Bang on a Can

My big goal in life was to be a pianist and play Bach really well. Then, in undergraduate school, I had a great teacher who taught composition. I really didn't know that composers were alive-- that you could be alive and do this was really amazing. There's a very narrow band of what's allowed in Western music and what's considered beautiful. The sounds I loved, people hadn't written down. So I wrote by working with musicians, exploring the other sounds an instrument could make and then how to reproduce it. People would say, "But we worked for years not to do that!" It takes performers who are really open. The past five years I've been working on a special notation for these sounds, so that people who don't know me can do my music. -Eleanr Hovda