A Quarter-Century Of Banging, And Still As Fresh As Ever

VPM | By Anastasia Tsioulcas

Published January 24, 2012 at 4:00 PM EST

Updated February 19, 2024

Members of the Bang on a Can All-Stars playing in Shanghai in 2009.

Here at Deceptive Cadence, we hope the music we share most Tuesdays — what’s piqued our interest and pricked up our ears — will urge you towards discovering new sounds in a flash. But today’s review has even more of a time-stamp than usual.

To celebrate its 25th anniversary, Bang on a Can (BoaC) — the New York-based new music composers’ collective/presenting organization/teaching institution/record label — is giving a double album away, but only through tomorrow, Jan. 25. When you visit their website, just share a little memory or feeling about the group. And if you’re a newcomer, that’s fine, too.

Despite its anniversary tie-in, Big Beautiful Dark And Scary isn’t a retrospective, though it does gesture at some basic BoaC tenets. There’s music by all three of the group’s founding composers: Julia Wolfe’s throbbing title work, David Lang‘s delicate and then driving sunray and Michael Gordon’s haunting and nearly apocalyptic elegy For Madeline, with particularly arresting klezmer-style clarinet wailing.

Other compositions reflect the BoaC stalwarts’ wide-open ears and admirable disdain for genre divides. There’s three movements from clarinetist and composer Evan Ziporyn‘s graceful, gamelan-shaded Shadowbang, not to mention three short works by David Longstreth, better known in most corners as a member of The Dirty Projectors.

It’s a bit odd that music by Conlon Nancarrow, who was born exactly a century ago, still qualifies as “new” music, but BoaC’s arrangements of his player piano studies are as happily demented and wildly fun as ever — as you can hear in Ziporyn’s take on Study 3a for the Bang on a Can All-Stars:

There’s also a generational shift, as evidenced by the presence of Louis Andriessen’s four-part Life (which, on the CD version, includes films by Marijke van Warmerdam). It’s followed immediately by Ridgeway, a piece by one of Andriessen’s students, Kate Moore. Bang on a Can may have become a venerable institution over the past 25 years, but as this release shows, they’re still kicking down doors.

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Anastasia Tsioulcas

Anastasia Tsioulcas is a correspondent on NPR's Culture desk. She is intensely interested in the arts at the intersection of culture, politics, economics and identity, and primarily reports on music. Recently, she has extensively covered gender issues and #MeToo in the music industry, including the trial and conviction of former R&B superstar R. Kelly; backstage tumult and alleged secret deals in the wake of sexual misconduct allegations against megastar singer Plácido Domingo; and gender inequity issues at the Grammy Awards.

On happier days, Tsioulcas has celebrated the life of the late Aretha Franklin, traveled to Havana to profile musicians and dancers, revealed the hidden artistry of an Indian virtuoso who spent 60 years in her apartment and brought listeners into the creative process of composers Steve Reich and Terry Riley.

Tsioulcas was formerly a reporter and producer for NPR Music, where she covered breaking news in the music industry as well as a wide range of musical genres and artists. She has also produced episodes for NPR Music's much-lauded Tiny Desk concert series and has hosted live concerts from venues like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and New York's (Le) Poisson Rouge. She also commissioned and produced several world premieres on behalf of NPR Music, including a live event that brought together 350 musicians to debut a new work together. As a video producer, she created high-profile video shorts for NPR Music, including performances by cellist Yo-Yo Ma in a Brooklyn theatrical props warehouse and pianist Yuja Wang in an icy-cold Steinway & Sons piano factory.

Tsioulcas has also reported from north and west Africa, south Asia, and across Europe for NPR and other outlets. Prior to joining NPR in 2011, she was widely published as a writer and critic on both classical and world music, and was the North America editor for Gramophone Magazine and the classical music columnist for Billboard.

Born in Boston and based in New York, Tsioulcas is a lapsed classical violinist and violist (shoutout to all the overlooked violists!). She graduated from Barnard College, Columbia University with a B.A. in comparative religion.

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