photo: Courtesy of the Artist
Sunday, June 17th, 2012 at 12:00PM
World Financial center – New York, NY
This Sunday June 17th, from noon to midnight, Bang on a Can brings its 25 Year celebration back downtown with its incomparable 12-hour super-mix of boundary-busting music from around the corner and around the globe. This year’s edition features rare performances by some of the most innovative musicians of our time side-by-side with some of today’s newest music pioneers.
The Netherlands will be represented as well. Dutch composer Ruben Naeff, who currently resides in Brooklyn, NY, wrote the octet Bash!, which is “a joyful party of clashing ideas”, according to the composer. The work has been written for the NYU Contemporary Music Ensemble, led by Jonathan Haas, who has performed it already several times since its recent premiere in March 2012.
About Ruben Naeff
Ruben Naeff studied mathematics and music in Amsterdam and worked some years as an economist in Rotterdam and The Hague, after which he moved to New York City. He gained recognition with his Bètacanon for de Volkskrant, his creed for the free markets for politician Ivo Opstelten, and his tribute to the deviant voice inspired by the Faustian pact of Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte. His work has been performed in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Latvia, and across the United States. Recordings can be found on www.rubennaeff.nl.
About the Bang on a Can Marathon
“Over the course of its 12 (free!) hours, the country’s most provocative and consistently entertaining new-music event deftly mixes high modernism and classic minimalism with electronic experimentation and slipstream visitors from the pop fringe.” – The Village Voice
As artistically inclusive as it is audience-friendly, Bang on a Can’s annual 12-hour Marathon has become one of the most diverse, most open and most exciting music events in the world. “Imagine Lollapalooza advised by the ghost of John Cage,” Vanity Fair wrote. “There are other places to hear new contemporary music, but it is seldom offered with such a potent blend of intensity, authority, and abandon.”
Composers Michael Gordon, David Lang and Julia Wolfe created the first Bang on a Can marathon concert in 1987 in order to break down the barriers that separate musical communities. Their idea was simple – instead of sorting music by style or genre or venue it would be more powerful to sort music by innovation, finding the rebels in each musical community, the restless creators not content to leave conventions unchallenged. Putting all these fresh voices next to each other on one gargantuan concert would let an audience feel the excitement of innovation itself. Their first marathon featured appearances by such leading lights as Steve Reich, John Cage, Pauline Oliveros and Milton Babbitt, but most of the music was by the young and unknown. It is a formula that Bang on a Can has followed to this day.
Since then the marathons have presented an astounding range of revolutionary music and musicians, from John Cage to John Zorn, from minimalism’s godfather Terry Riley to Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore, from the 30-voice Finnish shouting choir Huutajat to the hyperintelligent brutality of Iannis Xenakis, from the political sophistication of composer/pianist Frederic Rzewski to the high energy strumming of Japan’s Kazue Sawai Koto ensemble, from the eastern minimalism of Arvo Part to the speed-of-light Bulgarian wedding band of Ivo Papasov, from the brainy rituals of Karlheinz Stockhausen to the turntable manipulations of artist Christian Marclay to the massive electric guitar symphonies of Glenn Branca. And hundreds of young and unknown composers, each doing something new and for the very first time. It is in the range of these musics that you see how big the world really is, and how big it can be.
Music by: Gregg August, Jeremy Howard Beck, Eve Beglarian, Oscar Bettison, Jonas Braasch, Martin Bresnick, Ruby Fulton, Michael Gordon, Gerard Grisey, Michael Harrison, David Lang, David T. Little, David Longstreth, Michael Lowenstern, Alvin Lucier, Thurston Moore, Ruben Naeff, Conlon Nancarrow, Pauline Oliveros, Brian Pertl, Steve Reich, Marcin Stanczyk, Akiko Ushijima, Lois V Vierk, Daniel Wohl, Julia Wolfe, Evan Ziporyn, AND MORE
Performances by: Bang on a Can All-Stars, Pauline Oliveros and the Deep Listening Band, Dither, Grand Band, The Guidonian Hand, Heavy Hands, Newspeak, NYU Contemporary Music Ensemble with Jonathan Haas, Talujon, TwoSense, Ashley Bathgate, Maya Beiser, Vicky Chow, Kris Davis, Vijay Iyer, Kaki King, Michael Lowenstern, Alvin Lucier, Todd Reynolds, AND MORE
In the past 25 years, the festival has moved all over New York City from Exit Art Gallery to the R.A.P.P. Arts Center, La Mama, the Kitchen, the Society For Ethical Culture, Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall, the Henry Street Settlement, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Symphony Space, the World Financial Center. And it has been out of town, with Bang on a Can Marathons at Mass MoCA and in London, Amsterdam and Hamburg.
What links all of these marathons are the range and diversity of the music, the passion and intensity of the performances, and the enthusiastic response of the audiences. Bang on a Can believes that the marathon concert helps to build the world we want to live in, in which new music has value, new ideas have meaning and new voices are heard.
