Ever sit around with
friends, dissecting art, politics, and your dissatisfaction with
the status quo until, at 4 A.M. and flushed
with adrenaline (and perhaps wine), you experience a revelatory
conviction that you all ought to do something about it? That,
in fact, you can change the landscape around you with the sheer
force of your own creativity? If so, you've probably noticed that
by morning that expansive feeling has vaporized, and it's coffee,
toast, and business as usual.
Or maybe not.
Meet Bang on a Can.
This unassuming threesome of tight friends did their share of talking
in New York cafés, dreaming of new musical territories, making a
list of what was missing in the world as they envisioned it. Young
composers with a passion for radical experimentation, they shared
a growing frustration with the lack of a niche—any niche—in
which to thrive. So one day in 1987 (here's the part where the rest
of us shrugged, ushered our guests out, and went to bed), fed up
with too much talk and not enough noise, violinist/composer Julia
Wolfe, composer/clarinetist David Lang (whose works have been performed
by everyone from Kronos Quartet to the New York Philharmonic), and
composer/multi-instrumentalist Michael Gordon made some reckless
phone calls, threw together a 12-hour new-music happening in the
East Village, at which they cleaned the bathroom and poured the
beer themselves, and unknowingly unleashed one of the most potent,
genre-defining collectives on the contemporary music scene.
Fifteen years later,
BOAC has crashed its way through most of that list of dreams, with
a combination of aggressive programming, fierce devotion to paradigm-shifting
music, and a group magnetism that attracts some of the most gifted
performers in the nation. In that time, the group's three codirectors—Wolfe,
Lang, and Gordon—have scored dozens of avant-garde works, from
a cello solo to string quartets to operas. The original performance
marathon has become an annual event, just one part of the group's
busy New York season. The BOAC All-Stars, a chamber ensemble, has
become an international tour-de-force, displaying a virtuosic handle
on an astonishingly diverse repertoire of contemporary works. The
People's Commissioning Fund, perhaps BOAC's freshest innovation,
empowers music enthusiasts by pooling the resources of large groups
to affordably commission new works from emerging composers. And
lest things get boring, BOAC recently launched its new record label,
Cantaloupe Music (distributed by Harmonia Mundi), which has released
five critically acclaimed CDs in its first ten months.
There's no time to catch
your breath. The next dream on BOAC's list is about to be unveiled.
In an effort to nurture modern music, the BOAC Summer Institute
of Music (the urge to call it Banglewood is premature but powerful)
will host its first residency for 20 composers, instrumentalists,
and conductors, from July 12 to 28, at the Massachusetts Museum
of Contemporary Art (Mass MoCA). Not surprisingly, Lang, Gordon,
and Wolfe are passionate about offering a summer festival unlike
any other, where young people who defy neat musical categories will
meet and find inspiration among kindred spirits. "When you grow
up interested in experimental culture," says Lang, "you're led to
believe—in all parts of your educationÑthat you're a freak.
We met each other by accident! We're the people the mainstream music
world didn't know what to do with. There should be a place for people
like us to go."
Composer Steve Reich,
conductor Brad Lubman, and bassist Joseph Carver will join BOAC
and the All-Stars as this year's faculty at an Institute that will
include traditional elements like chamber music coaching, but will
be steeped in such adventurous teaching approaches as Mark Stewart's
instrument-building workshop, and the Balinese gamelan that Evan
Ziporyn will offer. Dialog will reign supreme. "Composers and performers
don't talk!" complains Wolfe, and a vital aspect of the Institute
will be talking about music, and even "talking about how to talk
about music," adds Gordon, noting the typical breakdown in language
that occurs when an avant-garde composer tries to describe what
she does for a living. The fact that Mass MoCA is a world-class
site for contemporary art, but not a place visitors expect to hear
music, is a boon in the eyes of the BOAC triad, who hope to surprise
MoCA-goers with daily gallery performances. "The art world is already
set up to say, 'Here are these new and strange and dangerous ideas,
and here are people who are willing to talk about them and think
about them and incorporate them into their lives,'" says Lang. "Our
mission has always been to put music in a place where people can
actually 'get it.' I think this is one of those places."
