Bang On A Can Postpones Inaugural LONG PLAY Festival; Launches Online Archive

Bang on a Can has announced that it will postpone its inaugural LONG PLAY festival, scheduled for May 1-3, 2020, due to the COVID-19 crisis.

The three-day destination music festival was to feature dozens of concerts across a network of pioneering music venues in Brooklyn including BAM Howard Gilman Opera House, Roulette, Public Records, ShapeShifter Lab, Littlefield, Brooklyn Music School, BAM Lepercq Space, The Plaza at 300 Ashland, and more. Bang on a Can will reschedule the festival, with new dates to be announced. Festival pass holders can choose to receive a refund or donate the value of their passes to Bang on a Can as a tax-deductible contribution, and are being contacted about options.

Since its founding in 1987, Bang on a Can has maintained an extensive archive of its recordings, videos, posters, program books, and more. Thirty-three years of collected music and associated ephemera are in the process of being digitized and archived online. Calling it "Canland", Bang on a Can will make the new digital archive publicly accessible in its entirety on May 1, 2020 at 12pm Eastern time (formerly the start day and time of LONG PLAY).

Bang on a Can Co-Founder and Artistic Director David Lang says, "We're super disappointed to have to postpone our very first LONG PLAY festival. But as we all know, it isn't safe for thousands of experimental music fans from around the world to come to Brooklyn right now. We look forward to rescheduling, when we are on the other side of this. But we didn't want to lose the sense of community that comes from all of us listening together and we wanted to offer some way for that to happen, so we are launching Canland. We're sifting through our files and cabinets and desk drawers and old CD-roms and floppy discs for vintage pictures and programs and videos and recordings. We look so young! (As do young Philip Glass, young Meredith Monk, young Steve Reich, etc.) And it is crammed full of great stuff from recent years too, by people who look really young because they are still really young! There are some stellar performances here, lots of virtuosity and grit. And lots of images of the community of people who come out to support it. We can't be with you in person right now, but we are with you in spirit - and online! And we look forward to being together in person at LONG PLAY, as soon as we can."

About Bang on a Can: Bang on a Can is dedicated to making music new. Since its first Marathon concert in 1987, Bang on a Can has been creating an international community dedicated to innovative music, wherever it is found. With adventurous programs, it commissions new composers, performs, presents, and records new work, develops new audiences, and educates the musicians of the future. Bang on a Can is building a world in which powerful new musical ideas flow freely across all genres and borders. Bang on a Can plays "a central role in fostering a new kind of audience that doesn't concern itself with boundaries. If music is made with originality and integrity, these listeners will come." (The New York Times)

Bang on a Can has grown from a one-day New York-based Marathon concert (on Mother's Day in 1987 in a SoHo art gallery) to a multi-faceted performing arts organization with a broad range of year-round international activities. "When we started Bang on a Can, we never imagined that our 12-hour marathon festival of mostly unknown music would morph into a giant international organization dedicated to the support of experimental music, wherever we would find it," write Bang on a Can Co-Founders Michael Gordon, David Lang and Julia Wolfe. "But it has, and we are so gratified to be still hard at work, all these years later. The reason is really clear to us - we started this organization because we believed that making new music is a utopian act - that people needed to hear this music and they needed to hear it presented in the most persuasive way, with the best players, with the best programs, for the best listeners, in the best context. Our commitment to changing the environment for this music has kept us busy and growing, and we are not done yet."

In addition to its festivals LOUD Weekend at MASS MoCA and LONG PLAY, current projects include The People's Commissioning Fund, a membership program to commission emerging composers; the Bang on a Can All-Stars, who tour to major festivals and concert venues around the world every year; recording projects; the Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival at MASS MoCA, a professional development program for young composers and performers led by today's pioneers of experimental music; Asphalt Orchestra, Bang on a Can's extreme street band that offers mobile performances re-contextualizing unusual music; Found Sound Nation, a new technology-based musical outreach program now partnering with the State Department of the United States of America to create OneBeat, a revolutionary, post-political residency program that uses music to bridge the gulf between young American musicians and young musicians from developing countries; cross-disciplinary collaborations and projects with DJs, visual artists, choreographers, filmmakers and more. Each new program has evolved to answer specific challenges faced by today's musicians, composers and audiences, in order to make innovative music widely accessible and wildly received. Bang on a Can's inventive and aggressive approach to programming and presentation has created a large and vibrant international audience made up of people of all ages who are rediscovering the value of contemporary music. For more information about Bang on a Can, please visit www.bangonacan.org.