In conjunction with the MoMA exhibition Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925, Bang on a Can presents a pair of concerts that reveal how pioneering European composers of 100 years ago forever changed music in New York. Curated by Bang on a Can co-founder and artistic director David Lang, each concert pairs two composers—an early-20th-century innovator, and a New Yorker he influenced— and is performed by alumni and faculty of the Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival at MASS MoCA, a utopian residency program dedicated entirely to the creation, study, and performance of the most adventurous music of our time.
This second evening in the series features one of Arnold Schoenberg’s shortest, oddest, most intense pieces, Herzgewächse, a shockingly expressive vocal miniature originally written for Vasily Kandinsky’s journal The Blue Rider. Morton Feldman’s meditative work Three Voices, for solo voice and two prerecorded solo voices, a luxurious, introspective setting of a poem by Frank O’Hara, has a much slower tempo than the Schoenberg piece, but is ultimately no less intense.