LOUD Weekend celebrates culmination of 20th year of the Bang on A Can Summer Music Festival at Mass MoCA

NORTH ADAMS — The sounds of Mass MoCA are legion. Birdcalls echo between buildings, bells toll from an audio installation. Rock music drifts from The Chalet courtyard pub, event carts rattle across walkways, a police siren wails from nearby city streets.

If You Go

What: Bang on a Can: LOUD Weekend

With: Jim Jarmusch, Phil Kline, L’Rain, Jeffrey Brooks, George Crumb, Igor Stravinsky, Steven Schick, Florent Ghys, Bang on a Can All-Stars and more.

Where: Mass MoCA, 1040 Mass MoCA Way, North Adams

When: July 28 – 30 

Tickets: $39, Thursday; $49, Friday; $59, Saturday. Three-day pass: $109 in advance; $129 week of; $199 preferred access.

Complete schedule and information: 413-662-2111, massmoca.org 

And for one glorious weekend each year for the past two decades, adventurous new art music fills the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art campus at the culmination of Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival, a professional development program led by today’s pioneers of experimental music for a select group of young composers and performers.

Over three days from July 28 to 30, LOUD Weekend brings together legendary and emerging composers, classic works and new pieces, international voices, boundary-breaking performers, seasoned ensembles and talented young musicians, in a mind-expanding mix of music, film and, new this year, dance.

Spearheading this expansive creativity are acclaimed composers and Bang on a Can co-founders David Lang, Julia Wolfe and Michael Gordon. With two Pulitzer Prizes and an Oscar nomination between them, the trio talked about the festival and its origins in a sunny Mass MoCA courtyard.

Gordon shared a few LOUD Weekend highlights.

“The opening event on July 28 is Julie’s piece ‘Steel Hammer,’ played by Bang on a Can All-Stars with three guest singers. It tells the story of the John Henry legend in all its conflicting versions, and deconstructs the text. It features folk instruments mountain dulcimer, banjo, bones, and Mark Stewart, who’s a local hero, clogs. It’s terrific,” he said.

“The second opening concert is composer Phil Kline and director Jim Jarmusch, friends [who] played in a high school band together. Jim has curated an evening of early films from the Thomas Edison collection, and they’ll play guitars to them.

“There’s a tribute to great American composer George Crumb, who just passed away, a mini-fest of four pieces [including] ‘Black Angels,’ his reaction to the Vietnam war.”

He added, “Phil Kline’s ‘Zippo Songs’ with Theo Bleckmann is also anti-war, poems soldiers wrote on their lighters in Vietnam.”

Last year’s winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Music, Cuban-born composer Tania León will attend, Gordon said.

“She’s an incredible spirit,” Wolfe said, “an amazing communicator about music and supporter of younger artists.”

“It’s not Bang on a Can if we don’t do Steve Reich,” Gordon said. Guitarist Mark Stewart performs “Electric Counterpoint,” while Reich’s string quartet, “Different Trains” juxtaposes recordings from Reich’s own cross-country train trips with people talking about trains headed for concentration camps.

“It’s very moving and powerful,” Lang noted.

Bang On A Can artistic directors and co-founders David Lang, Michael Gordon and Julia Wolfe first brought Bang On A Can to Mass MoCA in 2000. The first Bang On A Can Summer Music Festival was held in 2002.

PHOTO PROVIDED BY PETER STERLING

Another annual highlight is world premieres by composer Fellows. “And we also have this really great singer songwriter from New York, L’Rain, who sings beautiful ambient meditative music.”

Lang’s “death speaks” is a new song cycle using text from Schubert songs where Death speaks, Gordon explained.

“It’s very calming,” Lang offered.

Gordon’s “Field of Vision,” for 36 percussionists in Courtyard D, “is going to sound amazing,” he said, “I’m using industrial metals, construction material, automobile parts, with bass drums and gongs.”

Jewish Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth has written a “massive live score” for a 1920s silent film called ‘Die Stadt ohne Juden’ (The City Without Jews), that imagined all Jews were expelled from the country.

And Bang on a Can All-Stars will premiere CAN DANCE, nine filmed dance works accompanied by newly-commissioned live compositions.

“A lot of things are sprinkled in, that push this music in different directions,” Lang added.

HOW IT ALL BEGAN

He took a moment to visit Bang on a Can’s roots.

“In 1977 Michael and I met at Aspen Music Festival. After Yale, we saw each other every day, we had a lot of time to sit and look at the world around us. And we started complaining about life,” Lang said. 

“If you could change the way music was presented, the way audiences and music interact, the way music relates to other disciplines, what would you change? We realized we had to do something, so we put on a concert. The format was unlike anything we knew: putting pieces next each other that were never put next to each other before, an audience unique to this kind of experience, someplace where you wouldn’t compare it to other concerts. It was about making the music we love come alive.”

Inspired by an all-night event of Yale professor Martin Bresnick, in 1987 they staged a 12-hour concert in a Soho art gallery in Manhattan.

“People are used to seeing confrontational and edgy new art, accepting new things are a risk, and that risk has value,” Lang said. “Putting music [there] gets that message across.”

They launched the “First Annual Bang on a Can Festival” with 30 works by mostly unknown composers, plus a few famous ones.

“We didn’t think we’d do it more than once,” Lang admitted.

Titled from a promotional phrase Wolfe coined — just a bunch of composers banging on a can — “once we used the name, it stuck,” she noted.

A friend from Williamstown told Lang someone was trying to turn a nearby old mill into an art institution.

“We had talked about [starting] a little school for musicians to meet and work together,” Lang recalled. “Aspen was really useful, but there wasn’t a summer program for the music we like.”

Wolfe picks up the story. “David took a hard-hat walk through this building with [founding Mass MoCA director] Joe Thompson. Joe said, could you imagine doing music here?”

Lang could, and they shook hands on it.

“It was really exciting, building something like this,” Wolfe continued.

In 2000, they cemented the relationship with a performance of “Carbon Copy Building” composed by Lang, Wolfe and Gordon; it attracted 200 people. Twenty years later, a sold-out six-hour Bang on a Can marathon drew 700 listeners.

SUMMER MUSIC FESTIVAL BEGINS AT MASS MOCA

There were 25 Fellows at the first three-week Summer Music Festival in 2002, informally called “Banglewood” in a nod to the famed festival to the south.

‘We thought, ‘this is what we’re about, bringing together these adventurous spirits,’” Wolfe said. “They’re like the crazy person at conservatory or university, they come here and meet each other and magic happens. It’s about living music.”

They accept up to 45 Fellows, “all super high-level performers,” Wolfe said. Each year features a unique mix of instruments.

“They come from Australia, Eastern Europe, Central Asia, an amazing international meeting of minds from very different countries and cultural worlds.”

Fellows from Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan often played traditional instruments.

This year’s complement hails from Denmark, Iceland, Cyprus, Greece, Hungary, Japan, Israel, Australia, Canada — and New York.

Applications have grown exponentially. This year, 200 applied for six composition spots, perhaps the biggest pool yet, Wolfe said.

Besides their own instruments, Fellows have engaged in African drumming and Indonesian Gamelan.

“We stress how big and broad music can be,” Wolfe said. “They use their bodies, rhythm is internalized, as opposed to written on the page. We want to bring many ways of making music into the conversation — Mark Stewart building instruments, Gregg August leading Latin music. It’s a joyful, fun experience.”

More than 700 early career musicians and composers have participated over the years, Wolfe said, most aged late 20s to late 30s.

“They’re at the beginning of this life of making wild and crazy new music. They meet here, and many have formed festivals, ensembles, got married.”

There are Bang on a Can babies, Lang noted.

The festival is directed by Philippa Thompson, “an amazing leader,” Wolfe acknowledged.

“Traditionally we have two concerts a day, at lunchtime curated by Fellows and afternoon with faculty. For years we ended with a six-hour marathon, and everybody performed. We brought in a guest [such as Steve Reich, Meredith Monk] and sometimes performers.”

In 2019 they shifted to LOUD Weekend, a bigger public presentation.

They wanted to invite other groups, and do projects with longer set-up times, Gordon explained. “It’s basically a non-stop festival of many concerts. But sometimes they happen at the same time, and you can’t be at every one of them.”

People experience the festival in many ways, he noted. Some go to things they recognize and then visit the galleries and have dinner or a beer; others want to go to every single thing, especially things they’ve never heard of.

“You see the show you want to see, and it’s different from [what] everybody else sees,” Lang said. “You plot your own adventure.”

“The world is full of music, and there’s more music than you can hear. With LOUD Weekend, celebrate what you Can hear.”

IF YOU GO

What: Bang on a Can: Loud Weekend

With: Jim Jarmusch, Phil Kline, L’Rain, Jeffrey Brooks, George Crumb, Igor Stravinsky, Steven Schick, Florent Ghys, Bang on a Can All-Stars and more.

Where: Mass MoCA, 1040 Mass MoCA Way, North Adams

When: July 28 – 30 

Tickets: $39, Thursday; $49, Friday; $59, Saturday. Three-day pass: $109 in advance; $129 week of; $199 preferred access.

Complete schedule and information: 413-662-2111, massmoca.org