Bang On A Can All-Stars: Michael Gordon: Field of Vision

Across four decades, Bang on a Can has become an indispensable American art institution, not only working as a wellspring of and syndicate for new music but also reinvigorating foundational works of the past. When Michael Gordon, David Lang, and Julia Wolfe arrived in New York from Yale in the mid-’80s, the young composers were struck by the way that contemporary classical music felt like a closed system, a few people playing for each other with no hope of sharing it to a wider world. They changed that, beginning with the first Bang on a Can festival in New York in 1987 and extending it in most every direction imaginable for a performing-art organization: a record label, multiple festivals, a program where small donations from patrons pay for audacious commissions, a touring-and-recording band of All-Stars that have spread these sounds to the world’s far-flung places. “They have sustained what may be the most convivial vanguard in modern musical history,” Alex Ross wrote in The New Yorker. “The cult of genius has given way to a ritual of collaboration.” This year at Big Ears, Bang on a Can celebrates four decades with major works from three of its founders and three legendary composers.

During the last two decades, Gordon has composed several works for ensembles consisting of identical instruments: four electric guitars, seven bassoons, six percussionists wielding stacks of 2x4s. Field of Vision, premiered at an upstate New York arts center in 2022, is the new apogee of this approach. Three dozen percussionists spread across an outdoors expanse, arrayed in rings. They wield gongs and bass drums, bell plates tuned to specific keys and brake drums salvaged from auto-body shops. Across an hour, they move from industrial mayhem to gamelan radiance to sounds so quiet you may wonder if the source is actually human. “I think of this perspective of sound a bit like moving from two-dimensional art to three-dimensional art,” Gordon has said. “Sound isn’t a flat line—in Field of Vision it takes on multiple roles in space and time.” The result is an active trance, hypnotic like gnawa music or minimalism. Field of Vision has been performed on three continents. At Big Ears 2027, the University of Michigan Percussion Ensemble plays it with guests from the University of Tennessee’s Natalie L. Haslam College of Music.