I’ll let you in on a shameful secret: I don’t care for/actively dislike most Contem­po­rary Music. For this reason I’m kind of stunned by how much I liked Satur­day’s Bang on a Can Marathon, which, I’m embar­rassed to say, was the first I’ve attended. (This was actually more like a mini-marathon; only six hours or so. I think the NYC ones are longer, and the ones I used to produce at Yale went until dawn.) Here is the white­board back­stage. You can see that David Lang made every­thing a little late, but they managed to get back on schedule. Right on.

Every time I hear Meredith Monk’s music I am totally entranced. She has a tiny two-piano piece called Ellis Island that I like to listen to on repeat. On the Marathon we heard Three Heavens and Hells, a 25-minute setting of a 7 years old child’s poetry with animal noises. This sounds like the thing I might hate most in the world, but it was actually fantas­tic. (My parents, conversely, were either bored or scared and left right after this piece.) Even the poem was pretty good, better than I could do at least, and it didn’t rely on being cute.

Right after that was Zorn’s Cat o’ Nine Tails (subtitle, thanks to David Lang: “Tex Avery directs the Marquis de Sade”). Actually now that I think about it, this piece is kind of cute. It relies pretty heavily on sudden jump cuts from {noise + disso­nance} to {outdated music genre + conso­nance}, but, if performed well (and it was!) these juxta­po­si­tions are jarring and hilar­i­ous. Andi Hemenway was wearing some serious peeky-toe leather booths, befit­ting her role as violist/S&M dungeon master.

I love Julie Wolfe’s piece Dark Full Ride, because it is loud and badass and I feel badass after I listen to it. Dave Cossin remarked that it sounds like a 70’s cop show without the bass or saxo­phone. Someone else remarked that it had the most “testos­terone” of any music on the male-domi­nated program. That seemed like a weird comment to me. Are female composers supposed to write quiet, pretty music? And then go knit little hats or something?

Then Shaker Loops. I don’t really need to describe this piece. I love it more each time I hear it, and it is espe­cially great in a really tight live perfor­mance. Which this was. It was also heavily ampli­fied, but Tommasini wasn’t there, so no one complained. (By the way, did you know that parts of Shaker Loops were used in the game Civi­liza­tion IV? Because I didn’t.)

Everyone said Todd Reynold­s’s perfor­mance of Michael Gordon’s Light is Calling was a high­light, but I missed it because I was back­stage getting primed for the grande finale, George Antheil’s Ballet Mécanique. Not the original version for 24 player-pianos and 96 hot water heaters (or whatever) but a slightly less ridicu­lous version for four pianos and a huge battery of percus­sion. It’s still a piece of extremes; of volume, tempo, musical banality and catch­i­ness (these inane frag­ments will be running through my head for weeks). I’m not sure I like the piece; it’s like saying you like a USB drive, it either works or it doesn’t. But I sure enjoyed playing it, and my three fellow pianists (Vicki Ray, Richard Vali­tutto, and Andrew Drannon) were a pleasure to play with.

A Couple Things I Didn’t Under­stand About the Marathon

There were several pieces by younger composers that were Way Way Too Long. Aren’t we supposed to be the ones with short atten­tion spans and texting and guitar hero and stuff? News flash, unnamed composer, you are not Morton Feldman! Lisa Bielawa’s The Boat, a funny setting of Gertrude Stein, was notably Just the Right Length™. Maybe you should be more like her.

There were a few musi­cians in resi­dence who came over from Kyrgyzs­tan and Uzbek­istan and played tradi­tional instru­ments and musiks. This was a cool idea and I’m all for cross-cultural exchange, but it gave me a funny feeling. Espe­cially when the two handsome fellows from Kyrgyzs­tan came out in their tradi­tional ethnic garb, complete with upright white bowler-like hats. No one else on the marathon had to dress up at all, in fact many just wore jeans and the BoaC T‑shirt. The whole thing reeked of exoti­cism. Musi­cally, I didn’t under­stand the connec­tion to the rest of the marathon, if there was one at all; it’s nice to hear new things, but you can’t just take Kyrgyzs­tani folk music played on chopo chuors and sybyzgys and temir ooz komyzs, amplify it a bunch, and expect it to fit in with a bunch of over­thought, over­wrought contem­po­rary American concert music. Because it doesn’t.

I don’t like being negative (actually who am I kidding&#8212 I love it) so here is a picture of some graffiti I found on an aban­doned building on the Mass MoCA campus: