About Us
Full History
Before there was an organization dedicated to presenting and performing new music from between the cracks, before the annual 12-hour marathons, before there was a band of world-class musicians touring around the globe, before the summer festival for young composers and performers, before the live version of Brian Eno’s Music for Airports or the tours with Philip Glass, before all the concerts, the commissions, the cd releases, the operas, the radio broadcasts, there were three young composers in a lower Manhattan coffee shop.
The San Francisco Chronicle has called Bang on a Can "the country's most important vehicle for contemporary music" but is has been a long road getting there. That road began with a series of conversations among three friends, Michael Gordon, David Lang and Julia Wolfe, about where music was and where it was going. Fresh out of the Yale School of Music, they arrived in New York City in the early 80’s, only to discover that the music world had been fractured into tiny, isolated communities, each with its own style and subgenre and venue and audience. There were a lot of separate little scenes. The academics, the minimalists, the rockers, the improvisers, the eggheads, the folklorists, the meditaters, the symphonists – musicians in each category had some place to go. The problem was, if you didn’t fit squarely into one of the categories you were out of luck.
Michael, David and Julie decided to create a scene of their own.
Their first idea was to change the nature of the categories themselves. Most of the young composers they knew, and most of the music they liked, didn’t fit neatly into any of the established boxes. The founders saw that among young composers and all around the world there were powerful musical ideas, just starting to flow freely between categories, between minimalism and rock, between written and improvised music, between world music and noise, between live performance and electronica. Restlessly inventive musicians everywhere were pulling the barriers down - there needed to be a place where all the uncategorizeable music could find a home.
Bang on a Can is that home.
The organization's first event was on Mother’s Day, 1987 - a 12-hour marathon concert in a SoHo art gallery. Aiming to be audience-friendly, the artistic directors recast the rituals of performance: an offbeat name, a hip venue, an all-day format, with the listeners encouraged to come and go as they pleased, no star billing, no program notes, jeans-and-tee-shirt informality, a bar in the performance space. And, of course, great music. There were 28 composers, almost all of whom were there. Although such well-known composers as Steve Reich, John Cage, Pauline Oliveros and Milton Babbitt showed up, most of the music was by young, genre-defying, unknown and emerging composers. The search for unknown composers has remained central to Bang on a Can's mission to this day.
The marathons quickly branched into spotlight performances, and soon other festival activities surrounded each marathon. Individual evenings highlighted performances by Cage, premieres of Glenn Branca’s epic and raucous symphonies for massed electric guitars, fully staged operas by hobo-legend Harry Partch, Kazue Sawai’s all women Koto orchestra from Japan – such concerts added to the power of the marathons, extending both their focus and their reach.
People noticed. After only a few years producing the festivals in the East Village, the organization was invited uptown, to Lincoln Center. In 1994 began a six year run as part of the Great Performers Series at Alice Tully Hall, presenting marathons, All-Stars concerts and special events. Since then Bang on a Can has played all over town, including the Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the World Financial Center and Carnegie Hall.
The artistic directors realized at the very beginning that virtuosic and passionate performers were needed to make this music come alive. They needed to develop a core of exciting and dedicated performers, and after a few years they recognized that there were some players who showed up with regularity from festival to festival. Out of this core, in 1992, they assembled the Bang on a Can All-Stars, an intense group of soloists whose line-up shows the aesthetic intention for which they were designed. Part rock band, part amplified chamber group, the players of this ensemble have an astounding range of musical backgrounds and abilities. This group, with its unparalleled musicality, its international touring, award-winning cds and far ranging commissioning programs, has become one of the most powerful ambassadors for contemporary music in the world. In 2004 Musical America recognized the All-Stars as Ensemble of the Year.
An ensemble with such an unusual instrumentation needs new music to be written for it, and Bang on a Can has been very active as a commissioner of new work. Over the years many commissions have been given to such established masters as Terry Riley, Michael Nyman, Somei Satoh, Iva Bittova and Ornette Coleman, but because so much of what Bang on a Can does is geared towards composers whose youth or professional experience places them outside the normal funding channels, the organization needed a more reliable source of commissioning money. In 2000, Bang on a Can created the People’s Commissioning Fund, inviting audience members to give as little or as much as they could, then pooling the money to commission new work. Not only did this make premieres of music by alternative composers a regular and dependable part of Bang on a Can’s annual activities but it also converted the listeners into the commissioners themselves.
In 2002, in a bold attempt to make experimental music central to the education of the musicians of the future, Bang on a Can began training the next generation of composers and performers, via their Summer Festival at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Arts in North Adams. 35 of the world's most talented young composers and performers gather each July to refine their craft, working closely with some of the most innovative composers and performers of our time, with a guest faculty that has included such composers as Steve Reich, Louis Andriessen and Meredith Monk. Located in a refurbished factory in the industrial heart of the Berkshires, the Summer Festival presents a range of daily concerts, lectures, demonstrations, rehearsals and workshops, both for ourselves and for the thousands of contemporary art lovers who visit Mass MOCA every day.
Bang on a Can has always believed in some very simple truths. The walls between different kinds of music keep people apart and they must be taken down. Great musicians and great audiences should spend more time together. If you help fresh musical voices to be heard then the world will be a better place.