickett May. 31, 2018
Bang on a Can celebrates summer 2018 by showcasing the breadth of its adventurous curatorial vision with concerts June through September at three visual arts institutions - The Noguchi Museum and the Jewish Museum in New York City, and the Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival at MASS MoCA in North Adams, MA.
Bang on a Can is committed more than ever to an increasing and inclusive world-wide community dedicated to innovation through music; a world where ideas flow freely across musical, geographical, and spiritual boundaries. This past year, Bang on a Can had a lot of fun celebrating its 30th anniversary and it looks forward to the next 30 years of musical innovation, creativity, and togetherness.
Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival at MASS MoCA
July 12-28, 2018
MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA
From July 12-28, 2018, the "relentlessly inventive" (New York Magazine) new music collective Bang on a Can collaborates with MASS MoCA in North Adams, MA to present the 17th annual Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival at MASS MoCA. The festival is a musical utopia for innovative musicians in the beautiful Berkshire Mountains of Western Massachusetts, dedicated entirely to the creation, study, and performance of adventurous contemporary music. Featuring public performances, recitals, and lectures, the festival will be attended by over 50 cutting-edge composers and performers from around the globe, including over 30 fellows selected from a pool of more than 250 applicants from around the world. This year's featured guest composer is Steve Reich.
Festival highlights include a performance of Julia Wolfe's Anthracite Fields on Saturday, July 21 at 8pm. The electric Bang on a Can All-Stars team up with the transcendent voices of Choir of Trinity Wall Street for this haunting, poignant, and relentlessly physical examination of the coal-mining industry so musically and socially provocative that it won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize. With visually stunning projections, Anthracite Fields draws on oral histories, interviews, speeches, geography, local rhymes, and coal advertisements to create a work honoring the region's people who persevered, endured, and fueled a nation. Throughout the Festival, daily 1:30pm recitals offer an opportunity for the performance and composition fellows to interact with the artwork in the galleries, often playing new works written while in residence at MASS MoCA. Daily 4:30pm recitals feature performances by the Bang on a Can faculty and Festival ensembles. Kids Can Too! a hands-on, interactive workshop for children and families, will be held on Saturday, July 14 at 11:30am. Free and open to the public, Kids Can Too! invites the whole family to play along with Bang on a Can faculty and fellows. On Saturday, July 28 from 4-10pm, the legendary Bang on a Can Marathon will close out the Summer Music Festival at MASS MoCA in suitably audacious style. More than 40 performers in more than 20 performances make up 6 hours of magical music and mayhem. In addition to performances of guest composer Steve Reich's music, the Marathon will also feature works by Andy Akiho, Michael Gordon, Jonathan Bailey Holland, David Lang, Gyorgy Ligeti, Missy Mazzoli, Finola Merivale, Dobrinka Tabakova, Julia Wolfe, Iannis Xenakis, Pamela Z, and more!
Tickets: $12 Students & Bang on a Can Alumni, $12 Advance, $22 Day Of, $36 Preferred, $5 Museum Members at www.massmoca.org. MASS MoCA is located at 1040 Mass MoCA Way, North Adams, MA.
Artists at Noguchi | Bang on a Can Music Series
Sunday, June 10-Sunday, September 19, 2018, at 3pm
The Noguchi Museum, Long Island City, NY
While the world is messy, musicians continue to make vibrant music, bring people together from all corners of the globe, and lift spirits. With this philosophy, Bang on a Can offers a series of concerts inspired in part by the exhibition Akari: Sculpture by Other Means, featuring Isamu Noguchi's electrified paper, bamboo, and metal Akari light sculptures. Echoing the process behind Noguchi's now ubiquitous lantern-esque creations of the last century, which blend ancient craft and modern technology, the artists featured on this summer's concerts find innovation by bringing together classic and contemporary music traditions, including Japanese music, American music, Classical, Folk, Acoustic, Electric. Together with The Noguchi Museum, Bang on a Can welcomes everyone to join together for concerts that cross genres, generations, and geographies and build our utopian world.
Sunday, June 10: Erik Friedlander's Black Phebe Trio
Black Phebe Trio is Erik Friedlander, the NYC-based cellist and composer; pianist and accordionist Shoko Nagai; and percussionist Satoshi Takeishi. Black Phebe is really several trios; Nagai's charismatic performance on either accordion or keyboards changes the feel of the group. When she plays accordion, the band is a world music juggernaut playing virtuosic, mixed meter works or sweet folk songs. With Nagai on keyboard, the band is a piano trio or a classical chamber group. For more information, visit www.erikfriedlander.com/black-phoebe.
Sunday, July 8: Elena Moon Park and Friends
Elena Moon Park is a Brooklyn-based multi-instrumentalist with a passion for the preservation of diverse music and culture in the United States. Her album Rabbit Days and Dumplings - all-ages music featuring reimagined folk and children's songs from East Asia, including Korea, Japan, China, Taiwan and Tibet - has received great feedback, including a Parent's Choice Award & a feature on NPR's All Things Considered. For more information, visit www.rabbitdays.com.
Sunday, August 12: String Noise
Blurring the lines of classical and experimental avant-garde, violin duo String Noise (Conrad Harris and Pauline Kim) reinvent the listening experience by performing each piece continuously with improvisational interludes. They will perform music written for them by David Lang, Pauline Kim Harris, Jessie Cox, Aleksandra Vrebalov, and 2018 Guggenheim fellow Eric Lyon's The Book of Strange Positions, the title work of their debut album on Northern Spy Records. For more information, visit www.stringnoiseduo.com.
Sunday, September 9: Yumi Kurosawa
Koto player, composer, improviser, and computer sound artist Yumi Kurosawa was born and raised in Japan and currently enjoys a celebrated international career as a concert performer. Now based New York City, Kurosawa has been lauded by The New York Times for her graceful musicianship, "drawing on a timbral palette that ranges from warm and rounded to bright and metallic." For more information, visit www.yumikuro.com/.
Tickets: Performances are free with Museum admission and seating is on a first-come, first-served basis. More information available at 718.204.7088 or www.noguchi.org/bangonacan. The Noguchi Museum is located at 9-01 33rd Road (at Vernon Boulevard), Long Island City, NY.
Bang on a Can at the Jewish Museum
Tuesday, June 12, 2018 from 6-9pm and Thursday, July 19, 2018 at 7:30pm
The Jewish Museum, NYC
June 12: Museum Mile Festival with Frank London's Klezmer Brass All-Stars
Bang on a Can and the Jewish Museum kick off their annual series outside the Museum at this summer's Museum Mile Festival celebration, presenting Frank London's Klezmer Brass All-Stars, an eclectic mix of brass, clarinets, bass, and percussion led by London, known for his far-reaching influence on klezmer music as well as his significant contributions to the preservation of Hungarian-Jewish music and culture. The Museum Mile Festival takes place on Tuesday, June 12, 2018, from 6-9pm. Festival attendees can walk the Mile on Fifth Avenue between 82nd Street and 105th Street while visiting six of New York City's finest cultural institutions, which are open free to the public throughout the evening amid a festive car-free block party with live music, street performers and activities for kids.
July 19: Bang on a Can presents Judith Berkson
In the 2018-2019 season, Bang on a Can continues its partnership with the Jewish Museum pairing innovative music with the Museum's exhibitions and showcasing leading female performers and composers. First up: Brooklyn-based composer, pianist, and vocalist Judith Berkson performs a dynamic set featuring her unique blend of cantorial music, Hebrew liturgy, and her innovative indie-contemporary composed songs, in conjunction with the exhibition Chaim Soutine: Flesh. Berkson uses voice along with analog and digital keyboards to create pieces that cross the boundaries of classical, electronic and experimental music. Called "an intriguing young singer-pianist," her solo album Oylam (ECM Records, 2010) was described by The New York Times as "standards and Schubert and liturgical music, swing and chilly silences."
Additional performances will feature a solo piano recital by Jenny Lin alongside Chagall, Lissitzky, Malevich: The Russian Avant-Garde in Vitebsk, 1918-1922 (Thursday, November 15, 2018 at 7:30pm); The String Quartets by Julia Wolfe performed by ETHEL (Thursday, February 28, 2019 at 7:30pm); and a final concert in spring 2019 to be announced.
Tickets: Free admission for the Museum Mile Festival on June 12. Other performances at the Jewish Museum, $20 General; $16 Students and Seniors; $12 Jewish Museum and Bang on a Can Members at www.thejewishmuseum.org.
The Jewish Museum is located at 1109 Fifth Avenue at 92nd Street, New York, NY.
About Bang on a Can: Bang on a Can is dedicated to making music new. Since its first Marathon concert in 1987, Bang on a Can has been creating an international community dedicated to innovative music, wherever it is found. With adventurous programs, it commissions new composers, performs, presents, and records new work, develops new audiences, and educates the musicians of the future. Bang on a Can is building a world in which powerful new musical ideas flow freely across all genres and borders. Bang on a Can plays "a central role in fostering a new kind of audience that doesn't concern itself with boundaries. If music is made with originality and integrity, these listeners will come." (The New York Times)
Bang on a Can has grown from a one-day New York-based Marathon concert (on Mother's Day in 1987 in a SoHo art gallery) to a multi-faceted performing arts organization with a broad range of year-round international activities. "When we started Bang on a Can, we never imagined that our 12-hour marathon festival of mostly unknown music would morph into a giant international organization dedicated to the support of experimental music, wherever we would find it," write Bang on a Can Co-Founders Michael Gordon, David Lang and Julia Wolfe. "But it has, and we are so gratified to be still hard at work, all these years later. The reason is really clear to us - we started this organization because we believed that making new music is a utopian act - that people needed to hear this music and they needed to hear it presented in the most persuasive way, with the best players, with the best programs, for the best listeners, in the best context. Our commitment to changing the environment for this music has kept us busy and growing, and we are not done yet."
Current projects include the annual Bang on a Can Marathon; The People's Commissioning Fund, a membership program to commission emerging composers; the Bang on a Can All-Stars, who tour to major festivals and concert venues around the world every year; recording projects; the Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival at MASS MoCA - a professional development program for young composers and performers led by today's pioneers of experimental music; Asphalt Orchestra, Bang on a Can's extreme street band that offers mobile performances re-contextualizing unusual music; Found Sound Nation, a new technology-based musical outreach program now partnering with the State Department of the United States of America to create OneBeat, a revolutionary, post-political residency program that uses music to bridge the gulf between young American musicians and young musicians from developing countries; cross-disciplinary collaborations and projects with DJs, visual artists, choreographers, filmmakers and more. Each new program has evolved to answer specific challenges faced by today's musicians, composers and audiences, in order to make innovative music widely accessible and wildly received. Bang on a Can's inventive and aggressive approach to programming and presentation has created a large and vibrant international audience made up of people of all ages who are rediscovering the value of contemporary music.
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