LOUD Weekend Festival at MASS MoCA is July 27-29
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!!