Live Log 2024: BOAC Gets LOUD At MASS MoCA
Touching down on Bang On A Can's Summer Festival in the Berkshires.
While many new music ensembles have committed fans I see at concert after concert, there may be no group better at creating community than Bang On A Can. The prototype is their signature marathon, 12 hours of continuous music performed by a rotating cast in a single venue. Even during the pandemic, the online version provided memorable musical moments and a lively stream of chatter on YouTube. They also have Longplay weekend in Brooklyn, into which I got to dip a toe last year, dashing from show to show in several venues.
Then there’s the LOUD Weekend, possibly the piece de resistance among all BOAC’s festival offerings. Having it at Mass MoCA, a sprawling museum in a repurposed factory nestled in the Berkshires, gives a sense of focus to the enterprise. Rather than the distractions of urban life, festival goers have an experience enriched by the extraordinary art surrounding them, including permanent displays of work by Sol Lewitt and James Turrell.
As Stockbridge, MA - my home away from home - is only about an hour away, I’ve had the good fortune of going to Mass MoCA several times in its 25-year history. I’ve even attended concerts there, including BOAC playing Brian Eno and Bon Iver accompanying a dance performance. Yet I’ve never visited one of the many festivals they host. This year, the stars aligned. My daughter wanted to visit Mass MoCA as a potential resource for local graduate programs and the best time for us to go turned out to be LOUD Weekend. Having soaked up some of the offerings and atmosphere, I know what I’ve been missing - and can’t recommend it highly enough.
August 2nd, 2024
Our LOUD kicked off with a missed connection that became a lucky break. Dinner at Betty’s Pizza in Lenox took a little longer than we expected - and would have been longer still had we ordered pizza, which was 45 minutes delayed - so we had to book it up Route 8 to North Adams. We rushed from the parking lot to the entrance and checked in at the desk. We had timed it to get to a Marcos Balter concert so when the greeter told us, “Our next event is starting shortly and this is how you get to it,” we assumed that was what we were heading for.
When we walked into the B6 Event Space, I was surprised to see the room full and the concert just starting. I hadn’t thought we’d cut it that close! A chamber ensemble was playing lovely and mysterious music so we quietly made our way to a spot on the side. As I listened I thought Marco was trying some new things. I had expected a different sound world but was nonetheless captivated.
The writing for flute, oboe, clarinet, and bassoon was particularly distinctive, balanced between minimalism and impressionism. When there was a break, I spotted an empty seat in the second row and squeezed through the crowd to sit down. As my new neighbors grumbled, I finally had a chance to refer to the little program I had received at the desk. It turned out we were at the Spotlight On Meredith Monk! My confusion had led me to listen with an open mind. I quickly reevaluated my relationship with Monk, whom I had always thought was not for me. The rest of the piece, entitled Backlight (2015), was equally beautiful.
Then we got a real treat: the great Vicky Chow ripped through four solo piano pieces, including the explosive Paris. No one was more delighted with the brilliant performance than the 81-year-old composer, who leapt out of her seat to embrace Chow in a heartfelt show of appreciation. There are fine recordings of these works by Bruce Brubaker, Ursula Oppens, and Conrad Tao, but I hope Chow includes her fiery interpretations on her next album.
We then returned to the main building to find the Hunter Center, which revealed itself as the massive space where we had seen Bon Iver and BOAC before. We were finally in the right place for the Spotlight On Marcos Balter, a Brazilian-born, New York-dwelling composer of great skill and warmth who is also the Fritz Reiner Professor of Musical Composition at Columbia University. I was first introduced to his music in 2013 on the inaugural collection from Claire Chase’s Density project, to which he contributed a piece for solo flute.
This show also began with a solo work, Memoria (2007), played with a breathless intensity by cellist Nick Photinos. It proved a fine appetizer for the main event, a performance of Meltdown Upshot (2013), a widescreen epic originally composed for Ensemble Dal Niente, the group founded by Balter, and Deerhoof, his favorite band. I’ve never been a big fan but their drummer, Greg Saunier, is a fantastic player I was lucky enough to see in 2013 with Sean Lennon in a rare performance of their Mystical Weapons project.
Balter introduced the piece with some tales of its conception and it was fascinating to hear how he worked with the members of Deerhoof, who don’t read music. The band was eager to take on a through-composed piece, including Saunier, whom Balter originally assumed would bash it out. The result? “Deerhoof ate Dal Niente for breakfast!” as Balter gleefully recalled. The 25-minute work made the most of the blended ensemble, including three vocalists. One intricate section foregrounded guitars, mandolin, harp, and drums while another atmospherically combined suspended chords and a distant pulse with shades of Katy Lied-era Steely Dan.
Much was made in the promotions leading up to the festival that BOAC’s percussionist, David Cossin, would be playing a rock kit, and he shined bright indeed in many explosive moments. However, the player who seemed to have the most fun was violinist Todd Reynolds. His fully engaged performance was a delightful entryway into the piece, which the original forces recorded in 2016 - get to it.
There were three more concerts ahead that evening and the buzzing crowd indicated they would be well-attended but we were beat and headed back to Stockbridge.
August 3, 2024
The first performance on Saturday wasn’t until noon. This gave us time for an early lunch in Mass MoCA’s excellent cafeteria before going to Club B10, an intimate black-box space on the building’s highest level, to hear Julius Eastman’s Gay Guerilla (1979). Usually played on piano (or pianos), this may have been the first time the mesmerizing work was realized by a nine-piece ensemble including flute, clarinets, saxophones, bassoon, keyboards, harp, and electric guitar. As composer David Lang, one of BOAC’s founders, wisely said during his introduction, the amount of flexibility Eastman built into his scores makes “every performance a world premiere.”
This version of the work felt so right - and so powerful - that you could have easily convinced me that Eastman wrote it for exactly this group. There was also a spiritual quality emanating from the musicians, related both to their connection to the music they were playing and their deep listening to each other. It was a richly gratifying and even humbling experience and we left Club B10 almost in a trance. Shabaka, who had premiered a new work on Thursday night, seemed to feel the same way as he walked out carrying his flute.
We spent the next hour and change absorbing some of the extraordinary exhibitions, including Like Magic, a multimedia, multidisciplinary group show. There was music there, too, including graphic scores by Raven Chacon and a film by Tourmaline that featured a fascinating soundtrack by Geo Wyex.
Later in the afternoon, we went to a space called the Chalet, half of which is a charmingly rustic wood-lined bar, with the other half feeling like an empty gallery in old SoHo. Rather than music, we were there for the LOUD Weekend Conversation between WNYC’s Terrance McKnight and John Schaefer about “Media’s Place in the New Music Ecosystem.” It was a lively back-and-forth, as the veteran broadcasters talked about their paths into new music, radio vs. podcasting, and the current landscape for young music journalists.
Schaefer told the amusing story of Hit Em, a new genre of electronic music born out of a dream Matmos’ Drew Daniel had and then tweeted about, leading to people making it real with their interpretations of the sound he described. Despite following Daniel, who also releases music as The Soft Pink Truth, and looking at Twitter regularly, this was the first I heard about it - which says something about how hard it is to keep up in today’s media morass.
After spending some more time in the galleries, including Chris Doyle’s surreal video The Coast Of Industry, which had a cool electronic soundtrack by Jeremy Turner, and Musicians On Musicians, a photo show curated by Wilco, who put on their own festival at Mass MoCA, it was time for dinner. We wanted to try Casita, the new Mexican restaurant on campus, but it was completely booked. They were offering margarita service only on the back patio, which was tempting but did not bode well for the drive home. So we drove down the road for five minutes to the Craft Food Barn and enjoyed burgers and ice cream at their picnic tables.
Like any music festival worth its salt, LOUD Weekend forces you to make hard choices. Between 7:00 and 8:00 PM, we had to pick between overlapping shows by Tilt, the trio of Isabel Crespo Pardo, Carmen Quill, and Kalia Vandever, Lainie Fefferman (performing White Fire), or HxH, the duo of Lester St. Louis and Chris Williams.
We settled on White Fire, at least partly because I knew it would give us a chance to say hi to Jascha Narveson, Fefferman’s partner and collaborator and a great composer in his own right. Having praised White Fire for its utterly original soundscape and “crushing inevitability,” I was eager to see how Fefferman would present it in concert. She turned out to be an incredibly compelling performer, switching sunglasses to embody the biblical women (Rebecca, Lilith, Miriam, Jezebel, and Dinah) she was singing about and giving entertaining and informative introductions to each song.
While some sounds were preprogrammed, she added dynamics by triggering percussion and other noises on a series of sensors - made by Narveson with a 3D printer - arrayed in front of her by hitting them with drumsticks. Fefferman also used a QR code to direct us to a website where we could enter a word or two about what the name Jezebel meant to us. She then incorporated our contributions into the song, creating an almost overwhelming word cloud that reflected the complex, often misogynistic, associations that have become attached themselves to the name and the person.
I can’t recommend White Fire and its successor, Here I Am, highly enough, and if you get a chance to see either in concert, grab it. Even with all we missed that night and throughout LOUD Weekend, I’m so glad we got to experience as much as we did. Long may BOAC reign!
BOAC just announced their 2024-25 season, including LOUD Weekend, which will happen July 31st-August 2nd, 2025.
From the archives:
Live Log 2023: An Eastman Excursion
Bon Iver’s Dance Music
BOAC AT MMOCA: The Eno Has Landed