Review of Bang on a Can Marathon presented by River To River Festival, Arts Brookfield
By: Tom Partington
June 22, 2014
Bang on a Can Marathon is an annual event showcasing contemporary and experimental music since 1987. It has grown in size, scope, and prestige every year since, and is now one of the most highly anticipated events of the Summer as it kicks off the River-to-River series in Lower Manhattan.
This year, the event lasted for eight hours and included a wide range of performers and composers ranging from the legendary Meredith Monk to vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth to the Bang on a Can All-stars.
This year, as in recent years, the concert was held in the massive atrium of the Wintergarden at Brookfield Place, currently undergoing a large-scale renovation. It is only partially completed, but the atrium, with the view of the Hudson is accessible. The renovation meant that the most people in the packed atrium were there solely for the concerts, and distractions were minimized.
I attended the 4pm segment that began with Roomful of Teeth, an eight-person vocal group, singing excerpts from member Caroline Shaw’s Pulitzer prize-winning piece, Partita for Eight Voices and a piece by Judd Greenstein, AEIOU. Both pieces showcase unusual and virtuosic ensemble singing that was enhanced by the cavernous venue; the voices cascaded across the marble floor with kaleidoscopic overtones and reverberations.
The next group was Contemporaneous, a nineteen-piece chamber orchestra playing Try, a dense complex piece by Andrew Norman. Cleanly and beautifully executed, this piece evoked the subconscious, and deftly leapt from thought to thought in a liminal state.
This was followed by Meredith Monk and Theo Bleckmann performing four segments of her Canadian wilderness-inspired Facing North song cycle. This impressionist wordless piece incorporated movement and humor, culminating a viciously difficult Hocket that had the two singers facing each other singing phrases and countermelodies that bounced between them so smoothly that it seemed as if there were three singers singing three parts.
The Bang on a Can Marathon is a rare treat; an opportunity to hear music in this genre and of this caliber is always special, but often marginalized. Hearing performed it in a public space on a beautiful sunny Sunday is almost like a dream.
www.RiverToRiverNYC.com
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BANG ON A CAN MARATHON
OPENING WEEKEND OF
THE RIVER TO RIVER FESTIVAL 2014
Co-presented by River To River Festival, Arts Brookfield and Bang on a Can
Lead support is provided by ASCAP, in celebration of its 100 years of protecting, supporting and fostering the work of composers worldwide
Sunday, June 22, 2014 from 2pm-10pm
8 hours of FREE Live Music!
Brookfield Place, Winter Garden | 220 Vesey Street, NYC
Admission: FREE
Bang on a Can Marathon information: 718.852.7755 or www.bangonacan.org
Full Festival Line-Up: www.RiverToRiverNYC.com
FEATURING MUSIC by Louis Andriessen, Armando Bayolo, Jherek Bischoff, Carlos Carrillo, Bryce Dessner, Julius Eastman & Jace Clayton, Michael Gordon, Judd Greenstein, Brooks Frederickson, Molly Joyce, David Lang, Paula Matthusen, Marc Mellits, Meredith Monk, Andrew Norman, Caroline Shaw, JG Thirlwell, and Julia Wolfe
FEATURING PERFORMANCES by Adrianna Mateo, Anonymous 4, Bang on a Can All-Stars & friends, Bearthoven, Contemporaneous, Dawn of Midi, Great Noise Ensemble, Jace Clayton (aka DJ/rupture) & friends, Jherek Bischoff, Mantra Percussion, Meredith Monk & Theo Bleckmann, Roomful of Teeth, and So Percussion
PLUS Bang on a Can’s social engagement wing Found Sound Nation hosts its Street Studio – a mobile recording studio equipped for passersby and Marathon musicians alike to spontaneously create and record original music!
New York, NY (April 30, 2014) — On Sunday, June 22, from 2pm to 10pm, Bang on a Can returns to downtown Manhattan for its annual Bang on a Can Marathon, FREE for the public at Brookfield Place Winter Garden (220 Vesey Street), presented by River To River® Festival, Arts Brookfield, and Bang on a Can. The Marathon is part of the opening weekend of the 13th River To River Festival, kicking off the 11-day celebration of free music, dance, film, and arts events.
Bang on a Can started as a one day Marathon concert (on Mother’s Day in 1987 in a SoHo art gallery) and has grown into a multi-faceted performing arts organization with a broad range of year-round international activities. The New York Times reports, “A quarter-century later their impact has been profound and pervasive. The current universe of do-it-yourself concert series, genre-flouting festivals, composer-owned record labels and amplified, electric-guitar-driven compositional idioms would probably not exist without their pioneering example. The Bang on a Can Marathon, the organization’s sprawling, exuberant annual mixtape love letter to its many admirers, has been widely emulated…” The Village Voice recounted, “[one could] enjoy a world made a bit more habitable – something like an authentically felt home – thanks to all manner of cultural practices that get dissed out in the mainstream.”
This year, the annual super-mix of boundary-busting music from around the corner and around the globe features eight hours of rare performances by some of the most innovative, pioneering musicians of our time side-by-side with some of today’s newest exciting young artists.
The electric Bang on a Can All-Stars perform Bang on a Can co-founder Julia Wolfe’s sonic wall of sound, Big Beautiful Dark and Scary, released to critical acclaim on Cantaloupe Music in 2012; JG Thirlwell’s cinematic Anabiosis, commissioned for the All-Stars in 2005 through the Bang on a Can Peoples’ Commissioning Fund (PCF); plus Paula Matthusen’s 2013 PCF commission ontology of an echo, which incorporates field recordings made in the Old Croton Aqueduct in the Bronx. Joined on stage by alumni performers of the Bang on a Can Summer Festival (Banglewood), the All-Stars will take on Louis Andriessen’s 1977 signature work, Hoketus, honoring the composer’s 75th birthday this June.
Pioneering composer and performer Meredith Monk and longtime collaborator Theo Bleckmann will perform selections from Monk’s iconic eighth album, Facing North, released in 1992 on ECM. The all-female a cappella quartet Anonymous 4 presents selections from Bang on a Can co-founder David Lang’s love fail, celebrating the new CD release on Cantaloupe Music. Lang’s love fail, which premiered at BAM in 2012, is a meditation on the timelessness of love that weaves together details from mediaeval retellings of the story of Tristan and Isolde.
Mantra Percussion performs Bang on a Can co-founder Michael Gordon’s Timber, a sonic psychedelic percussion sextet scored for six amplified custom-built sawhorses. Gordon calls their sound “primitively electronic.” His work creates the impression that sound is traveling throughout the room by subtly shifting the accents from one player to another. The result is an ambient, sweeping meditation on sound and rhythm. Timber was released on Cantaloupe Music in 2011.
Grammy Award-winners Roomful of Teeth bring selections from Caroline Shaw’s Partita for 8 Voices, for which she won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize. Shaw describes the piece as “a simple piece, born of a love of structure, of the human voice, of dancing and tired ligaments, of music…” Roomful of Teeth also performs Judd Greenstein’s AEIOU, from 2009. In it Greenstein explores moving the warm Spanish vowel sounds of the title around the voices of the ensemble.
Brooklyn-based acoustic trio Dawn of Midi (bassist Aakaash Israni, pianist Amino Belyamani and drummer Qasim Naqvi) bring selections from their acclaimed 2013 album Dysnomia. Pitchfork describes the album: “three humans dovetailing instrumental loops into thousands of subtly different permutations . . . something totally unprecedented.”
So Percussion performs Music for Wood and Strings by Bryce Dessner (The National). Written for Chordsticks custom-designed for this piece and tuned to two open harmonies using strings and percussion instruments, Dessner magically blurs the line between percussion and melody.
Jace Clayton (aka DJ/rupture) and friends perform Clayton’s Julius Eastman Memorial Dinner, for two grand pianos, live electronics, and vocals that celebrates the life of Julius Eastman (1940-1990), a pioneering African-American composer, pianist, vocalist, and dancer, whose music was both hypnotic and confrontational. Clayton combines two of Eastman’s rhythmic and muscular piano works, “Evil Nigger” and “Gay Guerrilla,” into a new innovative singular performance, mixed with original material and interspersed with short theatrical vignettes.
Regarded as both a lyrical and emotionally raw performer, new music violinist Adrianna Mateo plays Molly Joyce’s 2013 piece lean back and release, which combines Mateo’s live performance with her pre-recorded tracks processed with delays and distortion to create a driven, descending work that explores the violin’s powerful lower register.
Nineteen-member strong new music ensemble Contemporaneous, founded in 2010, collaborates with Seattle-based composer/performer and “pop polymath” (The New York Times) Jherek Bischoff with a set of new tunes following-up their sold-out NY performances earlier this year. Contemporaneous also performs Rome and Berlin Prize-winning composer Andrew Norman’s Try.
Washington DC-based new music extraordinaires Great Noise Ensemble make their New York debut with Carlos Carrillo’s De La Brevedad de la Vida; Armando Bayolo’s Caprichos, inspired by Francisco de Goya’s satirical and scathing engravings from early 19th century Spain; and Marc Mellits’ Five Machines (mvt.5).
Bearthoven (pianist Karl Larson, bassist Pat Swoboda, and percussionist Matt Evans) takes on Brooks Frederickson’s jazz-inspired undertoad, with both the trio and composer making their Bang on a Can debut.
In addition, Bang on a Can’s social engagement wing Found Sound Nation will host its unique Street Studio. A mobile recording studio equipped for passersby and Marathon musicians alike to spontaneously create and record original music, the Street Studio will be stationed outside the Brookfield Place Winter Garden during the Marathon.
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)
Over 27 years, 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 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. For up-to-date information regarding Bang on a Can programs, events, and CD releases, please visit www.bangonacan.org.
About The River To River Festival: River To River, an LMCC public engagement initiative, inspires residents, workers, and visitors in Lower Manhattan, by connecting them to artists, new ideas and perspectives, and other art-lovers to demonstrate the role that artists play in creating vibrant, sustainable communities. River To River is made possible with support from the Alliance for Downtown New York, American Express, The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, HUD, The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, Westfield World Trade Center, and in part by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, as well as other underwriters.
About Arts Brookfield: Arts Brookfield presents exciting, world-class cultural experiences to hundreds of thousands of people for free each year in both indoor and outdoor public spaces at Brookfield’s premier office properties in New York, Los Angeles, Denver, Houston, Toronto, Perth and Sydney. From concerts, theater and dance to film screenings and art exhibitions, Arts Brookfield brings public spaces to life through art.
Now through December 2014, Arts Brookfield celebrates its 25th Anniversary through an interactive initiative, Art Set Free. The public is invited to submit original artworks of all kinds for digital display at Brookfield’s office properties around the globe and on www.ArtsBrookfield25.com.
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