Bang on a Can Marathon: Highlights

Bang on a Can is one of the most important, innovative new music organizations in the country, and, for some of us, a pilgrimage to their annual Marathon concert is essential.

Displaced from their usual venue in the spacious but noisy and overly reverberant World Financial Center’s Winter Garden due to construction there, the 2013 event was held at the Schimmel Center for the Arts at Pace University. There were pros and cons to this change. The Schimmel Center has better acoustics and more comfortable seating (not a small matter for these long undertakings), but also limited the audience and reduced the public nature of the event. A significant line developed by the opening hour:

About 2 dozen works were heard, featuring around 130 performers, during this 10-hour mini-marathon. (And, yes, "mini" applies when compared to a marathon a few years back that lasted 27 hours.) Some highlights, as they occurred, were:

> The "El Dude" movement from Derek Bermel's enjoyable Canzonas Americanas (this work's CD is highly recommended)

> Peter Evans' astonishing, continuously rapid-fire trumpet solo.

> Caleb Burhans' appealing oh ye of little faith, with a special shout-out to violinist Yuki Numata and guitarist Ryan Ferriera, who stepped in with little notice to replace an ailing Caleb, who suffered an accidental fall the previous evening. 

> Lukas Ligeti's quadra-rhythmic lakoni in kasonnde, featuring 2 deft drummers (David Cossin and Ben Reimer) each playing different rhythms with their left and right hands.

> Kendall Williams's exciting, convincingly assembled Conception, was written for the NYU Contemporary Music Ensemble along with 6 steel pan players. The young Williams stated a noteworthy goal of creating composed, contemporary music for steel pans, in contrast to typically improvised performances.

> John King's sonically rich Astral Epitaphs, originally composed for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company's final concerts at the Park Avenue Armory, was performed by the TILT brass ensemble and the Brooklyn Youth Chorus. It worked well here, and a performance in the cavernous Armory must have been spectacular.

 

> Julia Wolfe's Americana-ish With a blue dress on, with a virtuosic performance by Monica Germino, who fiddled, sang, and stomped with aplomb.

> Tamar Muskal's soulful Mar de Leche, zealously performed cellist Maya Beiser and her Provenance Project Band.

> Annea Lockwood's Vortex, performed by the BOAC All-Stars, was one of the few pieces heard over the day that conveyed a sense of mystery.

> Michael Gordon's Yo Shakespeare, energetic and packed with dance rhythms, was originally composed for Icebreaker within their rigid rules. Always a winner, it was performed by the BOAC All-Stars in a new arrangement.

> Finally, we heard the crowd-pleasing Asphalt Orchestra exuberantly perform works by Tom Zé and Tatsuya Yoshida. This unique ensemble remains an imaginative creation.

For more, visit Bang on a Can's website.

Bang on a Can: Marathon 2010

I think I've attended every Bang on a Can Marathon concert since 1993, and it's a pleasure to report that this year's offering was one of the best so far. From start to finish of this 13 hour event, the varied music was mostly interesting and attractive.

For me, the best was last. Jointly composed by the BOAC triumvirate of Michael Gordon, David Lang, and Julia Wolfe, Shelter was co-commissioned by BAM and originally seen at their Next Wave Festival in 2005. The music is strong and effective throughout. Adding the dreamy, at times surreal videos of Bill Morrison and Laurie Olinder to the superb performance by SIGNAL produced a wonderful, impressive experience.



One standout for me was Tim Brady's live electric-guitar work which was heavily processed and accompanied by excellent videos from Martin Messier. (The cumulative conclusion of the increasingly multiplied John Lennon guitar was mesmerizing.)



Another virtuoso performer was Moritz Eggert, who attacked the keyboard with not only the standard 10 fingers, but also his left foot, chin, and butt. Of course he also roamed inside the piano, produced handheld noise-makers, slapped the the piano's surfaces, banged the keyboard lid, tossed in some body percussion, and more. Somehow, the choreographed expertise and an appropriate brevity made the music more than mere novelty.

Fausto Romitelli, a new name to me, died in 2004 at age 41. His Professor Bad Trip apparently has received considerable European acclaim. The fine performance here by the Talea Ensemble skillfully presented this 45-minute work, which blends "distorted colorations of acoustic and electric instruments as well as accessories like the mirliton and harmonica," and was inspired by "Henri Michaux's writings under the influence of psychedelic drugs." I liked it.

Outstanding performers played for the appreciative audience from both the main stage in front as well as an elevated landing towards the rear, from where we heard an excellent performance of Xenakis's Tetras by the JACK Quartet.



Early on, two folk musicians from Kyrgyzstan, Kambar Kalendarov and Kutman Sultanbekov, presented lovely performances on the main stage, a haunting recorder and electronic-sounding jaw-harps resonating nicely in the setting's reverberant acoustics. Later, they emerged on the rear stage to dazzle us with showy performances on lute-like instruments.

I also enjoyed music from Tristan Perich, Seung-Ah Oh, Evan Ziporyn, Mary Ellen Childs, Fred Frith, Buke and Gass, and Kate Moore.

David Lang listens to the sartorially enhanced Evan Ziporyn

discussing his upcoming piece.

Also noteworthy, the teenaged group Face the Music, directed by Jenny Undercofler, gave a fine performance of Graham Fitkin's Mesh.

The Dutch percussion group Slagwerk Den Haag offered several top-notch performances, including a work using blackboards outfitted with contact mikes that triggered samples when "played" by the chalk-writing performers, providing entertaining visual theatrics. This piece, I Delayed People's Flights By Walking Slowly in Narrow Hallways, can be viewed on YouTube.



There are pluses and minuses in the Winter Garden's unusual venue. It suits the free-to-come-and-go-as-you-please nature of this long event, as well as taking place in a nontraditional public setting far removed from the standard uptown concert hall. On the other hand, this noisy, highly reverberant space favors certain styles of music and diminishes the impact of some pieces. For example, the important vocal samples in Vernon Reid's Ghost Narratives were unintelligible, and the vocal contributions of the uncredited Theo Bleckmann with a performance by SIGNAL were unheard (as if his mike was turned off).

About 30 photos, taken over the 13 hour concert, are here.

Overall, this was an extraordinary event. Bang on a Can remains one of the most important forces in new music.

Phil Kline’s "Around the World in a Daze" reviewed in Philadelphia Inquirer

In the Philadelphia Inquirer, David Patrick Stearns writes about Phil Kline’s Around the World in a Daze DVD:

“Musically, Kline's 10-part Daze is like those Olivier Messiaen orchestral works that are suites of free-standing tone poems, all from different sound worlds, that impulsively eschew the traditional notions of symmetry, proportion and structure.”

The article focuses on the use of visual content on DVDs that present new music. Regarding Daze, Stearns comments:

“Visual illustrations - still photographs from family pets to a grassy stream - often seem so unconnected that Kline is working with a John Cage-style faith in the accidental poetry of randomness.”

Stearns also discusses a Frank Scheffer film that accompanies Brian Eno's 1978 ambient Music for Airports, as arranged by Bang on a Canners Michael Gordon, David Lang, Julia Wolfe, and Evan Ziporyn. Unmentioned is that this release also contains a second film, In the Ocean, a documentary by Scheffer about the history of the wonderful Bang on a Can festival. There are spoken contributions from and excerpts of music by John Cage, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Elliott Carter, Louis Andriessen, as well as the can-bangers themselves.

Finally, the Stearns article mentions The BQE, with both video and music from Sufjan Stevens. Commissioned by Brooklyn Academy of Music, this cinematic suite was inspired by the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and the Hula-Hoop. The visual here (which include “three attractive, scantily clad women” hula-hooping) seems to be the dominant element, with music that is “far less radical than Kline's; it's like a traditional film score… Offenbach to Kline's Beethoven.”

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