‘Banglewood’ brings a can-do attitude

Bang on a Can, cofounded by David Lang (below), presents its new-music festival at Mass MoCA next week. Above: a performance from last year’s “Banglewood.’’ Bang on a Can, cofounded by David Lang (below), presents its new-music festival at Mass MoCA next week. Above: a performance from last year’s “Banglewood.’’ (Philippa Thompson (Above); Peter Serling (Below))
By David Weininger
Globe Correspondent / July 10, 2009

The new-music organization known as Bang on a Can came into existence in 1987. Its founders – New York-based composers David Lang, Michael Gordon, and Julia Wolfe – weren’t part of any established musical subculture. Too traditionally classical for downtown, too edgy for uptown, its composers and affiliated ensembles brought together modernism, minimalism, and pop influences into a brew that was distinctive but hard to pin a label on. Even as Bang on a Can grew in importance – its marathon concerts have become major events – it held onto its outsider status.

Fast forward to now, as Bang on a Can is about to start its annual summer festival (nicknamed “Banglewood’’) at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams next week. At the center of this summer’s gathering are the two most recent winners of the Pulitzer Prize for music. Lang won the prize in 2008 for his haunting vocal work “The Little Match Girl Passion.’’ And this year’s winner is minimalist pioneer Steve Reich, a longtime Bang comrade whose landmark “Music for 18 Musicians’’ will be the centerpiece of a July 25 concert. In a way, their presence signifies that Bang on a Can is an interloper no more.

“It was never our goal to be barbarians and outsiders,’’ says Lang by phone from his New York studio. “It was only our goal to try to build the best world for the music we loved.’’

“The Little Match Girl Passion’’ follows Hans Christian Andersen’s story of a little girl whose abusive father sends her out during winter to sell matches. When she fails to sell any, she dies on a street in the cold. The title of Lang’s work refers to Bach’s Passions, an allusion that recasts its moral message.

A recording was released last month on the harmonia mundi label, and it shows a piece that is in many ways atypical for the composer. Where many of Lang’s works revel in grinding dissonance and wildly atypical instrumentation, the “Passion’’ – written for just four singers who also play percussion instruments – possesses an austere, fragile beauty. Melodic lines interlace in a slow, sad sequence, and every change in the texture registers with the listener.

“That story is so emotional on its own that for me to warm it up with the music or add anything would take away from the power of the story,’’ Lang says of the minimal feel of the piece. Indeed, it was precisely the minimalists’ paring down of music to its basics that provided a model for the “Passion.’’

“That’s what I learned from those people,’’ he explains. “Once you strip down, if you begin from this very pure base, then the little things that you add become magnified and important.’’

Banglewood bills itself as a three-week immersion in new music, and there is more than enough purely musical activity to keep even the most ardent avant-gardist busy. Equally important, if not more so, is a series of seminars on the business end of the music world. Lang says what began as an experiment at the first festival is now among its most popular offerings.

“When we were in music school, everyone talked about art and nobility and love and all of these gigantic emotions which are all about classical music and are on giant marble pedestals with capital letters,’’ Lang says. “And we realized that as soon as you get out of school, all you care about is, who will hire me? How do I make a living? It’s something that schools don’t want to tell you, partly because teachers there want to stay on this high plane. So we thought, let’s just see what it’s like if we tell people how to start an organization, how to raise money, how to write a mission statement, how to make a board, how to write a contract.’’

Lang sounds improbably utopian when he talks about the prospects for young artists today. Forget entertainment, and even culture; writing and playing music, for him, involves nothing less than the creation of the world you want to live in.

“I know that everybody is miserable, people are losing jobs, so I don’t want to make light of what’s going on,’’ he acknowledges. “But I feel like the flip side is that people need the arts to mean something more now. It’s not just entertainment. It’s actually a vote for what it is you think should belong in the world which is coming which we can’t see. In a way, going to a concert is more meaningful now than it was 20 years ago when it was a stop between the bar and dinner.

“It is true that a lot of these students come in really miserable because they feel like they’ve been told by their families and teachers that there’s no hope,’’ he continues. “So, taking these incredibly talented people and telling them, here’s how you make it so you can live in a world where you can hope – that’s a mission.’’

www.bangonacan.org