New York Classical Review

When Bang on a Can’s Long Play festival launched in 2022, it seemed like a replacement for the old 24-hour Marathons that put the organization on the musical map. Across three days, in and around the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the festival had the same fundamental criteria as always: what founders David Lang, Michael Gordon, and Julia Wolfe considered good music. As part of the first generation of American post-minimalist composers, that meant contemporary classical music—including their own—and jazz, rock, and experimental mixes of all of the above.

In the last couple of years Long Play has been showing it’s actually a next step in the Bang on a Can future, with the subtle but clear argument that minimalist music is the de facto mainstream sound of early 21st century America.

The highlights of this year’s festival—held, as always, the first weekend in May—confirmed this, with concerts that not only honored the legacy of Steve Reich and Philip Glass, but extended it. Along with this, there was a quiet and profound appearance of music from another American composer who might at first not seem to belong in this company.

That composer was Morton Feldman. The festival produced two performances of his music, including Quatuor Bozzini playing String Quartet No. 1 Saturday Night at the Theatre for a New Audience at Polonsky Shakespeare Center.

As this performance showed, the live experience of Feldman’s music is irreplaceable. One has come to think that recordings can ‘obscure his achievements. His music is almost always quiet and still, and playing it at home too easily falls into ambience, making an impression but loosing the details in all the minor distractions around. The Montreal-based Quatuor Bozzini’s skillful performance showed why all the details are important.

Feldman’s late music, as Reich himself came to understand, is arguably minimalist, he used small repeated patterns and followed them with specific variations. Feldman was also, in spite of the sound of his work, deep in the classical tradition, so his patterns and variations are not just rhythms and bunches of notes, but timbres and tunings. Each change in bowing and dynamics, each quarter-tone bend, each extra moment of rest, is an essential piece of the structure. Where Reich and Glass go from a start to end end, Feldman makes a complex mosaic out of mix materials.

Bozzini was exact in all these details, with superb attention to tone quality along with precise rhythms and intonations. They seemed to start with a fast pace, but with fluid care to tempos the performance came in at a perfect 80 minutes. Overshadowed by the maximalist String Quartet No. 2 and the late piano music, String Quartet No. 1 is one of Feldman’s most “classical” works, with clear sections the ear can ponder and recall when they reappear. This was a special opportunity to hear an important work, but the number of people who walked out showed that the times still have fully not caught up to Feldman.

On Sunday, there were two concerts, one each of music by Reich and Glass, that were not only spectacular but had the excitement of taking music from the contemporary tradition and showing how it might spread, and even change, long after the composers are gone.

To get an early start celebrating Reich’s 90ᵗʰ birthday (October 3), the Dither electric guitar quartet and Sō Percussion—each augmented—played Electric Counterpoint, Piano Phase, Four Organs, and Sextet at a sold-out BAM Fisher. 

Electric Counterpoint is for a solo guitarist accompanied by prerecorded tracks of them playing the other parts. Dither took the music and arranged it for an ensemble of thirteen, eleven electric guitarists and two electric bassists. This made it big, and also bursting with energy.

The one minor sacrifice is that picking on the opening chords wasn’t completely precise with multiple players, but that was nothing compared to hearing this as large ensemble chamber music (this was also like a secret, retroactive link to Glenn Branca’s contemporaneous punk/classical guitar symphonies). Reich’s music live is full of the pleasure of seeing musicians working together on a complex and rewarding task, and it was dazzling to hear that applied to Electric Counterpoint—instead of hearing what one musician was experiencing, the listener had thirteen. The performance grew and grew in sensation, the rousing, joyous final movement brought down the house.

That creative approach was reflected in the rest of the program, which was all infrequently performed and important works from Reich’s career. Piano Phase and Four Organs are two of his key works. This first is a piano duo that takes his accidental discovery of what happens when patterns of sound move in an out of phase with each other and turns it into a performance composition. Sō’s Jason Treuting and Eric Cha-Beach played this at tandem pianos and seemed to bring a percussionist’s thinking to the keys. Rather than shimmering waves of sound as they took turns slowly leapfrogging each other in time, they produced intriguing combinations of notes, spontaneous phrases with phantom psychoacoustic details that spun out new structures.

Reich has explained Four Organs as the world’s longest dominant chord. With a percussionist shaking maracas at a steady beat for the whole fifteen-minute or so duration, the four keyboardists play the same chord, first simultaneously for an eighth-note, then gradually breaking it down into staggered individual notes, sustained and layered on each other. It’s an amazing reverse-process piece, like hearing the Big Bang modeled in sound, simple and also fiendish to count. The was an impressive performance, focused yet also relaxed, with a sense of fun shared between musicians an audience as the chord ever more slowly teased itself into being.

Inside a body of work that is all about the process, music that is constantly evolving, Sextet might be Reich’s most transitional work. It opens with a typical fast pulse of eighth-notes, and there is a steady bed of those throughout. But there are also sustained organ chords, washes of bowed notes from the metallophone. Sextet is in five movements and the division between each often come with dramatic gestures. The music is past Music for 18 Musicians and feels like it looks to City Life, which would come ten years later.

This was an exciting performance. The musicians set up the initial pulse with a good pace, not too fast, the sustained notes with a floating, languid feel. As with Electric Counterpoint, this picked up momentum when the players moved off the keyboards at the start to tuned percussion, working together in the interlocking repeated patterns. With another punctuation of enormous, positive energy at the end, this concert was not just a fine honoring of Reich, but a memorable example of the fundamental power of live music, and how a festival can bring in audiences for new experiences.

The marquee event, Sunday night at Roulette, was the Bang on a Can All-Stars playing the world premiere of a new arrangement of Glassworks. Glass’ music director, Michael Riesman, was on hand to tell the story behind it, and the composer sat in the front row, schmoozing with Lang, Gordon, and Wolfe before the performance.

The biggest change in this new arrangement is in the timbres. With an instrumentation of keyboards, percussion, bass, cello, guitar, and Ken Thomson’s soprano saxophone and bass clarinet, the sound is less dense than the organ-based Philip Glass Ensemble, augmented with brass, in the original.

In some ways, this was an easy transfer, especially with how natural arpeggios are on strings and guitar. In others, there were clear challenges that added an edge to familiar music, especially the quickness and endurance percussionist David Cossin needed to maintain so many repeated patterns, and Thomson’s often lung-busting role, which included handling the original wind ensemble parts in “Islands” entirely through altissimo playing on the bass clarinet. This had a gripping, haunting sound, one thought of the reaction from first hearing the opening bassoon solo in the Rite of Spring in 1913.

The All-Stars play new music with a touch of rock—it’s in their DNA and also in Glass’s. This came together with every strum from guitarist Taylor Levine, and made the “Rubric” movement sound like a punchy rock fanfare. 

The packed-in full-house audience, which had been in rapt silence, burst out in spontaneous applause after the section, eager to express their appreciation for the marvels of the music and this special event. As fine as the performance had been up to that point, this seemed to add a relaxed depth to “Facades” and the finale, which were beautiful in sound and expression.