Bang on a Can Marathon – May 6, 2017!

30th Anniversary BANG ON A CAN MARATHON

Saturday, May 6, 2017 from 2-10pm
8 hours of Live Music!

We’ll have a live stream of the performance via Little Dog Live.

For the whole schedule head to the Events Page.

part of Target First Saturday at Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, NY
Admission: FREE with Museum admission

Suggested donation $16 before 5pm; free after 5pm courtesy of Target First Saturdays.

In our 30th year, Bang on a Can is committed more than ever to an increasing and inclusive worldwide community dedicated to innovation through music – a world where ideas flow freely across boundaries whether they are musical, geographical, spiritual. Expressed another way:

“Thirty years ago we started dreaming of the world we wanted to live in. It would be a kind of utopia for music: all the boundaries between composers would come down, all the boundaries between genres would come down, all the boundaries between musicians and audience would come down. Then we started trying to build it. Building a utopia is a political act – it pushes people to change. It is also an act of resistance to the things that keep us apart.”  – Gordon/Lang/Wolfe

To celebrate 30 in style, Bang on a Can comes to Brooklyn with its annual incomparable super-mix of boundary-busting music from around the corner and around the world! The 2017 Bang on a Can Marathon will feature 8 hours of rare performances by some of the most innovative musicians of our time side-by-side with some of today’s most pioneering young artists.

Highlights of the 2017 30th Anniversary Bang on a Can Marathon include the Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble directed by Timothy Weiss, playing Dutch composer Louis Andriessen’s hard-driving Platonic masterpiece De Staat (“The Republic”), written as a commentary on the debate about the relation of music to politics; Brooklyn’s historic and mesmerizing Pan In Motion playing music by composer Kendall WilliamsJulia Wolfe’s folk ballad Steel Hammer, based on over 200 versions of the John Henry ballad, a quintessential American legend of the laborers that worked the railroad; renowned saxophonist, composer, painter, and poet Oliver Lake, co-founder of the internationally acclaimed World Saxophone QuartetJoan La Barbara’s A Murmuration for Chibok, which honors and keeps in the present over 250 school girls abducted in Chibok, Nigeria by Boko Haram in 2014, performed by the award-winning Young People’s Chorus of NYC, led by Francisco Nuñez; New York’s legendary and inspirational composer-singer Meredith Monk leading the women of her acclaimed vocal ensemble in a set of shimmering a cappella pieces from her work-in-progress, Cellular Songs; Bang on a Can’s extreme mobile ensemble Asphalt Orchestra performing music by Merrill Garbus/ tUnE-yArDs, Kim Deal/Pixies, and more; a rare solo set by Pulitzer-prize winning composer-singer-violinist Caroline Shaw; Amir ElSaffar’s Two Rivers Ensemble, an all-star sextet of jazz and Middle Eastern musicians that blends maqam music of Iraq and contemporary jazz; the distinctive and exceptional indie-guitarist Kaki KingWomen’s Raga MassiveMichael Gordon’s No Anthem; the ambient music world of Laraaji; the Moroccan grooves of Brooklyn’s Innov Gnawa; the Brooklyn premiere of David Lang’s Just, featured in last year’s Oscar nominated film Youth by Paolo Sorrentino, and more. 

PLUS Bang on a Can’s social engagement wing Found Sound Nation hosts its Street Studio  from 5-9pm- a mobile recording studio equipped for passersby and Marathon musicians alike to spontaneously create and record original music!

Lead Marathon support by ASCAP

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