Bang On A Can All-Stars: Ryuichi Sakamoto: 1996

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.

By the time Ryuichi Sakamoto released 1996 three decades ago, he was already a star. Yellow Magic Orchestra had already had hits, broken up, reunited, and broken up again. He’d not only starred alongside David Bowie in Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence but also famously talked his way into composing the score, launching an astonishing run that became much more than a side project: The Last Emperor, Wild Palms, Wuthering Heights, The Sheltering Sky. He’d worked with Western rock stars like David Sylvian and Iggy Pop, making prescient albums that fused genres in unimagined ways. He’d even composed music for the opening ceremony of the 1992 Olympics. 1996 was his attempt to distill all of that, to bring those scores and themes and recent album cuts back to the piano, surrounded by a small string section. But it became so much more, his sweeping sense of melody and expansive sense of dynamics on clear and powerful display in such a compact setting. It presented a 16-track argument for why Sakamoto was one of the best composers of his generation when he was barely past 40. Sakamoto died in 2023. Arranged by Bang on a Can All-Star clarinetist and composer Ken Thomson, this live interpretation of 1996 is a poignant homage to the global star.