Bang on a Can

Hard Times - certainly for the players! Hard Times for many other people in the world too - the poor, the afflicted, the outcast, the tortured. I cannot imagine art having any meaning outside itself unless it springs from a concern with those outcast from society. How art might directly relate to the material world is a more complex issue and I admit I have no simple answers. I can only speak for myself when I say that despite the fact that a tiny number of Americans own more money than the entire Indian subcontinent; despite the ever expanding globalisation of the world by a limited number of multi-national companies; despite unnecessary homelessness in the wealthy United Kingdom; despite the absolute barbarity of the death penalty; despite the shallowness of mass consumerism in Western culture, despite all of this - and much, much more - I believe that there is still hope in something better. Because I must. I don't know if the music I compose can rise to such lofty aspirations and I am full of doubts generally but like all of us, I go on trying and hope that the ineffable sound of music might provide an image in sound which gives us a glimpse of the world as we would wish to see it - renewed. --Steve Martland