Bang on a Can

Bang on a Can Marathon

The Marathon concert is the heart and soul of Bang on a Can. As artistically inclusive as it is audience-friendly, Bang on a Can's annual 12-hour Marathon has become one of the most diverse, most open and most exciting music events in the world. "Imagine Lollapalooza advised by the ghost of John Cage," Vanity Fair wrote. "There are other places to hear new contemporary music, but it is seldom offered with such a potent blend of intensity, authority, and abandon."

The Marathon is a collision of musical styles and ideas

Marathon 2007 clocked in at 27 hours and 10 minutes of continuous live music, presented for free at the World Financial Center Winter Garden with the River to River Festival. From Saturday evening, June 2nd straight on through to Sunday night, June 3rd, 6000 + people saw and heard a group of 9 bagpipers play a new work by Julia Wolfe, the layered sound and video of indie-rock phenoms The Books, the Bang on a Can All-Stars play Brian Eno's Music for Airports at Midnight, Juana Molina at 3am, Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians in a transcendent performance at dawn, hip-hop group Dalek, Michael Gordon's Gotham played from the rafters, the Young People's Chorus of New York singing Meredith Monk, and the final notes of David Lang's Men fading into silence at the end of it all.

Composers Michael Gordon, David Lang and Julie Wolfe created the first Bang on a Can marathon concert in 1987 in order to break down the barriers that separate musical communities. Their idea was simple - instead of sorting music by style or genre or venue it would be more powerful to sort music by innovation, finding the rebels in each musical community, the restless creators not content to leave conventions unchallenged. Putting all these fresh voices next to each other on one gargantuan concert would let an audience feel the excitement of innovation itself. Their first marathon featured appearances by such leading lights as Steve Reich, John Cage, Pauline Oliveros and Milton Babbitt, but most of the music was by the young and unknown. It is a formula that Bang on a Can has followed to this day.

Since then the marathons have presented an astounding range of revolutionary music and musicians, from John Cage to John Zorn, from minimalism's godfather Terry Riley to Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore, from the 30-voice Finnish shouting choir Huutajat to the hyperintelligent brutality of Iannis Xenakis, from the political sophistication of composer/pianist Frederic Rzewski to the high energy strumming of Japan's Kazue Sawai Koto ensemble, from the eastern minimalism of Arvo Part to the speed-of-light Bulgarian wedding band of Ivo Papasov, from the brainy rituals of Karlheinz Stockhausen to the turntable manipulations of artist Christian Marclay to the massive electric guitar symphonies of Glenn Branca. And hundreds of young and unknown composers, each doing something new and for the very first time. It is in the range of these musics that you see how big the world really is, and how big it can be.

In the past 20 years, the festival has moved all over New York City from Exit Art Gallery to the R.A.P.P. Arts Center, La Mama, the Kitchen, the Society For Ethical Culture, Lincoln Center's Alice Tully Hall, the Henry Street Settlement, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Symphony Space, the World Financial Center. And it has been out of town, with Bang on a Can Marathons at Mass Moca and in London, Amsterdam and Hamburg.

What links all of these marathons are the range and diversity of the music, the passion and intensity of the performances, and the enthusiastic response of the audiences. Bang on a Can believes that the marathon concert helps to build the world we want to live in, in which new music has value, new ideas have meaning and new voices are heard. In the words of the Wall Street Journal "If all contemporary-classical-music concerts were like this there wouldn't be a problem with contemporary classical music."