Summer Music Festival
MassMoCA is housing the Bang on a Can Summer Festival from July 9 through July 29 in 2007. The Festival consists of several programmes, such as the institute, the marathon and performances by the Bang on a Can All-Stars.
Bang on a Can has a strong connection and history with Dutch contemporary composers.
In 2007 two Dutch composers will be invited for a residency with workshops and performances of their new work.
The Bang on a Can All-Stars have commissioned a new work by Cornelis de Bondt and their famous marathon will consist of compositions by Martijn Padding, Louis Andriessen and others.
We will spend three weeks immersed in recent music that has changed the world. Available studies include Balinese music workshops, improvisation, as well as performance coaching, master classes, music business seminars and more. Composers will have their works performed. Players will perform publicly in ensembles sitting alongside their teachers. There are daily performances in the museum galleries, free and open to the public. Our special guest artist for 2007 is Don Byron. He will join us for the last week of the festival.

About the Residency and The Marathon
At this time the submissions for the residency are still in process. Two Dutch composers will be invited for a residency during the summer festival. The residency concludes with a six-hour blow-out Marathon Concert featuring performances by the student/faculty ensembles.
The faculty includes some of the most innovative musicians of our time. These are musicians who have dedicated their lives to commissioning, rehearsing, recording and performing music beyond the cutting edge.
The Marathon embodies everything that Bang on a Can believes about the world. Six hours of uncompromising, adventurous music from between the cracks, performed by the people who play it the best, presented to an enthusiastic audience in the most informal and inviting way. The marathon is part concert, part utopian vision. It is a manifesto in the form of a concert.

About Bang on a Can All Stars
The Bang on a Can All-Stars, New York's high-energy electric chamber ensemble premieres a new collaboration with the stunning Czech avant-folk songstress Iva Bittová. Bittová's haunting and riveting performance blends vocal and violin pyrotechnics with a theatrical flair on a par with performance art icons Laurie Anderson and Meredith Monk. Also don't miss the world premiere of a brand new work by the Dutch composer Cornelis de Bondt, commissioned for Bang on a Can, plus music by Michael Gordon, Gregg August and stunning film by the legendary Bill Morrison.
"Bittová is ...a marvel in person. Physically slight and wearing a red cocktail dress, she emitted an incredibly improbable combination of sounds with pinpoint precision, as casually as most people would a folk song or nursery rhyme. Imagine Minnie Ripperton as a chattering fairy or Meredith Monk on helium gas." Philadelphia Inquirer
Bang on a Can brings its signature event back to the Berkshires! 30+ musicians and composers of the Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival at Mass MoCA join up with American Jazz innovator Don Byron for a six-hour non-stop concert program highlighted by music performances with this celebrated clarinetist-composer. It's a lexicon of American 20th and 21st century music as rendered completely insane.

Vanity Fair:
"There are other places to hear new contemporary music, but it is seldom offered with such a potent blend of intensity, authority, and abandon."

The Guardian (London):
"Radical...demands to be heard."

The New York Times:
"A fiercely aggressive group, combining the power and punch of a rock band with the precision and clarity of a chamber ensemble."

Newsday:
"The Bang on a Can All-Stars present new music the way it should be presented -- with passion, precision, dynamism, stylistic authority and a welcoming informality." -