Press contacts
Bang on a Can: Christina Jensen PR, 646.536.7864, [email protected]
MASS MoCA: Jodi Joseph, 413.664.4481 x8113 or [email protected]
BANG ON A CAN PLAYS ART
Culmination of 13th Annual Summer Music Festival at MASS MoCA
July 26 – August 2, 2014
87 Marshall Street | North Adams, MA
Festival highlights include:
David Lang’s death speaks featuring Shara Worden & the Bang on a Can All-Stars
Bang on a Can Plays Teresita Fernández featuring Julia Wolfe’s Cruel Sister
World Premiere Composer Concert
Bang on a Can Plays Ann Hamilton, world premiere of Paper Chorus, presented in collaboration with Dieu Donné
Bang on a Can Plays Sol LeWitt featuring music by Steve Reich
Bang on a Can Plays Anselm Kiefer featuring Georg Friedrich Haas’ In iij. Noct.
Bang on a Can Plays Natalie Jeremijenko featuring Wilco’s Glenn Kotche
Bang on a Can Marathon with special guests Steve Reich & Glenn Kotche
Tickets: 413.MOCA.111 or www.massmoca.org
For information: www.bangonacan.org/summer_festival
Watch a feature about the Festival on PBS’s NewsHour: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opdcN70ayNM
(North Adams, MA & New York, NY) — From July 26 through August 2, 2014, the “relentlessly inventive” (New York Magazine) new music collective Bang on a Can collaborates with MASS MoCA to present Bang on a Can Plays Art, a jam-packed, week-long new music extravaganza featuring 14 concerts in 8 days, as the culmination of the 13th annual Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival at MASS MoCA which runs from July 14. Bang on a Can Plays Art draws inspiration from the visual art on exhibit in the galleries at MASS MoCA. Each concert will showcase 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 guests Steve Reich and Glenn Kotche (Wilco).
Bang on a Can Plays Art kicks off in the afternoon on July 26 with Bang on a Can Plays Izhar Patkin featuring Terry Riley’s minimalist classic In C, followed by a performance that evening of Bang on Can co-founder David Lang’s haunting death speaks by the Bang on a Can All-Stars with special guest Shara Worden, as well as a late-night solo concert by Worden’s alter-ego My Brighest Diamond. Festival highlights include Bang on a Can Plays Teresita Fernández featuring Bang on a Can co-founder Julia Wolfe’s Cruel Sister (July 27); Bang on a Can World Premiere Composer Concert showcasing brand new music by the Festival Fellows (July 28); Bang on a Can Plays Ann Hamilton (July 29), featuring the world premiere of Paper Chorus created by the Festival musicians wearing Hamilton’s all new paper sculptures; Bang on a Can Plays Mark Dion featuring Morton Feldman’s Why Patterns? (July 30); Bang on a Can Plays Sol LeWitt featuring the music of Steve Reich, who was a friend and colleague of LeWitt (July 31); Bang on a Can Plays Anselm Kiefer, featuring Georg Friedrich Haas’ powerful string quartet In iij. Noct. performed in total darkness (July 31); Bang on a Can Plays Natalie Jeremijenko featuring Wilco’s Glenn Kotche (Aug. 1); and the annual 6-hour Bang on a Can Marathon at MASS MoCA featuring 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 – including special guest Steve Reich and his newest composition Radio Rewrite, special guest Glenn Kotche’s recent chamber music and music from his new release Adventureland (Cantaloupe), and a rare performance of Edgar Varese’s masterpiece Ionisation, (Aug. 2). Performance details can be found in the calendar at the end of this release.
Bang on a Can Plays Art is the culmination of the Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival at MASS MoCA (the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art), a musical utopia for innovative musicians in the beautiful Berkshire Mountains of Western Massachusetts, from July 14-August 2, 2014. The festival is dedicated entirely to the creation, study, and performance of adventurous contemporary music. A three-week intensive of 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 over 250 applicants from around the world.
Composers will have their new works performed and players will perform in ensembles sitting alongside their teachers. The festival includes daily performances in the museum galleries, free with museum admission, and concludes with a six-hour blow-out Marathon Concert performed by the festival ensembles and special guests. The festival also features African and Latin music workshops, electronics and music business seminars, free events in the community, and more.
Since its founding in 2002, over 400 musicians have attended the Bang on a Can Summer Festival, coming from over 50 countries including places as far away as Malaysia, Argentina, and Uzbekistan. Alumni of the Festival are emerging leaders in the new music field. Many have founded new ensembles, new festivals, new record labels, and new bands. Bang on a Can Festival alumni include Judd Greenstein, founder of the NOW Ensemble, New Amsterdam Records, and Ecstatic Music Festival; Lauren Radnofsky, founder of Ensemble Signal; Dave Longstreth, founder of the band Dirty Projectors; Missy Mazzoli, composer and founder of the band Victoire; Anna Clyne, currently composer-in-residence with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra; David T. Little, founder of Newspeak; Jakhongir Shukurov, composer and producer of the Omnibus Festival in Uzbekistan; Olivia De Prato and Mariel Roberts, founders of MIVOS Quartet; and Matt McBane, founder of the Carlsbad Music Festival in California.
The 2014 Festival faculty members are drawn from among the most innovative musicians or our time, including Gregg August (bass), Ashley Bathgate (cello), Vicky Chow (piano), David Cossin (percussion), Michael Gordon (composition), David Lang (composition), Brad Lubman (conducting), Nicholas Photinos (cello), Vicki Ray (piano), Todd Reynolds (violin), Mark Stewart (electric guitar), Ken Thomson, (saxophone/clarinet), Julia Wolfe (composition), and special guest Nani Agbeli (African drumming and dance).
Tickets & Directions
Tickets to the evening concert on July 26 and the Marathon on August 3 are $24 each. The remaining Bang on a Can Plays Art concerts are free with museum admission. Kids Can Too tickets are $5 per person. MASS MoCA members receive a 10% discount on tickets to any evening event. Tickets are available at the MASS MoCA Box Office 11am-5pm daily, by phone at 413.662.2111 during Box Office hours, or online at www.massmoca.org.
BANG ON A CAN PLAYS ART SCHEDULE (subject to change)
Saturday, July 26 – Sunday, August 2, 2014
Saturday, July 26, 2014
4:30pm:
Bang on a Can Plays Izhar Patkin
Terry Riley: In C
Rooms within rooms. Artist Izhar Patkin’s The Wandering Veil divides Mass MoCA’s largest gallery into a maze of smaller spaces. So does Terry Riley’s In C, the national anthem of minimal music. Bang on a Can Plays Art kicks off with Riley’s landmark work, with musicians spread throughout, among and within Patkin’s massive installation in MASS MoCA’s largest gallery.
8:00pm:
David Lang’s death speaks
Bang on a Can All-Stars with special guest Shara Worden
Alt-diva Shara Worden joins the Bang on a Can All-Stars for David Lang’s post-Schubertian song cycle death speaks. Lang combed through every song by Franz Schubert and pulled out just the moments when Death is a character, speaking directly to us, and then set those texts to new music. The result is intimate, haunting, and strangely life-affirming “Schubertgaze” (New York Times).
10:00pm:
Bang on a Can “After Hours” @ The Chalet, Dean Baldwin’s Bar Sculpture
My Brightest Diamond
Shara Worden keeps singing, now as her indie alter ego My Brightest Diamond. A frequent collaborator with such artists as Sufjan Stevens and David Byrne, My Brightest Diamond plays a special solo late night set.
Sunday, July 27, 2014
4:30pm:
Bang on a Can Plays Teresita Fernández
Julia Wolfe’s Cruel Sister
Bang on a Can Festival String Orchestra; Brad Lubman, conductor
Post-performance talk featuring Julia Wolfe
In the middle of Teresita Fernández’s dynamic, monumental works, the Bang on a Can Festival String Orchestra plays a monumental work of its own. Conductor Brad Lubman leads the strings in a performance of Julia Wolfe’s intense and harrowing Cruel Sister, based on a chilling folk song of two sisters tragically in love with the same man.
Monday, July 28, 2014
4:30pm:
Bang on a Can World Premiere Composer Concert (Hunter)
The Bang on a Can Summer Festival has become a mecca for curious and powerful young composers from around the world. This concert features ten world premieres by this year’s composer fellows, written specifically for this concert, and performed by all of this year’s performer fellows and most of its faculty.
Tuesday, July 29, 2014
4:30pm:
Bang on a Can Plays Ann Hamilton
MacArthur Prize-winning artist Ann Hamilton has created a series of wearable hand-made paper components in her artistic residency at Dieu Donné. With the help of Bang on a Can All-Stars Mark Stewart and David Cossin, an ensemble of Bang on a Can Fellows will premiere a piece specially created to explore the sound vocabulary of paper through body movements.
Wednesday, July 30, 2014
4:30pm:
Bang on a Can plays Mark Dion
Morton Feldman’s Why Patterns?
Everything in its right place. Morton Feldman changed the meaning of the word quiet with his meditative and ethereal music. Feldman’s music is finely detailed and rigorously made, and it seems somehow fitting to perform it at the entrance of Mark Dion’s encyclopedic Octagon Room.
7:00pm:
Bang on a Can @ Windsor Lake
Join the entire Bang on a Can Summer Festival and most of our friends and neighbors of North Adams at beautiful Windsor Lake for our annual avant-variety show. Bring a lawn chair or sit on the grass. Bring a bathing suit and a picnic supper. Free admission.
Thursday, July 31, 2014
4:30pm:
Bang on a Can Plays Sol LeWitt
Music by Steve Reich
Post-performance discussion with Steve Reich
Frequent guest Steve Reich joins us for a concert of his works, including Electric Counterpoint and more, in the midst of MASS MoCA’s kaleidoscopic Sol LeWitt galleries. Reich was good friends with Sol LeWitt from their days as young artists on the New York scene together in the 1960s. Reich will talk about about his relationship with Lewitt after the performance.
8:00pm:
Bang on a Can Plays Anselm Kiefer
8:00pm: Check out the Kiefer exhibition
9:00pm: Lights Out: Georg Friedrich Haas’ In iij. Noct. performed in darkness
Austrian composer Georg Friedrich Haas is quickly becoming a superstar of contemporary music, and one of his greatest hits is his piece In iij. Noct. Not for listeners who are afraid of the dark, this piece is performed in a completely lightless room, with the musicians spread around the audience. A one-of-a-kind music experience.
10:00pm:
Bang on a Can “After Hours” @ The Chalet, Dean Baldwin’s Bar Sculpture
Come join us for a late-night spontaneous music hang!
Friday, August 1, 2014
4:30pm:
Bang on a Can Plays Natalie Jeremijenko
Performance by Wilco’s Glenn Kotche
Spectacle beneath the upside-down trees! Or is that above? Wilco’s explosive drummer and percussionist extraordinaire Glenn Kotche is joined by a host of players for a percussion extravaganza, under Natalie Jeremijenko’s twisted Tree Logic. Loud, hard-rocking, and a lot of fun.
10:00pm:
Bang on a Can “After Hours” @ The Chalet, Dean Baldwin’s Bar Sculpture
Come join us for a late-night spontaneous music hang!
Saturday, August 2, 2014
4:00pm:
Bang on a Can Marathon with special guests Steve Reich and Glenn Kotche (Wilco)
The Bang on a Can Marathon is a 6-hour day-night boundary-busting festival finale featuring 50+ musicians and composers from around the world and has become one of the most diverse, open and exciting summer music events in the Berkshires. The marathon will feature Steve Reich’s newest composition Radio Rewrite, a Reichian remix of two songs by the legendary British rock band Radiohead. Also featuring the chamber music of Glenn Kotche, who burst on the scene as the drummer for the mega-band Wilco but who is now getting very busy as a dynamic and adventurous composer. Another special highlight is a rare performance of Edgar Varese’s riotous masterpiece Ionisation, the first piece ever written for percussion ensemble.
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 MASS MoCA
MASS MoCA is one of the world’s liveliest (and largest!) centers for making and enjoying the best new art of our time, across all media: music, art, dance, theater, film, and video. Hundreds of works of visual and performing art have been created on its 19th-century factory campus during fabrication and rehearsal residencies in North Adams, making MASS MoCA among the most productive sites in the country for the creation and presentation of new art. More platform than box, MASS MoCA strives to bring to its audiences art and shared learning experiences that are fresh, engaging, and transformative. MASS MoCA is the home of Solid Sound, Wilco’s music and arts festival, the FreshGrass festival of bluegrass and roots music, and The Bang on a Can Festival of contemporary music.
MASS MoCA’s galleries are open 11am to 5pm every day except Tuesdays. From June 21 – September 1, MASS MoCA’s galleries are open 10am to 6pm Sunday through Wednesday and 10am – 7pm Thursday through Saturday. Gallery hours are often extended on evenings featuring performing arts events. Summer gallery admission is $18 for adults, $16 for seniors and vets, $12 for students, $8 for children 6 to 16, and free for children 5 and under. Members are admitted free year-round. For additional information, call 413.662.2111 x1 or visit massmoca.org.
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