In Industry. Bang on a Can and New Music in the Marketplace, William Robin devotes considerable space to discussion of new music festivals. For Michael Gordon, David Lang, and Julia Wolfe, it was a dissatisfaction with the state of new music festivals that prompted them to start their Bang on a Can Marathon, which grew into the ongoing project of Bang on a Can, which still includes festivals as its main component.
The question is, why festivals? Why have music festivals become kind of the default way that new music gets premiered? I think there are two reasons. First is that new music festivals are a little like any other kind of festival. They bring together a variety of practitioners and fans in one place. Everyone who is there is an interested party, and a festival is kind of a buffet where one can partake of a wide variety of performances. The other is practical. One could hire a symphony orchestra to play new music compositions; orchestras are typically composed of 80-odd highly-trained classical musicians who are capable of handling the often difficult scores of contemporary composers. They could conceivably play anything, and break off into smaller ensembles depending on the demands of a particular composition. But orchestras are extremely expensive. The festival format permits one to build ad hoc ensembles to play each piece.
I want to discuss a variety of new music festivals that preceded Bang on a Can, and some festivals that are direct competitors with Bang on a Can.
The New York Avant Garde Festival
The New York Avant Garde Festival ran from 1964 to 1980. There were 15 of these festivals in all, organized by cellist Charlotte Moorman. All of my information about them comes from one source, Topless Cellist: The Improbable Life of Charlotte Moorman by Joan Rothfuss, which I highly recommend. Moorman was a conservatory-trained musician, but apparently not good enough to be hired by a major symphony orchestra. But in the early ‘60s, Moorman met people involved in the musical avant garde. Perhaps most important, she met Norman Seaman, an impresario who had booked 115 events in New York City in 1960 and 1961. He knew how to contact concert halls, coffee houses, theaters, etc., how to fill seats, how to get events reviewed in the press, and everything you would need to know to put on events. Moorman learned all this from him. (They don’t teach this in the conservatory. And new music entrepreneurs like Bang on a Can usually have to figure it out themselves.)
Moorman’s first new music concert was a recital at Town Hall by her colleague, Kenji Kobayashi. Through Kobayashi, Moorman got to know his then wife, Yoko Ono, who introduced Moorman to the new music world. That combined with what she learned from Seaman gave her the tools to host a series of totally insane festivals, that combined new music and performance art. The first festival of the Avant Garde was held in 1964 at Judson Hall. It included performances by various artists associated with Fluxus, including George Brecht and Nam June Paik, and many cutting-edge composers: Luciano Berio, John Cage, Gyögy Ligeti, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Edgard Varése, Iannis Xenakis, etc. The next year it expanded to include film and dance.
Charlotte Moorman and Yoko Ono in 1973 (photo by Tyrone Dukes for the New York Times)
Moorman was quite innovative when it came to venues. The 1967 festival was performed on the Staten Island Ferry, and 1968’s was performed as a parade down Central Park West Drive. Her friendship with Ono turned out to be propitious, since she soon married a Beatle and was able to finance the New York Avant Garde Festival for several years. Moorman was both an able administrator and a daring performer.
Why isn’t the New York Avant Garde Festival still a thing? Moorman developed breast cancer in 1979, has a mastectomy, put on the 1980 festival, then found a lump in her remaining breast. She battled the cancer throughout the 80s and died in 1991. This is important—to have someone enthusiastic about the avant garde while also a capable administrator and impresario is a small miracle—what happens when that person exits the scene?
New Music America
New Music America was a nomadic festival that started in 1979—just the right moment to take over from the New York Avant Garde Festival. It continued some of the vibe as the Avant Garde Festival—it was downtown music. The first New Music America, then called New Music, New York, featured such well-known downtown composer/musicians as Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Meredith Monk in a nine-day festival at the Kitchen, a performance space. Some of the downtown crowd saw this as an institutionalization of “downtown.” But it had all the benefits of a festival as described above. It differed from the subsequent Bang on a Can Festivals in that it sprawled over many nights and venues. Their 1989 festival in New York had almost 100 events spread out over 23 locations. In 1982, New York Times critic John Rockwell described New Music America is as “post-literate avant gardism that has sprung up in the electronic era—and era in which the recording studio and electronics provide the ‘permanent’ documentation that written notation used to provide.” This tended to exclude music from a classical tradition, focusing instead on composer/performers and improvisation.
New Music America’s nomadic nature was one of its strengths. It took the downtown music ethos and spread it far and wide. There were festivals in San Francisco (1981), Chicago (1982), Washington, D.C. (1983), Hartford, Connecticut (1984), Los Angeles (1985), Houston (1986), Philadelphia (1987), Miami (1988), returning to New York (1989) and ending in Montreal in 1990. In the end, the economy killed it off.
But these festivals in different cities had an effect. I want to look at the Houston edition of New Music America because there is an incredible first-person account of it by Michael Galbreth, whom some readers will know as half of the Art Guys, a Fluxus-influenced duo consisting of Galbreth and Jack Massing. Galbreth wrote, “I played a role in the history of New Music America and the New Music Alliance. I organized the 8th annual New Music America festival that landed in Houston in 1986, and I served as the President of the New Music Alliance for four years (1986 to 1989). My association with New Music America was among the most consequential of my early years as an artist. [. . .] At that time, most of my work was devoted to experimental music. I had presented work at Lawndale, DiverseWorks, various other alternative spaces, and on KPFT radio. I was among a tiny handful of Houston practitioners of this esoteric form of music. To work with some of the world's greatest composers, many of whose work I revered, would be the chance of a lifetime.”
Just like previous New Music America Festivals, the Houston festival sprawled out over many venues. Galbreth wrote that it featured “50 events at almost as many venues and locations.” And for Galbreth, “Organizing New Music America was a crash course in all aspects of arts administration.” I was in Houston then, but somehow the existence of New Music America washed over my callow, oblivious younger self.
Horizons
The Horizons festival is important because it was Gordon, Lang and Wolfe’s dissatisfaction with it that helped inspire Bang on a Can. There were only three Horizons festivals; the first in 1983, then one in 1984 an the last one in 1986. It was an outgrowth of an already existing program called Meet the Composer. Meet the Composer was a program started by composer John Duffy to try to raise the profile of the profession and help composers earn a living from their work. (Excluding composers working in the entertainment industry, composers largely couldn’t make a living from composing new music and were therefore ensconced in the ivory towers of academe.)
“‘Put into one sentence: Meet the Composer is helping create a marketplace for today’s composers,’ Duffy wrote in a 1981 essay. Praising an earlier history of composers ‘as craftsman/artists who functioned in society’ such as Bach, Beethoven, and Puccini, he stated that Meet the Composer would seek to return composers to their former status, ‘to help create an environment for our composers to work and flourish in, to help them contribute to our society.’”1 As part of its mission, Meet the Composer established a program of composers-in-residence with important symphony orchestras. It is kind of astonishing that this didn’t exist widely before then.
Jacob Druckman was the composer-in-residence with the New York Philharmonic. He and music director Zubin Mehta cooked up the idea of a festival of new music called Horizons. Keep in mind that at the time, concert goers to major symphony orchestras were hostile toward “new music”. You bought season tickets to the symphony to hear Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms, not some dissonant music by an egghead composer/mathematician who doesn’t even care if you like the music or not. This is still the norm for major symphonies and operas in the U.S.
Their plan to overcome this reactionary reluctance on the part of their patrons was to brand it as “the new Romanticism”. David Lang was an assistant to Druckman on the ’84 and ’86 festivals. And as I mentioned above, composers had access to an orchestra full of many of the world’s best musicians. But “new romanticism” was frequently “neo-romanticism,” a revival of 19th century-style tonal music.
“A letter to [Village Voice critic, Gregory] Sandow printed in the Voice, signed ‘Charles Ruggles, Brooklyn Heights,’ revealed that ‘Those of us who booed David Del Tredici at the Philharmonic were not crying over the lost values of serialism.’ Describing the work of Del Tredici as ‘hackneyed,’ the writer confronted the entire premise of the festival, noting that it ‘bore a weird resemblance to a proceeding one might expect to find during a totalitarian cultural purge, as composer after composer stood before the audience, admitting shamefacedly to past errors in their choice of aesthetic, but assuring the stern but understanding crowd that they had seen the light.’ Based on their chosen pen name—a portmanteau combining Charles Ives and Carl Ruggles—the author clearly valued neither the academic avant-garde nor the new Romantics, but the American maverick experimental tradition. [. . .] It should not be surprising, then, that the writer of this letter was [. . .] the composer and clarinetist Evan Ziporyn.”2 Ziporyn would go on to compose many works performed in Bang on a Can Marathons.
Bang on a Can
As I mentioned in my previous Bang on a Can post, the first Bang on a Can festival was in 1987. About 400 people showed up at various points during the ten-hour marathon, which included 28 different pieces of music, mostly by living composers. (The sole dead white European on the bill was Stravinsky.) Each of the three founders had a piece in the program. (After all, what’s the point of putting together a festival if you can’t participate?) They were trying to bridge uptown and downtown music. Their problem is that if you went uptown, you heard one kind of music and downtown, a different type of music. Gordon, Wolfe and Lang wanted their taste in music to be to entrance requirement into a festival.
Julia Wolfe (photo by Peter Serling)
“‘If you went to hear Speculum Musicae, there would be one composer doing great stuff in an ugly language, and the others were bad composers working in the same ugly language,’ Lang told Village Voice critic Kyle Gann in 1993. ‘Same thing Downtown: there’d be a free, sonic piece by a really good composer and a really bad sonic piece right behind it. Pieces were being grouped by ideology, not quality.’”3
Additionally, big-name composers weren’t treated better than unknown composers. “‘We had a little manifesto,’ Wolfe recalled in 2016. ‘Whether it was written down or not I don’t know. Every piece was treated the same: if you were the big shot, it’s not like you got more rehearsal time than the person who’s young and fresh out of school.’ Bang on a Can was, in many ways, charting a familiar path: young avant-gardists who, fed up with the status quo, wanted to remold the world in their own image.” 4
There was a sense of fairness and openness, but it was still a dictatorship of three. Still, that first concert had been a success. A lot of people had shown up given the demands the music (and the format) placed on the audience. The next question was would this be a one-off or would they be able to keep it going? Gordon, Lang and Wolfe were not only ambitious composers and impresarios, they taught themselves to be capable administrators (just as Charlotte Moorman had). I will discuss their administration, which includes booking, fundraising, and marketing and a million other tasks that don’t necessarily come naturally to artists, in a future post. But suffice it to say, they started in 1987 and are still going strong today. Wolfe, Lang and Gordon are still the artistic directors, but now they have a staff of professionals working for Bang on a Can. But they will eventually not be running Bang on a Can. Gordon and Wolfe are 67 years old, and Lang is 68. I wonder if they have made succession plans. That is the problem when you have a festival run by a visionary founder: what happens when the founder(s) retire or die?
BAM Next Wave Festival
The Brooklyn Academy of Music is an institution that has existed since 1861. It was a music performance space for most of its history (although it also hosted other events). In the ‘60s, new leadership pushed BAM towards a more artistically progressive stance. Artists who had works premiered there included Philip Glass, Trisha Brown, Peter Brook, Pina Bausch, Merce Cunningham, Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company, Laurie Anderson, Lee Breuer, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Steve Reich, Mark Morris, Robert Wilson, Peter Sellars, and many others. The BAM Next Wave Festival was founded in 1983 and has been going ever since. Unlike Bang on a Can, BAM Next Wave is not all music. It combines music, theater, film, and dance. One thing that stands out as one looks at previous iterations of the festival is that they use it to stage major work—lengthy theatrical and operatic works. Indeed, the Bang on a Can directors have premiered major works there; for example, David Lang’s one-act opera, The Loser, in 2018, Michael Gordon’s percussion piece, Timber, in 2012, and the premiere of Julia Wolfe’s Steel Hammer. Frequent Bang on a Can participant Evan Ziporyn, premiered his opera A House in Bali in 2010, which was performed by the Bang on a Can All-Stars and a 16-member gamelan orchestra. As far as I can tell, there was no Next Wave festival in 2020 or 2021. At least I can’t find any record. Those versions of the festival may have been a victim of the COVID epidemic. The 2021 season at the Brooklyn Academy of Music was held outdoors and online.
One thing that BAM had that other festivals don’t have is a permanent location. BAM has three. Finding new venues has been an ongoing challenge for Bang on a Can. That isn’t a worry for BAM. Perhaps this is the reason the festivals could go on for so many weeks. Bang on a Can, when they secure a venue, use it for a one-day marathon. I think this might be why BAM can focus on large-scale theatrical works.
Time:Spans
The most recent new music festival I want to mention is Time:Spans. It has been putting on large, multi-night festivals since 2015. Their website describes their mission like this: “The TIME SPANS festival is dedicated to the presentation of primarily twenty-first century music.” OK, that’s not very controversial mission for a festival of new music. It is named after an orchestral piece by composer Earle Brown (1926-2002). The festival is produced by the Earle Brown Music Foundation Charitable Trust. Who was Earle Brown? He was a quintessential downtown composer, friends with John Cage and Morton Feldman, a pioneer in what is called “graphic notation.” The fact that he has a 501(c) 3 Private Foundation suggests that Brown died with money in the bank. His foundation at least has enough money to have run a music festival for seven years. I would love to see the financials of the Earle Brown Trust, but it is not in GuideStar (my go-to for looking up the tax forms for nonprofits). I think perhaps that non-profits and foundations have different reporting requirements.
In any case, perhaps because the festival is of such recent vintage, it is easy to see what they’ve done in seven years. They have it all on their website. The reason I mention Time:Spans in the first place is because I happened to attend the 2019 festival. It was held in New York over the course of the summer, and I was in town for two weeks in August. I bought a season pass and went to several of the shows. One of the concerts I saw I would classify as one of the best I have ever seen. It was the rock band Deerhoof playing a series of mashup songs based on TV show themes, jazz and 20th century classical music. It obviously shouldn’t have worked, but I was electrified by their playing. Beyond that, I saw shows featuring the Talia Ensemble, consisting of 19 classically trained musicians. A lot of the music I saw was very percussion heavy—one night, the ensemble had two marimbas on stage at once. I particularly enjoyed hearing music by Montreal-based composer Ana Sokolović. It was challenging, but enjoyable.
Ana Sokolović photgraphed by André Parmentier
Julia Wolfe was meant to have a piece played at Time:Spans 2020, but the festival was cancelled. Fucking Covid.
In future posts on Bang on a Can, I will discuss a little of the mechanics of administration and I want to discuss a collaborative opera by the three founders, Wolfe, Lang, and Gordon, called The Carbon Copy Building, based on a libretto by cartoonist Ben Katchor.
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Industry: Bang on a Can and New Music in the Marketplace p. 15, William Rubin
Industry: Bang on a Can and New Music in the Marketplace p. 64, William Rubin
Industry: Bang on a Can and New Music in the Marketplace p. 79, William Rubin
Industry: Bang on a Can and New Music in the Marketplace p. 76, William Rubin