Thank you for coming to Long Play!
Long Play 2024 was amazing!
We are so grateful to our audience, our artists, and our venue partners for making it such a success!
Photo slideshow coming soon!
Julia Wolfe and Bang on a Can at Cincinnati’s May Festival – May 18, 23, and 25
We’re super excited to share the news that Julia Wolfe has been named the inaugural festival director for Cincinnati’s historic May Festival. The annual festival will feature 3 powerful and poignant concerts on May 18, May 23, and May 25 featuring a world premiere by Julia Wolfe and multiple additional works including her pulitzer-prize winning oratorio Anthracite Fields with our own Bang on a Can All-Stars + the May Festival Chorus, telling the story of the Pennsylvania coal miners; Her Story, with Lorelei vocal ensemble + the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, focusing on American women’s struggle for equal rights; orchestral and choral works by Michael Gordon, David Lang, and more!
May 18: Anthems (link to Live Stream)
Julia WOLFE: All that breathes (May Festival Commission; World Premiere)
David LANG: the national anthems
Julia WOLFE: Pretty
VAUGHAN-WILLIAMS: Dona nobis pacem
Featuring:
Stephanie Childress, conductor
Camilla Tilling, soprano
Daniel Okulitch, bass-baritone
May Festival Chorus
May Festival Youth Chorus
Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra
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May 23: Voices of the Earth
Michael GORDON: Natural History
Julia WOLFE: Anthracite Fields (BOAC All-Stars)
Featuring:
Teddy Abrams, conductor
Steiger Butte Singers of Chiloquin,Oregon
Bang on a Can All-Stars
May Festival Chorus
Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra
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May 25: Julia Wolfe’s Her Story
Julia WOLFE: Her Story
FAURÉ: Requiem
Featuring:
François López-Ferrer, conductor
Lorelei Ensemble
May Festival Chorus
Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra
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.
For 23 of our 25 years, the Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival has transformed MASS MoCA into a genre-bending musical utopia for innovative composers and performers. Over three weeks, 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 Hunter Center stage in a series of playful and heady collisions of jazz, classical, rock, and beyond.
Long Play 2024! May 3-5
“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 present 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.
Saturday May 4 at Long Play
Get the most out of Long Play festival’s Saturday lineup with a 1-day pass—on sale now!
A 1-day pass for May 4 gives you access to the thrumming sonic bliss of Jeff Mills: Tomorrow Comes the Harvest at the BAM Howard Gilman Opera House—and more than 25 other concerts, including performances by BlankFor.ms, Jason Moran, Marcus Gilmore; Immanuel Wilkins + Jason Moran; Ligeti Quartet • Anna Meredith: Nuc; Mivos Quartet with the complete string quartets of Steve Reich; Fuji|||||||||||ta, Ekmeles performs David Lang’s the little match girl passion, Sō Percussion playing Julia Wolfe, and more!
Media Workshop applications are due April 4!
Bang on a Can Media Workshop at MASS MoCA
An exploration of contemporary music criticism
and journalism
July 27-Aug 4, 2024
“One of the most meaningful and impactful experiences of my writing career
thus far.” – Maggie Molloy, workshop participant
Bang on a Can, our special guest faculty John Schaefer and Terrance McKnight, and 6 writers in the early stages of their careers will gather at MASS MoCA (the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams, MA) to explore the role of criticism and journalism in today’s dynamic contemporary music scene.
The aim of the workshop is to help writers generate a vocabulary, syntax, and context that is most useful for readers/ listeners and to make modern music and criticism more accessible, welcoming, and exciting to all audiences.
The workshop will take place during the final week of the Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival at MASS MoCA (a residency and festival for composers and performers) and will include daily meetings with faculty and daily writing assignments. Additionally, participants will be “embedded” in the festival activities, attending rehearsals, workshops, and performances, enabling more insights into the process of bringing music to the stage.
Application deadline is April 4, 2024
Sunday May 5 at Long Play
Get the most out of Long Play’s Sunday lineup with a 1-day pass—on sale now! A 1-day pass for May 5 gives you access to Steve Reich: Music for 18 Musicians Featuring Bang on a Can All-Stars and Friends at the BAM Howard Gilman Opera House—and more than 25 other concerts including performances by Deerhoof; Sam Prekop and John McEntire; Laurel Halo; claire rousay; Michael Gordon Rushes; Kuniko Kato plays Steve Reich Drumming; Rob Mazurek/Chad Taylor – Chicago Underground Duo; and others at venues throughout downtown Brooklyn.
Resonant Spaces, April 14 & 21
Over the course of 2 consecutive weekends (April 14 & 21), composer Michael Gordon and Mantra Percussion present 6 unique concerts performing Gordon’s epic, hour-long percussion sextet Timber (performed on planks of wood) across Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens in unseen reverberant places that thousands of people pass by without ever thinking about.
Feb 15 at The Jewish Museum: Bang on a Can All-Stars Play Philip Glass
At the same time that artists such as Marta Minujín and her New York Pop Art contemporaries were challenging the art establishment of the 1960s, there were also composers using ideas from popular culture to take on the institutions of serious music. With “Bang on a Can All-Stars Play Philip Glass,” a program including Glass’s iconic late 1960s works Music in 5ths and Two Pages, the All-Stars play music that reflects the time and ideals of Pop Art—experimental versus classical, high versus low—the time Minujín first broke into New York and ideals that remain evident in her work today.
This event is presented in conjunction with the current Jewish Museum exhibition Marta Minujín: Arte! Arte! Arte!
Applications for the Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival are online now!
Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival at MASS MoCA
A new music utopia for composers and performers
July 15-Aug 4, 2024
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.