#4218: From New Sounds Live, with Bang On A Can

From the New Sounds Live concert series, the Bang on a Can All-Stars play music in alternate tunings and "period" instrumentation by Annie Gosfield, Arnold Dreyblatt, and Glenn Branca. The music all comes from the annual Bang on a Can People’s Commissioning Fund Concert, recorded at Merkin Hall at Kaufman Music Center in March 2019.

Hear a piece by the late composer Glenn Branca, who worked with large numbers of electric guitars at high volume because of the kickass sonics involved – the overtones, the beating tones, and the difference tones. Those sounds led him to the tuning system known as just intonation, and his inventing new instruments for that intonation. Listen to Branca’s “Movement Within” which was reconstructed in part by composer and Cantaloupe label manager, Adam Cuthbert, and Bang on a Can All-Star guitarist Mark Stewart. Cuthbert helped to resurrect the sampled instruments from an early 1990’s zip drive– making the work something of a period piece - and Stewart figured out the overtone series called for from the numbers in the score.

Then, listen to a work by Annie Gosfield, in factory-influenced music that brought industry into the compositional world, in something of a tribute to her grandmother. The work, “The Manufacture of Tangled Ivory” is also a period piece, in that the samples used in the work were brought back to life from David Lang’s 2004 Macintosh computer.

Finally, hear music that approximates the pitched propulsive rhythms of a malfunctioning escalator in a work by Berlin-based American composer Arnold Dreyblatt. Dreyblatt is also the leader of the Orchestra of Excited Strings, a group that literally beats the sound out of various stringed instruments, in music that can seem like an entire universe of tones -maybe not even what he composed- because of the overtones of the strings. And, of course, nearly everything is amplified for the Bang on a Can All-Stars in Dreyblatt’s work, “Escalator”. - Caryn Havlik

Program #4218: From New Sounds Live, with Bang On A Can  (First aired 3/28/2019)

ARTIST: Bang on a Can All-Stars
WORK: Arnold Dreyblatt: Escalator [1:30]
RECORDING: New Sounds Live, Merkin Hall, March 6, 2019
SOURCE: This performance not commercially available. 
INFO: dreyblatt.net

ARTIST: Bang on a Can All-Stars
WORK: Glenn Branca: Movement Within [14:06]
RECORDING: New Sounds Live, Merkin Hall, March 6, 2019
SOURCE: This performance not commercially available. 
INFO: glennbranca.com

ARTIST: Bang on a Can All-Stars
WORK: Annie Gosfield: The Manufacture of Tangled Ivory [11:31]
RECORDING: New Sounds Live, Merkin Hall, March 6, 2019
SOURCE: This performance not commercially available. 
INFO: anniegosfield.com

ARTIST: Bang on a Can All-Stars
WORK: Arnold Dreyblatt: Escalator [16:22]
RECORDING: New Sounds Live, Merkin Hall, March 6, 2019
SOURCE: This performance not commercially available. 
INFO: dreyblatt.net