News

“Long Play has been around only since last year, but it is already the most important classical music festival in New York City.” [NYTimes]

We are so excited to announce the 3rd year of Long Play, a three-day destination music festival, presented from Friday, May 3 through Sunday, May 5, 2024. Featuring 50+ concerts , Long Play also showcases a dense network of inventive music venues in Brooklyn – with performances at BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music), Roulette, Public Records, BRIC, Murmrr, Irondale Center for the Arts, The Center for Fiction, plus outdoor events and more. A limited number of 3-day Early Bird Festival and Supporter Passes are on sale now at www.longplayfestival.org!

Some featured concerts in the 2024 lineup include Soundwalk Collective + Patti Smith, Jeff Mills’ Tomorrow Comes the Harvest, Steve Reich’s master-work Music for 18 Musicians, Deerhoof, BlankFor.ms + Jason Moran, Anna Meredith + Ligeti Quartet, Raw Poetic and Damu the Fudgemunk, Bang on a Can All-Stars performing Ryuichi Sakamoto 1996, and many others.

Bang on a Can’s Co-Founders and Artistic Directors Michael Gordon, David Lang, and Julia Wolfe, say of Long Play:

We don’t know about you, but personally, ourselves, we need to listen to a lot more music.  Right now.  People are tense, the world is a mess.  We need music’s healing powers, stat.  And just as much as the music, we need the community of people around the music – the performers, the composers, the people who come together to hear it all, the people who take the tickets and sell the beer and sweep up after.  We need the whole thing, all of us, the whole universe of music lovers who share the same belief – that music has the power to make us whole.  Because it does.

Lucky for us, this year’s LONG PLAY festival is overflowing with all different kinds of music and musicians – music that is loud and soft, music that is driving and meditative, music that is for winding up and for winding down.  Music that challenges where we have come from and that charts where we are headed.  60 plus concerts of all of this great music, in one long weekend, in multiple venues in Brooklyn, all within walking distance of each other.   Come see it all, on LONG PLAY.

More info and tickets

Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival at MASS MoCA

A new music utopia for composers and performers

July 15-Aug 4, 2024

Applications are online now! 

The Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival at MASS MoCA (the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art) is a 3-week musical utopia for innovative composers and performers in the beautiful Berkshire mountains of western Massachusetts dedicated entirely to adventurous contemporary music. Composers will have their new works performed. Players will perform in ensembles alongside our faculty. The program includes daily performances in the museum galleries, and concludes with a three-day blow-out festival performed by fellows, faculty, and special guests. In the words of previous participants this program is“…one of the most important artistic events in my whole career.” and “life changing.” The program also features African and Latin music workshops, electronics and music business seminars, free events  in the community, and more.

More info and applications

The Jewish Museum and Bang on a Can present a concert celebrating the works of Layla and Mounir Mourad, the Egyptian Jewish musical legends. Layla Mourad was one of the most important singers during the golden age of Arabic music and prolific composers for Arabic language film in the mid-1900s. Her music remains popular and influential across the Middle East to this day. Mourad, who came from a notable musical family, sang and starred in some of the most classic and celebrated films in Egyptian history. Her brother, Mounir Mourad was also a renowned actor and composer whose music, featured in this program, incorporated a modern, jazzy sound along with a conservative Arabic rhythm. This concert honors their lives, legacies and their family’s important contribution to Egyptian music along with their continued impact on the music scene in Cairo.

For this concert, Layla and Mounir Morad’s music has been arranged by Yousha Mourad, an Egyptian-American Jewish composer and vocalist. His goal is to continue the legacy of Layla, Zaki, and Mounir Mourad through his modern compositions in the Arabic language based on the Maqam/rhythmic approach used in the Mourad family’s music. This event is presented in conjunction with the current Jewish Museum exhibition Mood of the moment: Gaby Aghion and the house of Chloé.

Featuring:
Yousha Mourad: Vocals/Oud
Ismail Lumanovski: Clarinet
Safran Mansi: Percussion
Dayramir González: Piano
Michael Olatuja: Bass
Tamer Pinarbasi: Qanun

Thursday, November 9, 2023
7:30 – 9 pm EST
Scheuer Auditorium

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

More info and tickets

Includes Museum Admission; doors open at 7 pm

The Bang on A Can All-Stars join Kronos Quartet in their Five Decade Celebration!!

—————————————————————————————

KRONOS Five Decades is presented November 3 at Carnegie Hall – and it features Laurie Anderson, Bang on a Can All-Stars, Jake Blount, Tanya Tagaq, Wu Man, Attacca Quartet, Sō Percussion, and others.

This special concert includes a new short film by award-winning documentarian Sam Green; the New York premieres of Carnegie Hall co-commissioned works by Michael Gordon and Gabriella Smith; and an extraordinary new “Sunrise Jam” version of Terry Riley’s Sunrise of the Planetary Dream Collector for 50 musicians.

Bang on a Can is honored to have presented the first concert of Kronos’s Five Decade season at 2023 LOUD Weekend at MASS MoCA!

For the next concert in the Bang on a Can series at The Noguchi Museum, on Sun, Sept 24, we present For Living Lovers, a duo with guitarist Brandon Ross and bassist Stomu Takeishi.

Brandon Ross and Stomu Takeishi are both longtime veterans of New York City’s creative music scene. Over the course of their long collaboration, the duo have developed a unique dialogue and timbral language for guitar and bass. For Living Lovers’s music poses questions—physical, philosophical, and sonic—all while inviting the listener to participate in an intimate conversation.

Tickets and Info

Mark Swed’s review of the MEMORY GAME performance at the Ford Theater is online!

“There was an extraordinary amount of modern American music memory, excellence and importance on the stage”

Meredith Monk’s MEMORY GAME
Performed by Meredith Monk & Vocal Ensemble and the Bang on a Can All-Stars

MEMORY GAME is both a look back at a pivotal point in Meredith Monk’s storied career, and a richly layered portrait of how vocal music—under the guidance of an indefatigable master—can play with our expectations in poignant and compelling ways.

Live at The Ford, presented by the LA Phil!

Get Tickets 

On August 27 at 4pm, Bang on a Can and The Noguchi Museum present a double bill by cellist Issei Herr and drummer/producer Matt Evans at our a monthly series of live performances in the Museum’s garden and galleries. Free with museum admission.

Learn More

Leading up to a LOUD Weekend finale, Bang on a Can fellows and faculty let loose throughout the incredible MASS MoCA galleries. Gallery concerts are free with museum admission, performed on some weekdays at 1:30pm and 4:30pm.

• Friday, July 14 – Ghanaian Drumming (festival participants)
• Monday, July 17 – Mark Stewart with the Gunnar Schonbeck instruments
• Wednesday, July 19 – Vicky Chow
• Friday, July 21 – Todd Reynolds
• Monday, July 24 – Gregg August plus festival ensembles
• Wednesday, July 26 – Short New Works by the festival composers

Learn more at massmoca.org. 

Bang on a Can and MASS MoCA announce the 2023 edition of our multi-day music festival called LOUD Weekend, presented on Thursday, July 27 through Saturday, July 29, 2023, at MASS MoCA. LOUD Weekend features three days of ear-bending music and mind-blowing art exhibitions taking place throughout the museum’s vast galleries and its stunning collection of indoor and outdoor performing arts venues.

LOUD Weekend 2023 (additional artists and more details to be announced): 

• KRONOS Five Decades – the singular legendary Kronos Quartet perform TWO concerts celebrating their 50th anniversary season.
• Love in Exile – a brand new collaborative album and tour featuring experimental super trio Arooj Aftab, Vijay Iyer, and Shahzad Ismaily kicks off LOUD Weekend on Thursday night, 7/27.
• David Lang explores our eternal fascination with death, love, family and suicide in the concert premiere of his newest chamber opera, note to a friend, based on three haunting texts by iconic Japanese novelist Ryunosuke Akutagawa. Featuring Theo Bleckmann, vocal.
• The electric Bang on a Can All-Stars (NY) team up and face-off with the Netherland’s Ensemble Klang (NL) for the US premiere of Pete Harden’s heavy hocketing hoedown Forgiveness and Forgetting. 
• Time and distance collapse in the music of the Catalan folk duo Tarta Relena. With little more than their two voices, Helena Ros and Marta Torrella connect the far corners of the Mediterranean, drawing on traditions stretching back more than a thousand years (Pitchfork).
• Composer Paola Prestini and cellist Jeffrey Zeigler pair up for Houses of Zodiac: Poems for Cello, an installation-concert drawing inspiration from the writings of Anaïs Nin, Pablo Neruda, Brenda Shaughnessy, and Natasha Trethewey to explore the intersection of mind, body, and nature, with films by Murat Eyuboglu.
• All-time powerhouse composer Joan Tower returns to LOUD Weekend with her brand new piece  Into the Night. 
• Composer Oscar Bettison’s mega-work O Death, mixes saxophones, trombone, banjo and piano with jaw’s harps, harmonicas, recorders, melodica, flower pots and prepared wrenches, performed by Ensemble Klang, all the way from Holland!
• The return of composer Jeffrey Brooks to LOUD Weekend – with the world premiere of his latest work in the Stein-o-caster series for an ingeniously amplified piano played with paint brushes.
• Special guest composers Andy Akiho, Nicole Lizée, David Sanford, and more. 
• WORLD PREMIERES by the 2023 summer festival composition fellows. 
• Music by Bang on a Can co-founders Michael Gordon and Julia Wolfe.
• Performances by Gregg August, Robert Black, Vicky Chow, David Cossin, Arlen Hlusko, Nick Photinos, Todd Reynolds, Mark Stewart, Maya Stone, Ken Thomson, plus fellows from the 2023 Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival at MASS MoCA.
• PLUS A LOT MORE!!

More info and tickets