“When things are tough all around us, we dream,” the composers Michael Gordon, David Lang and Julia Wolfe wrote in a letter to potential donors in 1996.
Bang on a Can, the up to date music group they’d based a decade earlier than, had just lately misplaced a few fifth of its finances due to large cuts to the National Endowment for the Arts. But Gordon, Lang and Wolfe have been undeterred.
“It’s a Bang on a Can thing,” they added within the letter. “Just as arts funding is collapsing, we’re mounting new projects to build a new audience for a new kind of music.” Within a 12 months, the group had began one such undertaking: the People’s Commissioning Fund, an revolutionary program which pooled small donations to be able to fee composers to write down works for a home ensemble, the Bang on a Can All-Stars.
This enterprise was a direct response to the perilous local weather for American artists within the 1990s. When Newt Gingrich’s legislative manifesto, Contract With America, swept a Republican majority into Congress in 1994, the N.E.A. was on the chopping block. Since the late ’80s, when evangelical Christians denounced the images of Andres Serrano and Robert Mapplethorpe on obscenity grounds, the humanities endowment had been a central goal of conservative ire. In 1995, Congress voted to slash the N.E.A. finances by 40 p.c — and, much more drastic, to remove practically all grants awarded to particular person artists.
For American composers, who had relied on these grants for many years, the hazards have been clear. “There is no art without artists,” representatives of the American Music Center wrote to Jane Alexander, President Bill Clinton’s N.E.A. chairman, earlier than the congressional cuts. “Direct support to artists makes possible research and development in the arts, not only for artists themselves but for the future of art. The resulting work of individual artists can sometimes be messy or controversial, but it is necessary.”
After the cuts, establishments scrambled to adapt to getting even much less help than the middling help the federal government had beforehand provided. “Funding for individual artists has been under attack for years, and with N.E.A.’s ongoing cutbacks the situation has become even more grim. We decided to take matters into our own hands, and began appealing directly to the people to support new work,” Michael Gordon wrote in 1999 of the creation of the People’s Commissioning Fund two years earlier.
The administrators of Bang on a Can had lengthy been taking issues into their very own fingers, creating a house for avant-garde music amid a decline in public funding. Arriving in New York within the mid-1980s contemporary from graduate research at Yale, Gordon, Lang and Wolfe had uninterested in the sort of new-music concert events that appeared to cater solely to a small circle of fellow musicians.
They wished to achieve a broader public. In 1987, they placed on the primary Bang on a Can Festival, a 12-hour marathon that they billed as an “eclectic supermix of composers and styles from the serial to the surreal.” They closely promoted the live performance, mailing out fliers, hanging posters and pitching newspapers for protection. They saved ticket costs low, bought beer on the venue — a gallery in SoHo — and skipped conventional live performance niceties like program notes. It labored: The gallery reached capability, with greater than 400 individuals dropping by into the early hours of the morning.
Bang on a Can quickly grew right into a multi-event annual competition for which giant crowds confirmed as much as hear every part from the participatory meditations of Pauline Oliveros to the dissonant hockets of Louis Andriessen. “The audience was everything a presenter of classical music could hope for,” the New York Times critic Allan Kozinn wrote of the 1991 marathon. “Predominantly young, open to a broad range of styles, and enthusiastic but discriminating.”
In 1992 Bang on a Can based its All-Stars ensemble, an amplified sextet that expanded the group’s footprint outdoors New York and carved out a hard-rocking, Post-Minimalist aesthetic. By the late ’90s, the group had signed a recording contract with Sony Classical, held its marathons at Lincoln Center and commanded a finances of practically half 1,000,000 {dollars}.
Though they noticed themselves as emblematically do-it-yourself, the founders of Bang on a Can weren’t alone in believing that up to date music may discover a greater viewers. It was an ethos that suffused the period. At the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1981, practically 10,000 individuals took in a sold-out run of Philip Glass’s opera “Satyagraha.” At the New York Philharmonic two years later, a contemporary music festival unexpectedly grew to become a box-office sensation. The group Meet the Composer dotted the nation’s orchestras with composers in residence, paid for with tens of millions of {dollars} from Exxon, the Rockefeller Foundation and the N.E.A. A 1992 album that includes a lachrymose symphony from the ’70s by Henryk Gorecki sold a million copies for Nonesuch, igniting a new-music rush within the file trade.
And as public funding for the humanities shrunk via the Reagan years and after, some started to argue that American composers truly didn’t want such subsidies: They may survive, maybe even thrive, within the market.
“The healthiest thing for the arts is for them to be profit-making,” John Duffy, the founding father of Meet the Composer, stated in 1991. “Composers should come to a certain point where they earn a living from their work and they don’t have to rely on government or private support.”
Through its first decade, Bang on a Can had pursued fund-raising with a single-minded devotion uncommon within the up to date music world, interesting to foundations and donors by showcasing their inventive deserves and their success with audiences. So the lack of federal funding in 1996 was seen as a brief setback. The group designed the People’s Commissioning Fund partially to mitigate the disappearance of N.E.A. help for the creation of recent works by particular person composers. Instead, as one description of the brand new fund acknowledged, “Our audience members and supporters become commissioners themselves, actively shaping a world where emerging composers can flourish.”
A shiny postcard from 1997 asserting the undertaking and soliciting donations stated, in usually cheeky Bang on a Can fashion, “Yes! I have passionate feelings about the future of new music! No! I am not a materialist! I don’t need another tote bag, or umbrella, or toaster! I want opportunities to get closer to the music I support, the composers who write it and the performers who play it!” Donor-members may contribute as little as 5 {dollars}, with advantages starting from entry to open rehearsals to an invite to a dinner with the commissioned composers. By 1999, membership had reached 300.
The fund was aligned with Bang on a Can’s bigger mission to help experimental musicians, who might not have been chosen for N.E.A. grants previously. Among the primary spherical of commissioned artists was Pamela Z, a composer-performer who ingeniously manipulates and merges her voice with electronics. “I didn’t have a lot of experience composing chamber music,” she recalled in a 2019 interview. “The Bang on a Can People’s Commissioning Fund was a really key part of my growth as an artist.”
Bang on a Can described the brand new undertaking as a extra democratic various to the distant foundations or rich patrons who usually sponsored new works; one proposal pitched the fund as “new music for the people.” (Archival data present that somebody urged it’s renamed, because the People’s Commissioning Fund sounded “too socialist.”) But whereas it was successful, there’s something troubling concerning the circumstances of its emergence: an period of public items refigured into non-public enterprise.
Even if it was a part of a large authorities forms, the N.E.A.’s funding of particular person composers actually was new music for the individuals. By advantage of paying taxes — Jane Alexander often remarked that every citizen’s contribution to the humanities endowment value the equal of two postage stamps — the American individuals commissioned new artwork, and have been invested within the democratic governance of a nationwide system of cultural patronage.
Like lots of its friends, Bang on a Can was making an attempt to salvage vestiges of the N.E.A.’s help for particular person artists within the wake of the endowment’s decimation by free-market conservatives and the spiritual proper. The People’s Commissioning Fund was crowdfunding earlier than Kickstarter, and Bang on a Can was anticipating the default mode of arts financing within the 21st century: patching collectively earnings streams from many small sources, scrambling for grants and, an increasing number of, petitioning individuals to open their wallets. But simply as GoFundMe campaigns can’t substitute for public medical insurance, non-public commissioning endeavors can solely achieve this a lot with out strong authorities help for the humanities.
The People’s Commissioning Fund has continued to supply important support for rising voices in up to date composition, having commissioned over 70 works since its founding. If not for the pandemic, its annual live performance, carried out by the All-Stars, would have occurred in January. Bang on a Can has moved its occasions on-line, although, and can host its next in a series of livestreamed marathons on Feb. 21, together with the premieres of 16 works.
The world that the group has constructed over the previous few many years has served as an important mannequin for subsequent generations of entrepreneurial musicians. But within the wake of the Great Recession and now amid the existential menace of the pandemic, the strategies by which Bang on a Can survived the 1990s might not be sustainable. Do-it-yourself can solely go to date with out the federal government lending a serving to hand. Now, when what little stays of this nation’s help for tradition has been imperiled, it’s time for America to make a brand new contract with its artists.
William Robin’s e book “Industry: Bang on a Can and New Music in the Marketplace” can be printed on Feb. 22 by Oxford University Press. That night, he’ll talk about it with the music critic Allan Kozinn in a livestreamed event hosted by the 92nd Street Y.
