LOUD Weekend at Mass MoCA

Bang on a Can and Mass MoCA present LOUD Weekend, a fully loaded eclectic super-mix of minimal, experimental, and electronic music, across three days and all through the museum’s campus. A lineup of new music masters is in the works.

LOUD Weekend at Mass MoCA concludes the 20th annual Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival at Mass MoCA, a professional development program led by today’s pioneers of experimental music for young composers and performers selected from an international applicant pool, which runs from July 11 to 27.

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Highlights of the 2022 Bang on a Can LOUD Weekend at Mass MoCA include:

• Bang on a Can All-Stars perform the world premiere-preview of ‘Dance Party’ – live music and dance on film. Nine choreographers have been commissioned to create dance/films to music written for and performed by the Bang on a Can All-Stars: Josue Collado Fregoso: Joie de Vivre with Marrissa, a film by Pioneer Winter; Michael Gordon: July (selections) for solo piano with film by Brian Brooks; Hildur Gudnadottir: Fear of Dog, a film by Andros Zins-Browne; David Lang: interstate with film by Annie-B Parson; Qasim Naqvi: Featureless with film by Kyle Marshall; Angelica Negron: Tursistas with Kookik, a film by Keerati Jinakunwiphat; Henry Threadgill: With or Without Card with film by Rena Butler; Trevor Weston: Dig it with The Burglar, a film by Jerron Herman; Julia Wolfe: Into the clouds with film by Andrea Miller.
• World-renowned filmmaker and guitarist Jim Jarmusch and composer-guitarist Phil Kline convene a supersonic electric guitar duo, performing a spectacular live soundtrack with Thomas Edison films chosen by Jarmusch.
• Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth’s newly composed score Die Stadt ohne Juden (“The City without Jews”) to accompany Hans Karl Breslauer’s 1924 silent film that was lost for nearly a century.

• The Bang on a Can All-Stars perform Julia Wolfe’s Steel Hammer. Based on hearsay, recollection, and tall tales, Wolfe retells the classic American Ballad of John Henry with exquisite vocals complemented by mountain dulcimer, banjo, bones, clogging and more. Sung by the charismatic trio Molly Netter, Sonya Headlam & Rebecca L. Hargrove.

• Tania León’s Rítmicas, drawing on the energetic grooves of Son and Guaguancó rhythms from the composer’s native Cuba.
• Field of Vision: Michael Gordon’s brand new large-scale site-specific ritual/spectacle featuring 36 percussionists from the University of Michigan Percussion Ensemble & Sō Percussion Summer Institute, directed by Doug Perkins.

• George Crumb Mini-Fest! Crumb broke into our national consciousness with his powerful protest to the Vietnam War, Black Angels, and captured the music of imaginary worlds with Ancient Voices of Children, Eleven Echoes of Autumn, and Vox Balaenae.

• An iconic Steve Reich double bill: the ground-breaking string quartet Different Trains and one of Reich’s most beloved works, Electric Counterpoint, performed by Bang on a Can guitarist Mark Stewart.

• Brooklyn-based songwriter-sound artist-multi-instrumentalist L’Rain (aka Taja Cheek) whose songs enigmatically blend spiritual music, tape loops, pop and R&B.

• Legendary, composer, trombonist, and scholar George Lewis drew from percussion-hero Steven Schick’s journal documenting his 700-mile walk from the US-Mexico border to San Francisco to create Soundlines: A Dreaming Track.

• David Lang took every setting of Death speaking in the entire catalog of Schubert songs and created an intimate, haunting, and strangely life-affirming post-Schubertian song cycle death speaks.

• Inspiringly inventive composer-producer-keyboard experimentalist Yuka Honda performs a solo set.

• Phil Kline’s Zippo Songs – Another anti-war masterpiece, based on the poetry American GIs inscribed on their lighters in Vietnam. Featuring Theo Bleckmann, vocal.

• A duo set featuring electronic composer-performer Ty Braxton and drummer Gregg Fox (Liturgy, Ben Frost).

• The return of composer Jeffrey Brooks to LOUD Weekend – with the world premiere of Stein-o-caster for an ingeniously amplified piano played with paint brushes.

• Composer Phil Kline’s outdoor experiential scavenger-hunt/installation for 24 boomboxes, last words before vanishing from the face of the earth.

• Percussion legend Steven Schick performs Thought Sectors, a new work by composer Sarah Hennies.
• Robert Honstein enhances a solo vibraphone with tin foil and cardboard, creating a meditative ringing world in An Economy of Means, performed by percussion-great Doug Perkins.

• Morton Feldman’s solo piano piece, Triadic Memories, performed by pianist Marilyn Nonken.

• Bonjour – a creation of composer Florent Ghys with a jazz-laced indie pop influenced quintet with 2 double basses!

• World Premieres by Summer Festival composers Kyle Brenn, Erika Dohi, Yaz Lancaster, Dan Langa, Udi Perlman, Kelley Sheehan, Samantha Wolf.

• Guest composers Phil Kline, Tania León, George Lewis, Florent Ghys  plus music by Suzanne Farrin, Robert Honstein, Alexis Lamb, Juri Seo, Ken Thomson, and more.
• Performances by Gregg August, Robert Black, Vicky Chow, David Cossin, Arlen Hlusko, Brad Lubman, Doug Perkins, Nick Photinos, Lauren Radnofsky, Todd Reynolds, Mark Stewart, Maya Stone, Ken Thomson, plus Melissa Achten, Katerina Anagnostidou, Andrew Anderson, Brett Armstrong, Camilla Caldwell, Allison Damon, Kennedy Taylor Dixon, Joseph Ehrenpreis, Grace Gelpi, Natasa Hadjiandreou, Christopher Kobayashi Herz, Michelle Hromin, Caroline Jesalva, Sarah Manley, Daniel Matei, Ariel Mo, David Munro, Ida Nørby, Thorgunnur Ornolfsdottir, Cort Roberts, Jessica Scott, Victor Sintchak, Amy Huimei Tan, and more

Bang on a Can has grown from a one-day New York-based Marathon concert (on Mother’s Day in 1987 in a SoHo art gallery) to a multi-faceted performing arts organization with a broad range of year-round international activities. Co-Founders Michael Gordon, David Lang and Julia Wolfe

Along wtih the annual LOUD Weekend and LONG PLAY festivals at Mass MoCA and in New York, Bang on a Can supports commissions for emerging composers and the Bang on a Can All-Stars, who tour to major festivals and concert venues around the world every year.

Their summer music festival and professional development program at Mass MoCA supports young composers and performers, and the Asphalt Orchestra extreme street band holds mobile performances. Their Found Sound Nation, a technology-based musical outreach program, partners with the State Department to bridge the bring together young American musicians and young musicians from around the world. And Bang on a Can artists have created projects with DJs, visual artists, choreographers, filmmakers and more.