Bang on a Can All-Stars, at it again

Tonight brings the Bang on a Can All-Stars to Chapel Hill for a performance called "Steel Hammer," which involves chamber rock, early music and the legendary folktale "John Henry." Sounds like another cool genre-busting outing for BOAC, the latest in a series. See below for an interview from six years ago, about another of their shows here.

Bang on a Can for the Fun of it
By David Menconi, News & Observer
Nov. 7, 2003

Bang on a Can, the innovative new-music ensemble, originally took its name as a light-hearted joke. But co-founder Julia Wolfe says the group actually has had a few performances involving cans over the years.

"There was a John Cage percussion piece where some cans got whacked," Wolfe says, speaking by phone from her New York home. "And someone sang into an amplified can one year. But mostly, we chose our name because we wanted it to get rid of anything associated with the formal or elitist or cerebral-dominated 'new music world.' At first, some people were really offended at our name because they thought things should be very respectful and serious. This was very irreverent, but it's who we are."

Anybody who ever took offense at Bang on a Can's irreverence has gotten over it by now, or learned to keep it to themselves. Wolfe and her co-founders, David Lang and Michael Gordon, started Bang on a Can as a music festival in 1987. Like Hal Willner or Kronos Quartet, Bang on a Can dwells on the border between "high" and "low" art, integrating elements of rock, jazz and classical into accessible music that draws novices and experts alike to the concert hall.

From humble roots as a one-day festival of new music, Bang on a Can has grown to include a summer music school, record label and traveling performance ensemble, the Bang on a Can All-Stars -- who perform this weekend at Duke University. The shows include a reading of works by four Duke graduate student composers, and a performance of Wolfe's composition "Big, Beautiful, Dark and Scary."

But the main part of this weekend's program is a Saturday night performance of "In C," accompanied by composer Terry Riley. One of the landmark works of minimalist music, the trance-inducing "In C" consists of a series of deceptively straightforward interlocking drones. It has 53 simple musical motifs in C Major, and Riley's original instructions are as spare as the music itself: "To be performed by any group of musicians." Conceivably, even a three-piece rock band could do "In C."

"Actually, I think some have," Wolfe says. "It's a very open form, but has an amazing integrity to the structure no matter the instrumentation or who is leading it. 'In C' has a beautiful form because of how the cells of music are put together. It's kind of magic, and it's been played by so many great groups. It's almost like a new-music anthem, the thing that sparked minimalism. It was really instrumental in that movement coming into being."

Riley wrote "In C" in 1964, and you can trace a direct line from it to ambient music and Philip Glass' minimalist classical compositions. Another descendant was pop producer Brian Eno's 1978 new-age signpost, "Music for Airports," which Bang on a Can performed at Duke in 1998.

In recent years, Bang on a Can has moved closer to the mainstream, collaborating with Sonic Youth guitarist Thurston Moore and performing the 1967 Velvet Underground classic "Heroin." That's all part of the group's mission of making music more accessible to the masses. Wolfe is more qualified than most, given the populist leanings of her musical beginnings.

"I have a really eclectic background because I'm not a purely classically trained musician," Wolfe says. "Growing up, I'd listen to Led Zeppelin, Joni Mitchell, jazz, folk. Becoming a musician didn't even cross my mind until I went to college. A friend dragged me into this music class my freshman year, and that was it. I just thought, 'I've gotta do this.' So I'm a late bloomer."

Eventually, Wolfe came to Yale to study, where she met her Bang on a Can partners (one of whom, Gordon, is also her husband). The first Bang on a Can festival started as a marathon 12-hour performance in a SoHo art gallery, presenting music by John Cage, Steve Reich, Milton Babbitt and others. Despite its arty origins, however, Bang on a Can has always gone out of its way to avoid pretension and off-putting labels.

"The important thing is for people to have an experience," Wolfe says. "You don't have to have a Ph.D. in musicology to have an opinion. A presenter recently told me, 'I don't know if I can explain why or how I was affected by this music, because I don't know the jargon.' I said, 'Hey, thank God you don't know the jargon!' In the same way I can't explain the workings of an experimental film or why it was moving, I still get the experience and the artistry. That's a lot of what we're about. We always try to think about what's missing, and see if we can fill that gap. We put the music out there and hope people have a rich experience."