Dispatches From the Bang on a Can Summer Festival 2019: Part 5
Sunday was the last day of Bang On A Can’s LOUD Weekend - the newly inaugurated end to their annual Summer Music Festival up here at MASS MoCA. That means Saturday was full of music, with concert and recitals coming so thick and fast that no one could attend everything. Our Media Fellows did as much as they could, though, and you’ll begin seeing their reports here tomorrow.
But a quick survey of Saturday’s highlights would have to include a couple of rarely-performed works. “Eight Songs For A Mad King” is now about 50 years old - this music/theater piece by the late Peter Maxwell Davies requires a singer/actor to throw himself into the role of King George III as his mental health worsened.
With its masked ensemble, parodies of baroque and mid-20th century dance music, and smashing of a violin to bits (a student violin purchased especially for the purpose), it is a chilling and unsettling work. Music Fellow Julian Otis gave a riveting and committed performance - and given the subject matter, I guess I’ll intend the pun there.
It was also good to hear Annea Lockwood’s “Thousand Year Dreaming,” a sonic meditation inspired by Native Australian Dreamtime mythology. This 1990 piece surrounds the audience with didjeridoos, conch shells, and various other horns - conventional or not. The ubiquitous Mark Stewart led the ensemble.
But new works are a big part of the Summer Festival and on Saturday, four of the eight Composer Fellows had works premiered by what was essentially a variable chamber orchestra conducted by the redoubtable Brad Lubman. On Sunday, the other four will have had their premieres, and it’s already become apparent that this year’s batch of emerging composers includes some distinctive voices worth following. Our Media Fellows will have more on this...
David Lang, one of the cofounders of BOAC, introduced “Schnee” by Danish composer Hans Abrahamsen by pointing out that the LOUD Weekend included some incredibly soft music. “Schnee,” German for “snow,” has moments that hover at the threshold of audibility, luring listeners into its mix of ambient music, European modernism and distant echoes of minimalism.
Abrahamsen evokes stillness through quiet rustles and muffled thunder; Julianna Barwick suggested stillness through harmonic stasis. She builds her music by looping her soft, ethereal vocals and lyrical piano lines, though she did start her set with five string players and no looping.
The volume turned up somewhat when the Sun Ra Arkestra descended from whatever astral plane they usually inhabit. Led by the ageless Marshall Allen in the years since Sun Ra’s death, this cosmic jazz band has a reputation for spacey free form explorations - which is accurate as far as it goes. But the band is also a tight groove machine (with some astonishing dance moves), and if Russian composer Alexander Borodin rolled over his grave when his “Polovtsian Dance #2” was turned into “Strangers in Paradise,” a song from the 50s musical “Kismet,” he may well have rolled back to get an earful of the Arkestra’s Latin-flavored rendition.
Founding member of the BOAC All-Stars Robert Black did a solo bass recital inside the museum’s largest gallery, currently home to the twisted funhouse installation created by Trenton Doyle Hancock. Black filled the cavernous space with the thrumming rhythms of Kate Moore, some high modernism courtesy of Iannis Xenakis, and a solo suite from Philip Glass interspersed with lyrics and poems by Patti Smith, Lou Reed, and other Glass associates.
Annie Gosfield and Pamela Z incorporated technology in inventive ways: Gosfield’s “Detroit Industry” continues her series of chamber works that include sampled industrial sounds and the creative ways she can make allegedly non-musical sounds work with more conventional ones. Z did a solo set, using her voice and electronics, that displayed her vocal chops and her sense of humor. (See Elias’s portrait of her earlier in this series.)
Finally, a long day of music came to a close (for me, at least) after midnight when an ensemble led by Michael Riesman, longtime music director for Philip Glass, played Glass’s alternative score to “Dracula” to a screening of the Tod Browning film. The film now evokes chuckles when it used to provoke gasps, but Bela Lugosi is still fun to watch and the score was surprisingly effective.
