At the Barbican Centre in London, on March 20, 2012, the Bang on a Can All-Stars premiere Field Recordings — with new works by Gordon, Lang and Wolfe. The evening-length project that is as much a mystery as a concert – a kind of ghost story. The ghosts aren’t the physical presence of people gone before, but they are the ghosts of sounds, images, ideas, and voices. Each composer has been asked to find and interact with something recorded before, using the power of music made right in front of us to reach out to other things not present…
Jacob Druckman’s Horizons
an article for an unpublished Druckman memorial edition of Contemporary Music Review, (2000), Harold Meltzer, editor. What we are celebrating with this festival is all the new music. So wrote Jacob Druckman in the program booklet for Horizons ’84, The New Romanticism – A Broader View, the second festival of three that Druckman curated for the New York Philharmonic in 1983, 1984 and 1986. The statement is not totally true – the Horizons Festivals were never supposed to be about all the new music …continue reading
In 1987, David Lang was a 30-year-old composer and doctoral student who, with his Yale buddies Michael Gordon and Julia Wolfe, founded Bang on a Can, a scruffy organization dedicated to the proposition that all musics are created equal. These days, Lang is an eminence: Pulitzer Prize winner, member of the Yale faculty, and composer in residence at Carnegie Hall for 2013-14. Justin Davidson talked with him midway through “collected stories,” a six-concert festival he curated at Carnegie’s Zankel Hall, and days before the release of his recordinglove/fail…
