Sequenza21/The Contemporary Classical Music Weekly

I Know You Wanna Hit That

I have been wanting to go to the Bang on a Can Marathon for several years, but it was always in New York and I was always not, and it was always on a date when traveling wouldn't work out. Well, as a new New Yorker I was finally able to attend this year, and this past Sunday’s event did not disappoint. Bang on a Can began in 1987 with the first ever BoaC Marathon -- according to the program archived at the BoaC website, the program started at 2:00 PM on May 10th with Phil Niblock's "Held Tones." and they can't have begun the final piece, John Cage's "Ryoanji," until well after midnight. This was the same concert at which Milton Babbitt's "Vision and Prayer" and Steve Reich's "Four Organs" were played back-to-back and, according to Michael Gordon, ". . .Milton Babbitt came in and he talked, and his piece was played and there was this huge ovation. And then he walked out the back because he didn't want to hear Steve Reich's piece. [laughs] Steve Reich, who did not want to hear Milton's piece and had been waiting outside the building until it was over came in, and then he talked, and there was a huge ovation and then Steve left. And they didn't ever meet." Michael Gordon, David Lang, and Julia Wolfe have organized a Marathon almost every year since, and the festival has had stints at the R.A.P.P. Arts Center, Alice Tully Hall, and BAM, among other venues.

This year's Marathon was at the World Financial Center's "Winter Garden," and as part of the River to River Festival it was free for the first time ever. The Winter Garden turned out to be in almost all respects an ideal location -- it's a huge atrium with two rows of palm trees running like columns through the middle, a 5 or 6 story high ceiling, and a gigantic curved staircase on one end, opposite the temporary stage. The only problem was the natural reverberation of the hall. Close to the stage it wasn't a problem, and many pieces on the program weren't harmed by excessive reverb, but much of the detail was lost in, say, the arrangement for two drum kits of Steve Reich's "Music For Pieces of Wood," especially from the balcony where I was sitting at the time.

With an eleven-hour concert, it would be foolish of me to attempt to review every piece, and my occasional forays out into the world to find food and my having had to depart after Michael Gordon's "Weather 1" mean that I didn't hear everything anyway. I will say generally that at most new-music concerts I like maybe 20% of the music and am uninterested in or dislike 80%, and on Sunday those figures were reversed. A few highlights from among the music that I did hear:

Gamelan Galak Tika (founded by Evan Zipporyn and based at MIT, where "we build robots in our spare time. . . actually, we really do.") teamed up with the Manhattan School of Music's "Tactus" ensemble to play Zipporyn's "Ngaben." The marriage of the Gamelan and the Western instruments was quite successful, and the piece itself was beautiful.

The Bang on a Can All-Stars played, among other things, an arrangement of Paul Lansky's originally electronic "As is for. . ." which features a recitation of the spellings of five-letter words beginning with "A" over the music. Some people sitting near me seemed not to like the spoken portion, and I can appreciate why they might have found it cheezy, but I didn't mind it and the music was fabulous, especially the variations-on-a-theme cello line.

A duo from Tuva called "Yat Kha" played an impressive set. Tuva is famous for its throat singers, men who can sing an octave or more below the range of a normal Bass singer, and one of these guys did it very impressively (the other guy had a beautiful high tenor voice). The second piece on their set was a traditional Scottish folk song "Wild Mountain Thyme," and the fourth was a rendition of Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart Again." Both were sung about two octaves below where I'm used to hearing them sung. It was as if the great Slovenian industrial band Laibach were a folk act.

The last piece I heard was Michael Gordon's "Weather One" for strings, and it was magnificent. It clearly comes out of the Minimalist/Post-Minimalist tradition, but rather than the stereotypical same-thing-over-and-over of, say, Philip Glass's 3rd Symphony (which I love, and which I was reminded of) where you often know what will come next, it was _approximately_ the same thing followed by _approximately_ the same thing. I found myself trying and failing again and again to learn what seemed like a cell of an ostinato -- I could chase it but I could never catch up for more than a measure or so. Delightful technical inscrutability aside, it also simply spent most of its duration rocking out.

And those were merely the highlights from my taste among the music that I heard. With a little luck, next year it will be free again, and you won't have any excuse for missing it. Plus, next year will be the 20th anniversary -- I'm hoping for a 20 hour Marathon.

posted by Galen H. Brown 6/05/2006