Bang on a Can All-Stars: Classics
19.8.2025 at 20.30
Erkko Hall, Dance House Helsinki
Duration approx. 2 H (incl. intermission)
Programme
Angélica Negrón: Turistas with Kookik, a film by Keerati Jinakunwiphat
Henry Threadgill: With or Without Card with Split Womb, a film by Rena Butler
David Lang: interstate with film by Annie-B Parson
Julia Wolfe: Believing
Steve Reich: Electric Counterpoint
Michael Gordon: I Buried Paul
Philip Glass: Closing
Steve Martland: Horses of Instruction
In co-operation with:
Jane and Aatos Erkko Foundation
Performers
Bang on a Can All-Stars
Vicky Chow, piano
David Cossin, percussion
Arlen Hlusko, cello
Taylor Levine, guitars
Ken Thomson, clarinets
Lizzie Burns, bass
Andrew Cotton, sound design
Intro
The six-member, electrically amplified Bang on a Can All-Stars, who freely cross the boundaries of classical, jazz, rock, world, and experimental music, have consistently forged a completely unique identity that defies categorization. Their music has practically become a genre of its own, as their repertoire contains a wide range of works written specifically for the group’s distinctive instrumentation and performance style.
The drum set, electric guitar, and electric bass suggest a certain musical direction, counterbalanced by the cello, piano, and clarinet. Somewhere in between are various percussion instruments, double bass, synthesizer, saxophone, and bass clarinet.
The group’s highly varied sonic palette represents not only original minimalism but also a kind of further development of minimalism toward a somewhat rougher and more energetic direction, at least in rhythmic, tonal, and timbral terms.
Puerto Rican–born Angélica Negrón, who moved to the United States as a young adult, incorporates Puerto Rican influences in her work Turistas; salsa, reggaeton, and Afro–Puerto Rican bomba can be heard in a distanced form. Negrón also approaches her subject with humor, challenging and refreshing stereotypes.
Henry Threadgill’s With or Without Card stands out from the rest of the evening’s program. The work recalls the restless and fragmented serialism of the 1950s. Any kind of repetition is taboo, and steady pulse and tonal harmony are entirely erased.
Interstate is David Lang’s musical study of a highway. Built from various canon and stretto structures, the piece forms a steadily rising crescendo before its final climax.
Julia Wolfe, one of the founders of Bang on a Can, has perhaps written the most for the ensemble. Believing has the intensity of metal music performed on acoustic instruments and, unexpectedly, also contains vocal parts.
One of the central figures of minimalist music and a legend of the genre is Steve Reich. His now-classic Electric Counterpoint (1987), for electric guitar and tape, consists of three overlapping movements in a slow–fast–slow structure.
Michael Gordon’s I Buried Paul takes its title from the words John Lennon mumbles in the final tag added after the fade-out in the Beatles’ Strawberry Fields Forever. Gordon’s musical inspiration also comes from the same backward cacophony.
Philip Glass, one of the founders of original American minimalism in the 1970s and a pioneer of the style, wrote Closing as a melancholic mood piece based purely on tonal harmony.
British composer Steve Martland’s Horses of Instruction is built from attack patterns of varying lengths and ostinatos. The piece ventures into the territory of progressive rock, and, once again, hypnotic repetition is the name of the game.
Text: Pekka Miettinen