Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival

For 23 of our 25 years, the Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival has transformed MASS MoCA into a genre-bending musical utopia for innovative composers and performers. Over three weeks, every nook and cranny of the campus comes alive with performances, workshops, and seminars focused on adventurous new music–culminating in LOUD Weekend, when renowned special guests, BoaC faculty, and young players take the Hunter Center stage in a series of playful and heady collisions of jazz, classical, rock and beyond. Fueled by more than three decades of Marathon concerts, Long Play Festival in Brooklyn, countless world tours and staged productions, Bang on a Can’s LOUD Weekend at MASS MoCA is a fully loaded, three-day, eclectic super-mix of creative, experimental, and unusual music.

LOUD Weekend kicks off Thursday, August 1 at 7:30pm with Duet Behavior, featuring legendary composer-vocalist Meredith Monk and percussionist John Hollenbeck — an intimate evening of Monk’s music combining her pioneering vocal magic with Hollenbeck’s inventive and masterful percussion. Highlights of the weekend include MEMORY GAME featuring Meredith Monk and Vocal Ensemble with the electric Bang on a Can All-Stars, cellist extraordinaire Maya Beiser’s variation of Terry Riley’s minimalist manifesto In C, Queens College Gamelan Yowana Sari performing a new work by Michael Gordon, Tristan Perich’s Dual Synthesis for 1-bit electronics and harpsichord, GEORGE (Anna Webber, Aurora Nealand, Chiquita Magic, John Hollenbeck), HxH (Chris Williams and Lester St. Louis), Lainie Fefferman’s one-woman band White Fire, visiting guest composers Huang Ruo, Marcos Balter, Mathew Rosenblum, Annika Socolofsky, Jeffery Brooks, and much more.