Banging on a Can

{... written a couple of years back for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution ...}

Classical music is not what it used to be. Recently, the often alarmist British critic Norman Lebrecht declared that the field's recording industry, already in decline, would actually collapse by the end of the year. That's an extravagant prediction, but indicative of a crisis.

Michael Gordon is not worried. The composer is rolling with the new. "Orchestras will become more like museum pieces, focused on repertory alone," says Gordon, who co-founded the contemporary music organization Bang on a Can in 1987, with fellow composers Julia Wolfe (his wife) and David Lang. Since then, they've produced more than 150 concerts, including the annual Bang on a Can marathons of new and untested music; launched a successful independent record label; and spawned a chamber outfit, the Bang on a Can All-Stars, which performs their compositions and dozens of pieces commissioned from an eclectic variety of other composers. "Ensembles like Bang on a Can are a whole different thing. The only connection between the two will be technique," Gordon says.

Boasting a repertoire of (mostly) newly minted pieces, the six-piece Bang on a Can All-Stars weds conservatory chops to vividly imaginative music. It's the kind of sound that reflects the influence of both 1960s minimalism and amplified rock, the improvisatory flair of jazz and the ambient whir of modern life.

While the Kronos Quartet has pioneered a similar approach in a conventional string quartet format, the All-Stars flaunt a more diverse instrumentation and a grittier East Coast attitude. The ensemble's roster suggests a crazy quilt of affiliations: Guitarist Mark Stewart tours with Paul Simon; cellist Wendy Sutter has backed up Baryshnikov; percussionist David Cossin was a key player on the Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon soundtrack. And so on.

"The energy of the group continues to really excite me," says Evan Ziporyn, the clarinetist, whose own passions, for instance, run to the Boston-based gamelan orchestra he leads. "Normally, there are two paradigms in Western music. Chamber music produced an incredibly disciplined, exact thing, which is amazing when it works. And then there's the jazz model, where you have this amazing empathy between the players. You have this latitude. We always wanted the precision of chamber music and the complexity of that -- we wanted to do composed music -- but we really wanted the players to be individuals. There is no one way that the cello is going to sound."

The band's liveliness extends to its choice of material. Because the Atlanta concert is the only stop on the tour where the All-Stars won't be joined by minimalist godfather Terry Riley, the concert will feature works by more composers. There's a piece each by Wolfe and Gordon, as well as salutes to Dutch heavyweight Louis Andriessen and American visionary Conlon Nancarrow, whose music -- deemed too difficult for human hands to play -- was composed mainly for player pianos. There are works from jazz musicians (Don Byron's "Dark Room"); a composer who notoriously concocts pieces for armies of boomboxes (Phil Kline's "Exquisite Corpses"); and discoveries from the Bang on a Can marathon (Zack Browning's "Back Speed Double Marathon"), a kind of American Idol of the new-music world in which composer/players get 10 minutes in the spotlight.

"I'm a pretty good example of their mission," says Kline, known for his yearly "Unsilent Night" gatherings in which participants march through downtown Manhattan with boomboxes on their shoulders, all playing tapes made by the composer. Eventually, Kline's work came to the attention of Bang on a Can , and he wound up in the 1992 marathon.

"That was the beginning of my big break," continues Kline, who has moved onto song cycles, such as the one on his new album, Zippo Songs, which was released on Bang on a Can 's Cantaloupe label. "The All-Stars are the first chamber group that to a large extent really got it both ways. They've got no trouble with the flyspecks -- those complicated pieces of modernist music -- but if I give Mark Stewart a rock riff, he has no problem with that, either."

Perhaps, as Gordon suggests, it's all part of a healthy paradigm shift. On his forthcoming Nonesuch album, Light Is Calling, the composer works with producers known for their expertise in electronica. That's the sound of the dance club now, but 40 years ago a minimalist pioneer like Steve Reich was doing pretty much the same thing -- splicing tape loops by hand rather than using a Powerbook. "Popular music is consumed so quickly," Gordon says, leaning forward in an armchair in the TriBeCa loft he shares with Wolfe and their 8-year-old daughter. "But in classical music it's always been possible for someone to be ahead of their time. Things are moving at a faster pace now."

The challenge for enterprises like Bang on a Can seems to be one of walking the line: to capture that of-the-moment cachet of the next pop wave while resisting instant consumption. It makes for the best kind of creative tension.

Gordon, who points out a view of the former World Trade Center site from one of the generous windows in his apartment, is nothing if not optimistic. Classical music as we know it may be in trouble, but it's far from an endangered species. "Even that girl in the Dixie Chicks who plays the violin has done an incredible amount for the instrument," he says. "My daughter plays violin, and she saw her picture in the paper the other day. She got very excited."