New Frontiers in Music:
Bang on a Can

Friday, June 26, 2009
The Pew Center for Arts and Heritage
1608 Walnut Street, 18th Floor
Philadelphia, PA 19103

Featuring:

Composers & Founding Artistic Directors of Bang on a Can
Michael Gordon
David Lang
Julia Wolfe

Moderated by:

Anne Midgette
Washington Post music critic & New York Times contributor

Bang on a Can began through a series of conversations among three friends: Michael Gordon, David Lang, and Julia Wolfe. Now nationally prominent composers—then fresh from the Yale School of Music—Gordon, Lang, and Wolfe arrived in New York City in the early '80s to find many separate musical scenes, each with its own style, venue, and audience. The idea behind Bang on a Can was to change the nature of these categories, responding to the powerful musical ideas beginning to flow freely in the work of young composers around the world: between minimalism and rock, through-composed and improvised music, world music and noise, live performance and electronica. Restlessly inventive musicians everywhere were pulling down barriers—Gordon, Lang, and Wolfe felt that there needed to be a place for all this uncategorized music to call home.

From its first one-day marathon in a SoHo art gallery in 1987, Bang on a Can has grown into a multifaceted association of ideas that the San Francisco Chronicle has called "the country's most important vehicle for contemporary music." Projects include: the annual Bang on a Can Marathon; The People's Commissioning Fund, which has commissioned more than 30 emerging composers since 2000 by pooling $5 to $5,000 contributions from member-commissioners; the Bang on a Can All-Stars, who tour to major concert venues around the world; the Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival & Institute, a professional development program for young composers and performers; festival concerts at venues like Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center, and Brooklyn Academy of Music; recording projects; and cross-disciplinary collaborations with DJs, visual artists, choreographers, and filmmakers.

PMP's symposium provided a forum for Gordon, Lang, and Wolfe to talk about their work as composers, impresarios, and entrepreneurs, as well as share recorded examples of their music.

About the panelists:

MICHAEL GORDON's compositions demonstrate a singular exploration of rhythm, juxtaposing and overlapping complex patterns to create what has been called "a glorious confusion." His work also employs microtonality and electronic processing, and often draws inspiration from popular culture. Gordon's interest in adding dimenÂsionality to the concert experience has led to frequent collaborations with filmmaker Bill Morrison, including two critically-acclaimed interdisciplinary works: Decasia and Gotham. In Decasia, the audience stands in the middle of a three-tiered, triangular structure surrounded by 55 musicians and large projection scrims. Gotham combines large sonic textures with Morrison's film made from vintage footage of New York City. Gordon's work for musical theatre has involved collaboration with directors Richard Foreman and Francois Girard for pieces premiered at the RedCat Theater in Los Angeles, Oper Aachen, and Next Wave Festival at BAM. His music has been commissioned and/or performed by Los Angeles Philharmonic , Jonathon Nott and the Bamberger Symphony, Kronos Quartet, cellist Maya Beiser, Alarm Will Sound, Ensemble Resonanz, and Icebreaker, and has been featured by a wide spectrum of dance companies including the Royal Ballet, the Stuttgart Ballet, Wayne McGregor/Random Dance Company, and Emio Greco/PC. His work can be found on recordings from Nonesuch and Cantaloupe.

DAVID LANG won the Pulitzer Prize in 2008. His music has been championed by BAM, the Santa Fe Opera, New York Philharmonic, Cleveland Orchestra, Tanglewood, the BBC Proms, Munich Biennale, Settembre Musica Festival, Sidney 2000 Olympic Arts Festival, and the Almeida, Holland, Berlin, and Strasbourg Festivals. His work has also been featured in the choreography of Edouard Lock and La La La Human Steps, Twyla Tharp, the Paris Opera Ballet, The Nederlands Dans Theater, and the Royal Ballet. Recent projects include the meditative amplified orchestra piece The Passing Measures; Writing on Water for the London Sinfonietta with visuals by English filmmaker Peter Greenaway; Shelter for trio medæival and musikFabrik with co-composers Gordon and Wolfe; The Difficulty of Crossing a Field, an opera for the Kronos Quartet; Grind to a Halt for the San Francisco Symphony; World to Come, a commission for cellist Maya Beiser from Carnegie Hall; a concerto for the percussionist Evelyn Glennie and orchestra; a collaboration with visual artist Mark Dion and Ridge Theater on an opera entitled Anatomy Theater; and an opera with Paul Hiller and Theater of Voices. His music has been released on Sony Classical, BMG, Point, Chandos, Argo/Decca, Caprice, CRI and Cantaloupe labels.

JULIA WOLFE’s work is distinguished by an intense focus on sound, its relationship to memory and experience, and the possibilities for new harmonies between familiar chords and microtonal tunings or sounds found in nature and the urban world. Described as "muscular" and "kinetic," Wolfe’s music has been heard at Next Wave Festival at BAM, the Sydney 2000 Olympic Arts Festival, Settembre Musica, the Holland Festival, and Theatre de la Ville, and has been performed by such ensembles as the San Francisco Symphony, The Brooklyn Philharmonic, Ensemble Resonanz, and Bang on a Can All-Stars. Recent works include My Beautiful Scream for Kronos Quartet and orchestra; Cruel Sister for string orchestra; Impatience for the Asko Ensemble to the film of the same name by early Belgian experimentalist Charles Dekeukeleire; and an accordion concerto commissioned by the Miller Theatre and written for Guy Klucevsek. Recent collaborations with composers Michael Gordon and David Lang include Shelter, created with writer Deborah Artman for musikFabrik and trio medæival with staging by the Ridge Theater; Lost Objects, an oratorio for Concerto Köln directed by Francois Girard; and The Carbon Copy Building with comic book artist Ben Katchor and the Ridge Theater (for which she received a Village Voice OBIE Award). Wolfe’s music has been recorded on Cantaloupe, Teldec, Universal, Sony Classical, and Argo/Decca.

ANNE MIDGETTE is the classical music critic of The Washington Post. Long a regular contributor of classical music and theater reviews to The New York Times, she has also written frequently for The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, Town & Country, Opera News, and many other publications. The co-author of The King and I, about Herbert Breslin’s 36 years managing Luciano Pavarotti, she is currently working on a book with the pianist Leon Fleisher.