Composer on 'Bang on a Can'

Dear Jeffrey Turner of Silver City, N.M.,

Thanks for your nice comments and your important question. I have to say that I am happy that you point out our debt to such iconoclastic American composers as Harry Partch and George Crumb. Not only are we not shy about acknowledging them but we embrace them, and the work of other American mavericks, from Conlon Nancarrow to Meredith Monk.

In America we have a long and proud tradition of rebel loners - it seems like a paradox, that we have a tradition of independents, but that is one of America's great musical gifts to the world. We question things here, and often the questions of a Charles Ives or a John Cage end up having profound meaning far from their more localized musical origins.

I noticed that in an eight minute long TV segment it is hard to show the full range of the music that "Bang on a Can" believes in, because we believe in a very diverse world. Since the Bang on a Can Summer Festival is a teaching situation we feel the need to give our fellows the widest experience with contemporary music that we can. We want them to be able to contribute to society as well-rounded professionals, and so their education includes much more than the American experimental tradition. They are exposed to improvisation, electronics, Balinese gamelan, North Indian Raga, alongside the most difficult and rigorous written contemporary music.

Our fellows regularly rehearse and perform music by such European modernist luminaries as Gyorgy Ligeti and Iannis Xenakis, in addition to all the Americans. Not only is all this music great but the playing of it gives our fellows skills they need to know.

"Bang on a Can" has never represented a single kind of music. It would be shocking to many musical purists to think that in addition to performing with Glenn Kotche of Wilco and Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth we have done many amazing performances of Elliott Carter and Karlheinz Stockhausen.

One of the oddest things to me is that people often expect that musical opinions should be made pure, in one direction or another. If you play one kind of music you can't like another kind. If you like improvisation you can't like written music; if you like jazz you can't like country and western. The world gets ridiculously small in the new music community - some people think if you like this one obscure composer you couldn't possibly like that other obscure composer, who does almost the same thing. This seems ridiculous to me. Music should act as a kind of opener - the fact that you like a kind of music shouldn't mean that that kind is better than other kinds, but that music has opened you up, that you have become ennobled by the power to hear and enjoy music. Once you notice that you have that power it can be aimed in many deep and seemingly contradictory directions.