Bang on a Can began with a fabled marathon concert in May 1987; lasting over 12 hours, the event featured a wide range of contemporary music, collapsing the distinctions between musical genres. John Cage showed up and insisted on paying for a ticket, intent on supporting scrappy young composers Michael Gordon, Julia Wolfe, and David Lang. That first marathon set the tone for Bang on a Can’s ongoing mission to create a vibrant and inclusive community for new music, which has extended to LOUD Weekend, launched in 2019 as part of their long-running Summer Music Festival at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. This year, I drove up to North Adams on the last day of the festival to catch the boundary-pushing vocal works of composer-performers Annika Socolofsky, Lainie Fefferman, and Meredith Monk.
Socolofsky’s Don’t Say a Word is an extraordinarily beautiful and visceral exploration of the power and vulnerability of identity and the human voice. The set of “feminist-rager lullabies for a new queer era” was marked by an intense emotionality. Socolofsky dedicated one of her songs, “Like a diamond,” to the composer and pianist Sarah Gibson, whom we both first met at the 2015 Summer Festival when the three of us were fellows. Gibson died last month at the age of 38. Remembering Gibson’s warmth and generosity of spirit, Socolofsky said, “If there’s anything our field needs, it’s someone pulling down gates and inviting people in.”
The piece began with Socolofsky alone, singing, “hush” with an urgency and force belying the word. The lullabies, performed with fellows of the Summer Festival and Bang on a Can All Stars pianist Vicky Chow, require precise control of vocal techniques including belting, classical vibrato, and a kind of raging skirl, as well as a harsh, nasal timbre the composer matched with austerely orchestrated strings and winds.
Across several songs, the ensemble provided a richly-textured soundscape, allowing the vocal lines to have primacy. Socolofsky used the lower, huskier part of her voice on “Loves don’t / go,” which she performed with Chow. The song speaks less of rage than of a deeply-felt grief for a younger self grappling with queerness and patriarchy, and the two performed the song as an achingly beautiful duet. Throughout the performance, cellist Daniel Knapp’s playing was strikingly beautiful, and his pulsing chords with violinist Eunmoo Heo formed the heartbeat and held breath of “Like a diamond.”
Annika Socolofsky performs at Bang on a Can LOUD Weekend — Photo by Stephanie Berger Photography
Lainie Fefferman’s White Fire delves into the space between what is recorded and what is left off the page. The solo work for voice and electronics is an exploration of spiritual texts and themes, with Fefferman using layered samples to manipulate and transform her voice into an otherworldly presence.
A gifted and funny storyteller, Fefferman introduced White Fire with a playful grin, saying, “This is going to be very Jewish.” The work is an interpretation of the experiences of five women and girls in the Bible. Despite the trauma in the stories, the music and performance were full of sensuousness, fun, and feminism. Fefferman performed seated behind an array of black discs topped with pink nipple MIDI triggers that she activated with a drumstick. For much of the performance, her amplified voice was quiet and made mythical through a chorus of pre-recorded samples of her own voice.
As the Biblical Lilith – the first wife of Adam cast out of Eden and eternally doomed to give birth to 100 babies each day who would all die – her voice became demonic as she intoned, “I will not save them,” and “Ten hundred babies.” With a soundscape of wraiths and sub bass, the piece felt like Billie Eilish on acid combined with millennia of Talmudic tradition. For one single moment in the entire work, Fefferman let her voice soar, and the audience caught a glimpse of her startlingly pure, high, and powerful voice. The economy with which she used this particular gift was formidable.
Each character was delineated by a different pair of plastic club sunglasses, and between songs, Fefferman breathed deeply and audibly, signalling the hypnotic mysticism of “white fire”, the space between the “black fire” of recorded words. “Jezebel” was constructed partially live in the space, with crowd-sourced lyrics and a Max patch that took command of audience members’ phones. I was gradually surrounded by a deeply unsettling and precisely enunciated whisper chorus of gendered slurs that faded into the electronic soundscapes of “Jezebel” and “Dinah.”
Meredith Monk performs at Bang on a Can LOUD Weekend 2024 — Photo by Stephanie Berger
The festival culminated in “Memory Games,” a performance of works spanning Meredith Monk’s singular career. Each piece was arranged for the Bang and a Can All Stars and a vocal ensemble, comprising Monk herself with Theo Bleckmann, Katie Geissinger, and Allison Sniffin, who doubled on bowed psaltery. Half of the songs were from The Games: a science fiction opera (1984). Monk introduced the work by describing its conception in West Berlin in 1983, six years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, saying, “We felt the world had ended.” The opera’s premise is that the world has ended, and “The Games” are held to remember “Earth’s culture.”
The songs had a resolutely and lovingly 1980s aesthetic, with analogue synthesiser sounds and arpeggiated harmonies. Monk’s angular and geometric choreography was precise and perfectly quirky. Her arrangement of “Gamemaster’s Song” employed a delightful 8-bit chiptune synth sound performed by Chow, with Bleckmann as soloist. Monk played the role of the Gamemaster in a maniacal way reminiscent of Cabaret. Kebra-Seyoun Charles swapped their double bass for an electric, and with Mark Stewart on guitar, they formed an off-kilter rhythm section over which Monk yodeled.
“Downfall” featured a fantastic saxophone solo from Ken Thomson with breathy exclamation sounds that matched the singers’ Sprechstimme counting in German. And in “Totentanz” from impermanence (2006), Monk was lit up in red like a burning phoenix. The concert was full of playful interactions and intricate counterpoints, showcasing Monk’s ability to create complex musical structures that feel organic and spontaneous. The performers received a standing ovation, which only abated with a first, and then second encore.
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