Record Labels

In the 1990s, Bang on a Can jumped from releasing albums on the academic label Composers Recordings, Inc. to signing a contract with the major label Sony Classical. Their path emblematized an unusual moment in recording contemporary music: after Nonesuch’s 1992 recording of Henryk Górecki’s Symphony No. 3 became extraordinarily popular, major labels looked to contemporary music as a means to reach new listeners. Whereas new music had previously been the provenance of noncommercial labels like CRI, major labels began investing in new composers and new institutions like Bang on a Can in the hopes of turning new profits. From Sony, Bang on a Can jumped to Philips’s Point Music and released their rendition of Brian Eno’s Music for Airports, an album designed to reach new rock audience; and from there, amidst the industry tumult of the late 1990s, they struck out on their own with the independent label Cantaloupe Music.

Academics

David Lang, Michael Gordon, and Julia Wolfe’s studies at Yale in the 1980s provided an experience fairly unusual for a graduate program in composition: it prepared them for careers in the musical marketplace, rather than remaining in the academy. The three composers had varied biographies prior to Yale, but had all experienced the vestiges of the Cold War musical avant-garde in their previous academic settings. Under the tutelage of Jacob Druckman and Martin Bresnick at Yale, though, the three composers explored musical minimalism and developed a professionalized mindset. They also flirted with the experimental hijinks of the undergraduate collective Sheep’s Clothing, an important precursor to Bang on a Can’s marathons, while avoiding its leftist politics. Despite Bang on a Can’s renegade tendencies, it is clear that their underlying ethos grew directly out of, rather than against, their Ivy League training.

All-Stars

In 1992, Bang on a Can launched their own in-house ensemble, the All-Stars, an amplified sextet designed to take the spirit of the festival on the road. Along with building a new audience via national and international tours, the All-Stars also unlocked a new source of earned income for Bang on a Can amidst an era of declining government support. The sound and image of the extroverted ensemble facilitated a pivot in Bang on a Can’s identity, from strongly emphasizing the overcoming of stylistic divides within new music (as epitomized by the uptown–downtown binary) to instead emphasizing the blurring of genre boundaries between contemporary classical music and rock. The All-Stars also instantiated a division of labor between composers and performers that was unusual in the history of new-music ensembles and led to some significant tensions, tied to how Bang on a Can carefully positioned their new group toward the marketplace.

Funding

In the midst of the Culture Wars, in which Congressional Republicans and the religious right attempted to defund the National Endowment for the Arts, Bang on a Can expanded and professionalized. Cuts to government funding throughout the 1980s and 1990s shaped how Bang on a Can and their peers navigated their relationship to the marketplace. Other controversies also emerged, as when the New York State Council on the Arts attempted to implement policy around multicultural programming and encourage institutions to seek out audiences, to the chagrin of composers Charles Wuorinen and Milton Babbbitt as well as the Group for Contemporary Music. But Bang on a Can made the most of this moment, carving out new sources of income, diversifying their programming, reaching new audiences, and ultimately starting a new program, the People’s Commissioning Fund, in the wake of the devastating cuts to the NEA passed in the mid-1990s.

Epilogue

By the early twenty-first century, new music’s marketplace turn was complete, though Bang on a Can’s journey had only begun: in the past two decades, they have received Pulitzer Prizes and grown into a multi-faced, multi-million dollar organization. The three founders began writing more large-scale works, and Bang on a Can’s marathons at the World Financial Center expanded their audience and diversified their programming. With their summer institute in the Berkshires, Bang on a Can has cultivated their ethos among a new generation of entrepreneurial composers, including the prominent indie classical scene, while American new music has grown from a fringe phenomenon to a cottage industry. But in the wake of the Great Recession, younger musicians are emerging amidst a crowded and precarious market, in which opportunities proliferate but stability remains elusive.

Introduction

This introduction outlines the starting point for this study: the rise of Bang on a Can, a large-scale contemporary music organization that started as a marathon concert in downtown New York overseen by composers David Lang, Michael Gordon, and Julia Wolfe in 1987. Bang on a Can’s success in the 1980s and 1990s was a product not only of their individual ingenuity, but also a broader marketplace turn in new music: an ideological project, driven by institutions and musicians who contended that in order for contemporary composition to survive and flourish, it must reach a broad, non-specialist audience. This chapter surveys the postwar history of American composition through the lenses of uptown academicism and downtown experimentalism, describes how this book grapples with Bang on a Can’s institutional practices, and briefly outlines subsequent contents.

Lincoln Center

When Bang on a Can first hosted their marathon concert and All-Stars recitals at Lincoln Center in 1994, critics and observers wrote about them with hyperbolic rhetoric, emphasizing how different the upstart festival was from the hallowed grounds of the Manhattan presenter. But under the direction of curator Jane Moss, Lincoln Center had begun to embrace contemporary music, representing a moment in which some of classical music’s most mainstream organizations looked to new work in the hopes of reaching new audiences. Bang on a Can, too, found new audiences at Lincoln Center; in partnering with the major institution, the organization prioritized their marketplace aims—their desire for expanding its reach—over the anti-establishment image that they had previously cultivated.

Festivals

When Bang on a Can mounted their first festival in 1987, they charted a familiar path: young avant-gardists who, fed up with the status quo, sought to remold the world in their own image. The organization’s scheme was two-fold: a marketplace-oriented agenda to build a non-specialist audience for new music that they felt was missing from the uptown academic and downtown experimental scenes; and an aesthetic agenda aimed toward dissolving the uptown-downtown binary itself. These two goals had ideological and practical components, ones explored by delving into how the trio shaped what they chose to program and how they staged their early festivals, as well as examining contemporaneous institutions such as the ensemble Speculum Musicae, the venue Experimental Intermedia, and the festival New Music America.

Horizons

The downtown marathons of Bang on a Can might seem worlds away from the American symphony orchestra, but in the mid-1980s they shared a common context: David Lang worked for the New York Philharmonic in this period as an assistant to composer-in-residence Jacob Druckman. His assistantship was part of the granting organization Meet the Composer’s Orchestra Residencies Program, which placed American composers in residencies with symphony orchestras and fundamentally reshaped the relationship between new music and the marketplace. The program’s most high-profile success, the Philharmonic’s 1983 Horizons festival, captured an unprecedented audience for new music via its heavily publicized theme of “A New Romanticism?” And Lang’s subsequent work with the Philharmonic provided him with experience and connections, as well as a growing ambivalence toward the orchestral sphere that shaped the maverick mindset of Bang on a Can.