News

Announcing Long Play 2025! May 2-4

A Supercharged Musical Ride through Right Now 
3 Days | 50+ concerts throughout Brooklyn

“Long Play…is already the most important classical music festival in New York City.”
—The New York Times

Bang on a Can announces the 4th year of Long Play, a three-day destination music festival, presented from Friday, May 2 through Sunday, May 4, 2025. Featuring 50+ concerts (a current list of artists is here, + more to come soon!), Long Play also showcases a dense network of inventive music venues in Brooklyn – with performances at BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music), Roulette, Pioneer Works, Public Records, BRIC, The Space at Irondale, plus outdoor events and more.

More info, artists, tickets

Dec 12th: Bang on a Can All-Stars play Julia Wolfe at National Sawdust

LIVE AT NATIONAL SAWDUST // DOORS AT 6:30PM // SHOW AT 7:30PM December 12, 2024 7:30 pm

Program – music by Julia Wolfe

Lick (10′)

Big Beautiful Dark and Scary (9′)

Reeling (6′)

Flower Power (preview) (30′)

The electric Bang on a Can All-Stars play an intimate concert of music by Bang on a Can co-founder Julia Wolfe – a set of new, recent, and ‘classic’ works featuring Wolfe’s signature combination of driving rock energy and minimalist serenity. Join Bang on a Can and National Sawdust for this end-of-year holiday hang as the All-Stars offer a sneak-preview of Wolfe’s Flower Power and more. Limited seating!

Get tickets here

Dec 5th, Jewish Museum: Dither Quartet plays Julius Eastman and Morton Feldman

Thursday, December 5, 2024
7:30 – 9 pm EST
Scheuer Auditorium

The William Petschek Family Music Program

How can the idea of a ‘cartoon’ translate into musical form? A sketch, an outline, a simplification that gives that sense that not all the details are filled in–these are all formal ideas that suggest how music might model cartoon-nature. Two composers who experimented their entire lives with leaving out important details are Julius Eastman (1940–1990) and Morton Feldman (1926–1987). Their works, Gay Guerilla by Eastman and Piece for Four Pianos by Feldman, both leave important details to the players to decide, and in this evening of world premiere arrangements, the players deciding are Brooklyn-based guitar ensemble Dither Quartet.

This concert, co-presented with Bang on a Can is held in conjunction with the exhibition Draw Them In, Paint Them Out: Trenton Doyle Hancock Confronts Philip Guston (November 8, 2024 – March 30, 2025).

Tickets: $22 General; $15 Students and Seniors; $12 Jewish Museum members

Doors open at 7 pm; Includes Museum Admission

Get tickets here

Peter Serling, @lotsopiktures

Sunday Oct 20th! Bang on a Can All-Stars play Ryuichi Sakamoto’s 1996

The Bang on a Can All-Stars are performing Ryuichi Sakamoto’s 1996 throughout the 24/25 season! First up, the All-Stars take 1996 to the Vilniaus Festival in Lithuania on Oct 20!

Ryuichi Sakamoto “was arguably the best-known and most successful Japanese musician in the world.” (Peter Tasker, Nikkei Asia)  He won an Oscar for his soundtrack to Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor and several Golden Globes and Grammy awards and nominations for other films. In 1992, he scored the opening ceremony of the Barcelona Olympics, conducting the orchestra while a billion people watched. Sakamoto’s film scores are renowned for their diversity and sensitivity, it is rare for a band to play this music live, and now the Bang on a Can All-Stars realize their own new live arrangements of the album 1996 (arranged by the All-Stars’ multi-talented clarinetist-composer Ken Thomson) — which includes an incredible selection of many of Sakamoto’s greatest hits – music from films including The Last Emperor, Wuthering Heights, The Sheltering Sky, Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, and more. The Bang on a Can All-Stars play Ryuichi Sakamoto is an exploration, a tribute, a celebration.

Get your tickets to the Vilinaus Festival performance here

Julia Wolfe’s Fire in my mouth – Ultima Festival in Oslo – Sept 19

In 1911 the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City caught fire. 146 clothing workers died in the blaze – most of them immigrant women and children who perished in dangerous, inhuman working conditions. Their story is told in Fire in my mouth, a large-scale oratorio for orchestra and female voices by composer and Bang On a Can member Julia Wolfe.

Described as ‘a monumental achievement in high musical drama’, Fire in my mouth follows the young workers as they emigrate to the United States, find jobs in the factory, protest against unfair labour conditions and are finally consumed in a tragic inferno. The score recreates factory sounds such as sewing machines and scissors, and vividly evokes the fire itself andthe workers’ suffering and hope.

Performed by the Oslo Philharmonic, Det Norske Solistkor, Solistkoret Ung and Det Norske Jentekor, Fire in my mouth’s themes of immigration, injustice, precarity and industrial neglect resonate strongly today.

NB: A short interview with Julia Wolfe will take place at Glasshuset before the concert.

LOUD Weekend at MASS MoCA – what a success!

LOUD Weekend at MASS MoCA (Aug 1-3) was AMAZING and we are so grateful to all of our artists, audience, and administrators!

We are delighted to share this review by in the Washington Post:

“An air of defiant joy charged every moment of LOUD Weekend, like the black thunderheads that barged over the hills. If there’s a single word to describe this music, it could be one that doubles as a descriptor for the audience: curious.”

Read full Washington Post article

Media Workshop “dispatches”:

Five young arts journalists joined us for the last week of our summer program to immerse themselves in our program and engage with our Media Workshop faculty John Schaefer and Terrance McKnight. Their work was published on WNYC’s New Sounds page, and the links to their work and more info about the program are available on our website

Media Workshop 

More about LOUD Weekend:

For 23 of MASS MoCA’s 25 years (happy 25th birthday MASS MoCA!), the Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival has transformed the museum into a genre-bending musical utopia for innovative composers and performers. Over three weeks prior to the LOUD Weekend festival, every nook and cranny of the campus comes alive with performances, workshops, and seminars focused on adventurous new music—culminating in LOUD Weekend, when renowned special guests, BoaC faculty, and young players take the stage in a series of playful and heady collisions of jazz, classical, rock, and beyond.

LOUD Weekend 2024 website

 

LOUD Weekend at MASS MoCA – Aug 1-3

Come on up to the Berkshires for LOUD Weekend 2024!

Aug 1-3

Bang on a Can’s LOUD Weekend at MASS MoCA is a fully loaded, three-day, eclectic super-mix of creative, experimental, and unusual music.

More info

For 23 of MASS MoCA’s 25 years (happy 25th birthday MASS MoCA!), the Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival has transformed the museum into a genre-bending musical utopia for innovative composers and performers. Over three weeks prior to the LOUD Weekend festival, every nook and cranny of the campus comes alive with performances, workshops, and seminars focused on adventurous new music—culminating in LOUD Weekend, when renowned special guests, BoaC faculty, and young players take the stage in a series of playful and heady collisions of jazz, classical, rock, and beyond.