Bang on a Can All Stars, 2008.  Photo credit: Michael Nagle for The New York Times

by Vivien Schweitzer

The former aesthetic battlegrounds of the classical music world are being mellowed by eclecticism, now the dominant trend. Many composers, performers, and curators freely mix and match genres, borrowing from classical, jazz, pop, rock, and world music. The uptown – downtown schism seems almost nonexistent, with even the graying pillars of modernism taking a less dogmatic approach. But that certainly wasn’t the case in 1987, when the first Bang on a Can marathon took place in a loft in Soho, New York City.

Musical borders were then often fiercely guarded, with adherents of different aesthetic schools obeying the strictures of their particular niches. That attitude frustrated David Lang, Julia Wolfe, and Michael Gordon when they arrived in NYC in the early 1980s after graduating from the Yale School of Music. They wanted to create a platform for composers such as themselves who couldn’t be neatly pigeonholed.

"We play African music, outer space music, joyous music..."

The Sun Ra Arkestra was founded in mid-1950s Chicago by the jazz composer, musician, bandleader, philosopher, Afro-Futurist, mystic (and also graphic designer, poet, activist, and self-proclaimed Saturnian) Sun Ra (1914–1993). In 1968, Sun Ra brought the Arkestra to Philadelphia, its home for the next four decades. The group still performs here today under the leadership of composer and multi-instrumentalist Marshall Allen, an Arkestra member since 1958.

In August 2010, Matthew Feldman and John Pettit spoke to Allen and Arkestra musicians Danny Thompson, Michael Ray, Dave Davis, and Wayne Smith, Jr. about the group’s past, present, and future. Click the play audio link below to listen.

On September 12, the Arkestra will perform as part of the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival’s Bang on a Can marathon. For more details: http://livearts-fringe.org/details.cfm?id=12728

Play audio >

by Nancy Guy, University of California, San Diego

Video clip from the Philadelphia Chinese Opera Society's performance of The Case of Chen Shimei, 7/25/2010, featuring Kang Wansheng in the role of Judge Bao. Credit: Winston Gao

Imagine a bright and shimmering voice so remarkable in its high tessitura and strength that the chief accompanist must choose from among his large collection of (jinghu) instruments to find the one capable of supporting and complimenting this singer’s extraordinary sound. Such was the case when the eminent Peking opera singer, Kang Wansheng, who specializes in playing painted face roles, recently joined the Philadelphia Chinese Opera Society (PCOS) in a performance of The Case of Chen Shimei. The PCOS is comprised of professional performers from China who now reside in the U.S., and aspiring local performers who have been trained exclusively in the U.S. For large-scale events, such as that sponsored by the Philadelphia Music Project, special guest artists join the PCOS in bringing to life this uniquely Chinese performing art. For the July 25^th performance, the guest stars were Mr. Kang, who belongs to the top rank of Peking opera (known also as “Beijing opera” or jingju) performers in China and is semiretired from the prestigious Tianjin Peking Opera Troupe, and Ms. Qin Xueling, an award-winning performer of young coquette roles.

by Tom Moon

Author and music critic Tom Moon reflects on the Wayne Shorter Quartet's appearance at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in April 2010, which featured an afternoon panel discussion and the world premiere of Shorter's new composition Lotus, commissioned by the Museum with support from the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage through the Philadelphia Music Project.

Wayne Shorter, 2006.

The saxophonist and composer Wayne Shorter is often described as an “original thinker,” or “iconoclast,” or “bold visionary,” one of those rare souls who follows his own muse. For decades, these phrases have attached to Shorter like barnacles—hey’ve become a kind of media shorthand, serving to honor his contributions while at the same time signaling that he’s a breed apart, in substantial ways not like the rest of us. Such tags stand in for (and can sometimes circumvent) more consequential discussion:  just as Miles Davis, one of Shorter’s employers and champions, was often summed up as “mercurial,” Shorter is tagged as a path-finding “brain,” as though an honorific, any honorific, could fully characterize his output, much less his artistic spirit.

Composer David Lang reflects on his composition "statement to the court," to be premiered by The Crossing on June 27, 2010.

Donald Nally, the conductor of The Crossing, asked me for a piece to go into a series about the poems of Philip Levine.