The Big (and Lasting) Bang

Bang on a Can—now a multi-faceted arts organization whose energy hasn’t abated in the 38 years since—had announced itself. Ever since, it has had a profound impact on a generation of composers and the wider chamber music field. While Lang, Gordon, and Wolfe each also have notable individual careers as composers, they’ve never lost their mission as a collective. According to Donald Nally, conductor of the contemporary chamber music choir The Crossing, which commissions works that address social, environmental, and political issues and has performed many of Lang’s works, the BoaC founders have long grappled with “the value of observing the suffering of others and how to either describe or transcribe that in music.” As one example, Nally cited Lang’s Little Match Girl Passion, a choral work based on the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale about a dying girl’s dreams and hopes, for which Lang won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Music. Wolfe also won a Pulitzer, in 2015, for Anthracite Fields, an oratorio about the dangerous and lonely lives of turn-of-the-20th-century Pennsylvania coal miners, which has been performed by the New York Philharmonic.

“We don’t have to be in the same room, but we do like being in the same room together,” Wolfe said, as I chatted with the three founders on a mid-November Sunday in the light-filled Lower Manhattan apartment that Wolfe and Gordon (who are married) share with their two dogs and adult daughter. Now all in their 60s —Wolfe is 66, Lang is 67, and Gordon, 68—the three all still innovate as both composers and artistic directors. In the 1980s, they occupied the same space, in terms of their field: They were writing music “that wasn’t formal like a lot of chamber music at the time, and it wasn’t improvisation,” Wolfe explained. “So out of necessity, we made a space for new chamber music in the very first year.” In his review of that first 1987 event, Holland mentioned that Bang on a Can’s festival was foreseen as an annual event. “One hopes as much,” he offered. “It makes a nice diversion from the constraints of usual concert formats.” Yet the founders weren’t actually looking years ahead at the time: In fact, they called it the First Annual Bang on a Can Festival as a private joke, assuming it would more likely be a one-off event.    

Schisms like the uptown-downtown divide that BoaC encountered in 1987 are nothing new in music, or in the arts in general. Gordon recalled a concert by the Guarneri Quartet in Miami in the early 1970s, when he was still a teenager, during which a large contingent of audience members walked out before Lutoslawski’s String Quartet (1964). Gordon was confused about the exodus. His mother explained to him that listeners had assumed they wouldn’t like the piece because it was by a living composer. He found it baffling that people would decide to hate a piece before even hearing it. “And then I still became a composer,” Gordon said, laughing now at the recollection. 

“We put pieces together that were really strong and belonged to different ideologies or not to any ideology, defying category, falling between the cracks,” Wolfe wrote of BoaC’s beginnings in the program notes for a 1995 concert, presented by Great Performers at Lincoln Center, of Bang on a Can All-Stars, an amplified ensemble the organization had introduced three years earlier. “We wanted to provide a place for new music in society. It wasn’t like other art. People knew who the new painters were, the writers, the filmmakers. But music was perceived as this really elitist thing—academic, clever, scientific, inaccessible. Nobody cared if people came to the concerts. And the music reflected that. It got so removed from life. It was important to us to find a new audience.” This required a new approach. To build their audience, they bought mailing lists and sent out postcards to people that had proven receptive to contemporary art, cinema, dance, and literature. It was a successful strategy: More than 400 people showed up for that inaugural event. 

Fittingly, for an organization that broke barriers between so-called uptown and downtown communities, the Bang on a Can Marathon migrated all over New York City, performing in large uptown institutions like Lincoln Center and downtown, experimental theaters like La MaMa.  

In 2011, nearly a quarter century after the inaugural Bevent, I attended a joyous Marathon at the Winter Garden of Manhattan’s World Financial Center. By then, the event was no longer just about juxtaposing differing aesthetics but more so focused on contrasting moods and emotions. An exuberant marching band called the Asphalt Orchestra snaked through throngs of listeners playing a new work by the Balkan composer and musician Goran Bregović and arrangements of music by Frank Zappa and Björk. This stood in vivid contrast to “Exalted,” an anguished choral work Gordon wrote in honor of his father, based on the first four words of the Kaddish (the Jewish prayer for the dead).  

Apart from the Kronos Quartet—founded in 1973 with a mission to build out the repertoire for string quartet and to commission, perform, and record music by composers including 20th century classical masters, jazz legends, and genre-crossing artists such as Laurie Anderson—the chamber music world was conservative when BoaC came along. Amplification was unheard of. From the start, Lang, Gordon, and Wolfe set out to eliminate hierarchies, and to create a format in which composers from varied backgrounds, aesthetics, genres, and ages would receive equal treatment. Famous composers weren’t given better players or more rehearsal time. Amplification was encouraged.

According to the composer Anna Clyne, who studied with Julia Wolfe as a graduate student at the Manhattan School of Music, BoaC “really smashed open boundaries. They’re inclusive of all genres of music, and the fact that the All-Stars is an amplified ensemble immediately opens up new sonorities.” For the composer Annie Gosfield, “Bang on a Can created a very open environment for chamber music at a time when many chamber music groups could be very closed-minded and sometimes even hostile to new music.” Her piece The Manufacture of Tangled Ivory (1995)—inspired by her grandmother’s work in sweatshops in the Lower East Side of Manhattan—includes a cadenza for detuned piano, prepared piano sounds, and electric guitars. Gosfield, who hadn’t then notated the piece because she always performed it with her own band—wanted to play it at a BoaC marathon. She sent a cassette tape to Lang, Gordon, and Wolfe shortly after composing the piece. They suggested that the All-Stars perform, record, and tour the piece, which they did in 1997. The subsequent publicity led to further commissions from other chamber groups for Gosfield.

According to the composer Missy Mazzoli, “The feeling I had studying composition in college was not always joy. There was a lot of bitterness. With Bang on a Can everything felt like a celebration and that was so attractive at the time.” The sense of a genuine community spirit also impressed Mazzoli. “Why would composers not help each other?” said Mazzoli. “It’s not fun to be super successful and super lonely at the same time. Supporting an ecosystem is a way of creating opportunities for yourself and your friends. Bang on a Can showed multiple generations of composers that the two are not at odds with each other or even separate from each other.”

The organization not only empowered composers to experiment but offered help with the practicalities of making a living and advancing their careers. Mazzoli, who is currently writing a work for the Metropolitan Opera, credits BoaC with teaching her how to establish an ensemble as a nonprofit and to develop her own skills as an entrepreneur. “They’ve impacted my life on so many different levels,” she said. “I felt like I could see the steps I needed to take in order get my music out there, be financially stable, and work with other people to create organizations that could sustain not only my career but help the community as well.” 

Lang, Gordon, and Wolfe take obvious pride in their efforts to broaden the horizons of young musicians, who “no longer have to choose anymore between being a pop musician or a classical musician,” said Wolfe. “People do both, and their musicianship is very broad. It’s this hybrid musician that is indicative of the chamber world that we’ve developed. Many other younger groups have come along that have been inspired by that.” BoaC indeed set a precedent that encouraged the formation of ensembles and initiatives such as the sextet Eighth Blackbird and the chamber orchestra Alarm Will Sound in 1996, the quartet Sō Percussion in 1999, and the independent label New Amsterdam Records in 2008. The BoaC universe also includes the Cantaloupe Music label, whose website declares “principles of community, artistic diversity, and stylistic freedom,” and the People’s Commissioning Fund. The latter was launched in 1997 to solicit contributions from hundreds of individual donors, which are pooled to commission new works for the All-Stars. (Donors of any amount are invited to a reception with the artists.)   

BoaC’s egalitarian ethos extends to their programming decisions, which are taken after Gordon, Lang, and Wolfe consult their four-person office staff and the six-member All Stars band. The Long Play festival—introduced in 2022, after 35 years of Marathons, as the organization’s cornerstone event—was created after one such discussion. The team realized that instead of slotting groups into 15-minute slots at a one-day marathon, they wanted to offer listeners a chance to hear more of a composers’ work and give musicians more time on stage. This idea “set a fire under everyone in our office to do this big, ridiculous and more inclusive thing,” said Lang. “Why keep this community going?” asked Wolfe. “Why bother? We’re always asking ourselves this question so we’re never on automatic. This is only worth doing if you’re staying current, reinventing, and welcoming in more voices.” The Long Play festival unfolds over three days and takes place at multiple venues. The 2024 festival focused on Steve Reich, and included the All-Stars performing their own arrangement of Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians. The 2025 festival, which will take place May 2-4 at venues in Brooklyn, NY features the world premiere of a piece by Henry Threadgill and celebrates the 90th birthday of Terry Riley with performances by musicians including Pete Townshend, the pioneering rock guitarist behind The Who’s greatest achievements.  

During a mid-December performance by the All-Stars devoted to Wolfe’s compositions, at National Sawdust, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, I sat among an enthusiastic crowd, including young composers who have studied with BoaC’s founders. Her four pieces juxtaposed a range of emotions and styles and included Reeling, her contribution to BoaC’s Field Recordings, an ongoing multimedia project that asks composers to select a recording of a voice, sound, or snippet of melody, and to base a new work upon it. For one past piece “A Wonderful Day,” composer Anna Clyne recorded the voice of a man she heard singing on a Chicago street. Other pieces have used audio samples of John Cage reading his diary, a recording of a NASA Voyager hurtling through space, and, for Lang’s Unused Swan, the sound of people sharpening knives. Wolfe, whose music often draws from folk music, chose a clip of the French-Canadian folk singer Benoit Benoit for Reeling. According to her program note, “He sings a very beautiful kind of music that’s basically the music that you make when you don’t have a fiddler and you don’t have a banjo. You just use your voice. You sing syllables in a sing-song, twirly way.” The piece starts on a genial note, with the band members snapping their fingers before building in energy to achieve a joyous cacophony.  

Right before that piece, Wolfe’s Big Beautiful Dark and Scary, which she composed in 2002 as a response to 9/11 attacks, was volatile and gripping. Wolfe and her two small children were just two blocks away when the planes flew into the Twin Towers, she explained from the stage while introducing the piece. “We can all relate to dark and scary now,” she said. The performance conveyed these unsettling emotions, and it offered further illustration of an ongoing effort by BoaC’s founders to explore social and political issues in searching ways meant to spark genuine dialogue between ideas and music. “I think there are a lot of forces which are trying to make everyone feel separate, uncooperative, and suspicious of each other, and to question what commonalities we have,” Lang had told me during our interview. “And I think when you go to a concert, what you’re really seeing is people who’ve come together, and who believe that it’s possible that they can do something together and make something beautiful together. And that is core to democracy.” 

During BoaC’s annual three-week summer chamber music festival at MASS MoCA in the Berkshires (nicknamed “Banglewood”), some 40 young international composers and musicians are mentored by and collaborate with established artists, who perform public concerts together each day. The festival culminates in the LOUD Weekend. The BoaC website describes LOUD (which runs July 31 through Aug 2, 2025) as a “fully loaded, 3-day, eclectic super-mix of minimal, experimental and electronic music.” Reviewing the 2024 edition, Michael Andor Brodeur wrote in The Washington Post that “an air of defiant joy charged every moment, like the black thunderheads that barged over the hills. If there’s a single word to describe this music, it could be one that doubles as a descriptor for the audience: curious.” 

Streaming platforms may have enabled listeners to experience ever greater ranges of music. It’s now rare to see an exodus before a performance of a new piece, as Gordon did in his teens, although such works are often still buffeted by a warhorse to appease any reactionary listeners. Bang on a Can has undoubtedly and in novel ways helped ignite listeners’ curiosity over the decades, and has done so via live performances of new music. As Gordon put it, “Our ears collectively, as a society, have changed.”