UCLA Performing Arts The musical group Bang On a Can
All-Stars brings its eclectic show to UCLA’s Schoenberg Hall
tonight at 8 p.m.
By Kelsey McConnell
Daily Bruin Contributor
The Bang On a Can All-Stars don’t produce ordinary
music.
The group brings its eclectic fusion of classical, jazz and rock
to UCLA’s Schoenberg Hall tonight at 8 p.m., following a
center-stage discussion with the musicians at 7 p.m.
The All-Stars are the progeny of the vision of members Michael
Gordon, Julia Wolfe and David Lang ““ New York’s now
well-known Bang On a Can Festival. Since its 1987 inception at a
Soho art gallery, the festival has been a forum for musicians
looking to fuse the diverse styles of the contemporary music
world.
It was out of this mélange of sound that the six All-Stars
came together.
“For years Michael Gordon, Julia Wolfe and I would sit
around all day complaining about how poorly the world treated
experimental music and young composers of experimental music in
particular,” said artistic director David Lang in a phone
interview from Champaign, Ill. “We started the festival to
solve as many problems with experimental music as we
could.”
The band features Evan Ziporyn on clarinets and saxophones, Mark
Stewart on electric guitar, Wendy Sutter on cello, Robert Black on
bass, Lisa Moore on piano and keyboards, Steven Schick on
percussion and Andrew Cotton as sound engineer. Gordon, Lang and
Wolfe serve as artistic directors.
“These players were all soloists in our festival in New
York,” Lang said. “Over the years we came to depend on
a handful of performers who were as committed to the world of weird
music as we were.”
By 1992, Bang On a Can created a separate series of performers
for the All-Stars. By 1994 the All-Stars were playing such
prestigious venues as the Great Performers Series at Lincoln
Center, the Meltdown Festival at the South Bank Centre in London,
the Holland Festival and Tanglewood.
Appearing at Schoenberg is something of a tour highlight for the
All-Stars. Schick is looking to take advantage of the musical
openness of the UCLA audience.
“I know the kind of curiosity that’s there,”
he said.
For Lang, however, the UCLA performance is a homecoming.
“I am from L.A.,” he said. “I lived across the
street from UCLA and my life revolved around UCLA when I was
growing up. My musical personality was in large part shaped by the
hundreds of concerts I went to in Schoenberg Hall.”
Audiences can expect the unexpected as the All-Stars draw from a
pool of composers largely unknown to the musical mainstream.
“The point is to perform good music. Music that you want
other people to hear, not just music by this or that
composer,” Black said. So while not everything we play lives
up to this ideal, a lot does.”
That said, what these composers lack in notoriety they make up
in creative conception. For example, Phil Kline’s
“Exquisite Corpses” takes its name from a surrealist
parlor game and turns on Kline’s vision of New York’s
historically exotic slums.
“Escalator” by Arnold Dreyblatt consists of
repetitive rhythms produced by malfunctioning escalators layered
over corresponding patterns scored for electric guitar, cello,
percussion, saxophone and bass.
Brian Eno, widely thought to be the father of ambient music,
contributed his piece “Music for Airports 1/1″ to the
All-Stars. “Music for Airports 1/1″ consists of
methodically computer-looped bits of tape which the All-Stars took
out of the studio to perform live with instruments.
Lang and Gordon have also added their compositions to the mix.
“I Buried Paul,” composed by Gordon, is about the noise
born from playing the Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields
Forever” backwards. Lang’s “The Anvil
Chorus” is a narrative about the art of blacksmiths realized
through controlled hammering patterns on junk metals.
The Bang On A Can All-Stars perform these pieces with a verve
that has been called radical, avant-garde and fiercely aggressive.
Schick contests these descriptions in part.
“There is an intensity about the way we play,” he
said. “There is an incredible punch, but the music invited
you as well. We used to say that they were unstoppable, sexy and
loud.”
So who does such intense, inviting and sexy music play to?
“We could cultivate a wide cross section of fans,”
Schick said. “We go anywhere from alternative, if you were an
open-minded classical fan, to a theater fan who’d never
really gone to a concert. It’s quite a nexus of
styles.”
Aside from its world tours, The Bang On a Can All-Stars can be
heard on its first CD “Industry,” its 1996 release
“Cheating, Lying, Stealing” and the 1998 release
“Music for Airports.” The All-Stars’ latest
project is the debut recording of Bang On a Can’s new label,
Cantaloupe Music, to be distributed by Harmonia Mundi USA. Lang has
high hopes for the future of Cantaloupe Music.
“Cantaloupe helps us take control over some of our fate in
the recording world,” he said. “The major labels are
more and more interested in having hits, selling millions of copies
of something. Where does that leave the loner oddball composer
whose music may only appeal to a few thousand people? Cantaloupe
helps us extend Bang On a Can’s ability to do as much for
improving the weird music scene as possible.”
Of the All-Stars’ many CDs, Lang says he has a soft spot
for its newest recording, a Cantaloupe Music debut, “Renegade
Heaven.”
“It is the purest statement of how we live now,”
Lang said. “Also, because we are in charge it is
unbelievable, uncompromising and very aggressive, which makes me
very happy.”
MUSIC: “Renegade Heaven” will be
released on March 13, but will be available for purchase before
then at www.cantaloupemusic.com.