BANG ON A CAN CELEBRATES SUMMER 2015
With Concerts at The Noguchi Museum, Jewish Museum, & MASS MoCA
Plus the Annual Bang on a Can Marathon
Bang on a Can at the Jewish Museum:
June 9: Paul Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid
July 9: Todd Reynolds, violin
The “Artists at Noguchi” Series:
June 14: TIGUE
July 12: Florent Ghys, bass
August 9: JG Thirlwell
September 13: Ashley Bathgate, cello
June 21: Bang on a Can Marathon at the Winter Garden at Brookfield Place
July 15-August 1: Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival at MASS MoCA
Bang on a Can: www.bangonacan.org
New York, NY — Bang on a Can celebrates summer by showcasing the breadth of its adventurous curatorial vision with concerts in June and July at three visual art 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 – in addition to its annual Bang on a Can Marathon at the Winter Garden at Brookfield Place in New York on June 21.
“From our very first Marathon concert in 1987 at Exit Art Gallery in Soho, Bang on a Can has found inspiration in the natural interaction that takes place when innovative music and visual art meet,” said Kenny Savelson, Executive Director of Bang on a Can. “Over many years, an important part of our curatorial aim has been to reach across disciplines to bring artists and audiences together and create a world where creative ideas may flow more freely. Each concert this summer will showcase music that interacts with art on various levels.”
Bang on a Can and the Jewish Museum continue their partnership to produce a series of dynamic musical performances at the Museum inspired by the Museum’s diverse slate of exhibitions with performances by Paul Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid (June 9, part of the free Museum Mile Festival) and violinist Todd Reynolds (July 9, tied to the Museum exhibition Repetition and Difference).
Bang on a Can and The Noguchi Museum continue their monthly summer concert series, held this year in the Museum’s indoor galleries on Sunday afternoons at 3pm, with four performances by TIGUE (June 14), Florent Ghys, bass (July 12), JG Thirlwell (August 9), and Bang on a Can All-Stars cellist Ashley Bathgate in music by Kate Moore (September 13); all concerts are free with Museum admission.
On June 21 from 12-10pm, the annual Bang on a Can Marathon takes place at the Winter Garden at Brookfield Place, co-presented by Arts Brookfield and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council as part of the River To River Festival. From July 15 through August 1, the Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival takes over MASS MoCA for three weeks of musical utopia in the beautiful Berkshire Mountains in North Adams, MA, culminating with Bang on a Can Plays Art, a jam-packed, 8-day new music extravaganza from July 25 through August 1. For performance details, see www.bangonacan.org/events.
Bang on a Can at The Jewish Museum (For details: http://thejewishmuseum.org/calendar)
On June 9 as part of the annual Museum Mile Festival, composer / turntablist Paul Miller, also known as DJ Spooky, that Subliminal Kid, whose “ambitious, elaborate, often hypnotic soundscapes have been notable as much for their eclectic imagination as for their post-modern intellectualism” (Chicago Tribune), brings an art-party set to the streets of New York. What makes his DJing so powerful is the range of influences from which he draws his materials – old films, dance music, noise, world beats.
Now celebrating its 37th year, the Museum Mile Festival takes place on Tuesday, June 9, 2014, from 6-9pm. Festival attendees can walk the Mile on Fifth Avenue between 82nd Street and 105th Street while visiting nine of New York City’s finest cultural institutions, which are open free to the public throughout the evening.
On July 9 violinist Todd Reynolds performs at the Jewish Museum, coinciding with the Museum exhibition Repetition and Difference. A forerunner in the expansion of the violin beyond its classical and “wood-bound” tradition, Reynolds electrifies in concert, weaving together composed and improvised segments, and making use of computer technology and digital loops to sculpt his sounds in real time, seamlessly integrating minimalist, pop, Jazz, Indian, African, Celtic and indigenous folk music into his own sonic blend. The violinist of choice for a generation of New York composers, particularly those who trace their influences to the minimalists of downtown New York, this program explores repetition and difference in music for violin and electronics by Bang on a Can co-founders Michael Gordon and David Lang, expressivist/post-minimalist Ingram Marshall, and by Todd Reynolds himself.
The Museum exhibition Repetition and Difference runs through August 16. Through over 350 historic objects from the Museum’s collection and recent works by contemporary artists, Repetition and Difference explores how subtle disruptions in form, color, or design can reveal intriguing information about a work’s creation and meaning. Large groups of seemingly identical objects, including silver coins struck in ancient Lebanon and 19th-century Iranian marriage contracts, are juxtaposed with recent works by artists including Abraham Cruzvillegas, N. Dash, and Hank Willis Thomas.
The Noguchi Museum & Bang on a Can Summer Concert Series (For details: www.noguchi.org/programs/public)
Opening this summer’s series of concerts at the Noguchi Museum on June 14, TIGUE is one half new music ensemble, one half avant-pop band, and delivers rhythmic hooks and patterned drones through process and improvisation. Uniting homegrown ethos and conservatory precision, the Ohio-born, Brooklyn-based members are Matt Evans, Amy Garapic, and Carson Moody. Their program will include music by Sleeping Giant composer Robert Honstein and original music from TIGUE’s upcoming release, Peaks.
On July 12, bassist Florent Ghys plays a set of intimate pop-laced tunes from his new Cantaloupe Music album Télévision – an epic foray into classical forms, musique concrète, samples, and sci-fi.
JG Thirlwell is a composer/producer/performer based in Brooklyn, who also works under many pseudonyms including Manorexia, Foetus, Steroid Maximus, Baby Zizanie, Hydroze Plus and Wiseblood. He has released over thirty albums, composed commissions for Bang on a Can and Kronos Quartet among others, and creates the musical score for the show Venture Bros on Cartoon Network. His program at the Noguchi Museum on August 9 will include works for string quartet, including a world premiere and a New York premiere with Thirlwell joining in on live electronic treatments.
On September 13, Bang on a Can All-Stars cellist Ashley Bathgate plays the heartfelt, hypnotic, hour-long work Stories for Ocean Shells by Australian composer Kate Moore, a quickly rising composer-star of her generation.
Bang on a Can Marathon 2015: June 21 (For details: http://bit.ly/BOACMarathon)
The 2015 Bang on a Can Marathon is a non-stop, ten-hour super-mix of boundary-busting music from around the corner and around the globe. This year’s marathon includes music by Anna Clyne, Julian Day, Lainie Fefferman, Michael Gordon, Jóhann Jóhannsson, Paul Kerekes, David Lang, Lao Luo, Ivo Papasov, Tristan Perich, Pixies, Bobby Previte, Todd Reynolds, Somei Satoh, LJ White, Kendall Williams, Julia Wolfe, and more; plus performances by Asphalt Orchestra, Bang on a Can All-Stars, Cyro Baptista, Glenn Branca, Crossfire Steel Orchestra Inc., Vicky Chow, Nels Cline, Corey Dargel, Dither, Florent Ghys, Gong Linna, Grand Band, Tomoko Mukaiyama, So Percussion, Third Angle New Music, and more.
Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival at MASS MoCA (For details: www.bangonacan.org/summerfest2015)
From July 25 through August 1, 2015, Bang on a Can collaborates with MASS MoCA to present Bang on a Can Plays Art, a jam-packed new music extravaganza featuring 13 concerts in 8 days, as the culmination of the annual Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival at MASS MoCA, which begins on July 13. Bang on a Can Plays Art draws inspiration from the visual art on display in the galleries at MASS MoCA. Each concert showcases music that interacts with the art on various levels – stylistically, thematically, and whimsically – performed by the Bang on a Can All-Stars, Festival Artists and Fellows, and special guest Alvin Lucier. The festival is dedicated entirely to adventurous contemporary music and features daily performances by over 50 cutting-edge composers and performers from around the world.
Bang on a Can Plays Art kicks off in the afternoon on July 25 with Bang on a Can Plays Francesco Clemente featuring Terry Riley’s rarely played 1965 psychedelic Tread on the Trail in MASS MoCA’s largest gallery, followed by a performance that evening of Bang on a Can co-founder Michael Gordon’s oratorio Van Gogh by the Bang on a Can All-Stars with special guest theater director David Herskovits. Festival highlights include three installments of Bang on a Can Plays Clifford Ross in the gallery featuring Ross’ massive photography – John Cage’s monumental Ryoanji (July 26); intimate works by Alvin Lucier (July 30); and Kate Moore’s heartfelt Stories for Ocean Shells (July 31) will all be paired with the works of this pioneering photographer. In addition, Bang on a Can’s World Premiere Composers Concert showcases brand new music by the Festival Fellows (July 27); a performance of David Lang’s darker will include projections by Suzanne Bocanegra (July 28); Bang on a Can Plays Jim Shaw features performances on numerous toy pianos (July 29) in the galleries showcasing this dream-scape artist; Alvin Lucier comes to MASS MoCA for Bang on a Can Plays Sol LeWitt and Sayler/Morris, featuring the composer in his iconic work I am sitting in a room in the galleries of his visual art contemporary Sol LeWitt, while his mind-bending Silver Streetcar for the Orchestra (July 30) serenades the flight of the last passenger pigeon as portrayed in a video installation by artists Edward Morris and Susannah Sayler. Finally, the annual 6-hour Bang on a Can Marathon at MASS MoCA (August 1) includes more than fifty musicians and composers in six hours of non-stop, boundary smashing music – a feast of sound including classical, contemporary, minimalism, ambient, jazz, experimental, and more – with excerpts from Philip Glass’s legendary Einstein on the Beach, music/video by Christian Marclay, songs by Meredith Monk, the forceful Singing in the Dead of Night by this year’s Pulitzer Prize-winner Julia Wolfe, and more.
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).
“When we started Bang on a Can in 1987, in an art gallery in SoHo, we never imagined that our one-day, 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 for the last 27 years, 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, 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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