Banging on cans

A musical marathon that breaks down barriers among musical styles is coming to town, a spectacle that was born in New York City.

“There was a whole new generation of composers who didn’t fit in anywhere. We wanted to provide a place for new music in society,” explains Julia Wolfe, composer and cofounder of Bang on a Can, a series of concerts that started in New York in the late 1980s.

“Music was perceived as this elitist thing—academic, clever, scientific, inaccessible. Nobody cared if people came to the concerts, and the music reflected that.”

With fellow musicians David Lang and Michael Gordon, the first Bang on a Can Music Festival was launched in a SoHo art gallery, showcasing cutting-edge work that dared to cross the boundaries between academic composition and the avant-garde edge of popular music.

These new pieces posed new challenges for the performer, requiring a core group of musicians with the talent and vision to pull them off. Hence, the Bang on a Can All-Stars was born.

“It is part rock band and part amplified chamber group,” Executive Director Kenny Savelson explains. “Constructed specifically to blur the lines between classical and pop ensembles, the line-up was chosen to give voice to a huge range of musics and styles, and the players have the musical backgrounds and abilities to match.”

To combat the staid, elitist nature of new music concerts, the All-Stars started staging marathon concerts, running from 10 to 26 hours, where listeners can either traipse in and out or stay in the non-stop stream of music.

“For the first time you could go hear some of the most innovative new music being composed today by younger artists back-to-back with a renegade rock band and an occasional homage to a living master such as Steve Reich, Cecil Taylor—and the possibility that all of these living artists might come to be in the same room together…and they all showed up,” Savelson explains.

For the Baton Rouge marathon, Savelson promises it will be a tremendous experience. The All-Stars will feature clarinetist-composer Don Byron and the Czech avant-folk gypsy singer-violinist Iva Bittová. “We’ll be presenting some of our newest repertoire by Julia Wolfe, who will be in residence at LSU during the week along with a number of other pieces we’ve recently commissioned, likely to include a new piece by Alvin Lucier, maybe a piece by Thurston Moore of the New York rock band Sonic Youth,” Savelson says. “And we’ll feature work by a selection of locally based composers and performers as well.”

As for how long the average listener can last in a concert like this, Savelson says, “You’d be surprised how many people just sit and listen for hours and hours. There is a point where you’ve heard so much that your standard way of listening, of drawing distinctions between the styles of music being performed, melts away and this is a uniquely liberating way to hear a concert. Once you’ve come that far, why go?!” bangonacan.org/all_stars