Industry: Bang on a Can and New Music in the Marketplace

by William Robin

Overview

Amidst the heated fray of the Culture Wars emerged a scrappy festival in downtown New York City called Bang on a Can. Presenting eclectic, irreverent marathons of experimental music in crumbling venues on the Lower East Side, Bang on a Can sold out concerts for a genre that had been long considered box office poison. Through the 1980s and 1990s, three young, visionary composers—David Lang, Michael Gordon, and Julia Wolfe—nurtured Bang on a Can into a multifaceted organization with a major record deal, a virtuosic in-house ensemble, and a seat at the table at Lincoln Center, and in the process changed the landscape of avant-garde music in the United States.

Bang on a Can captured a new public for new music. But they did not do so alone. As the twentieth century came to a close, the world of American composition pivoted away from the insular academy and towards the broader marketplace. In the wake of the unexpected popularity of Steve Reich and Philip Glass, classical presenters looked to contemporary music for relevance and record labels scrambled to reap its potential profits, all while government funding was imperilled by the evangelical right. Other institutions faltered amidst the vagaries of late capitalism, but the renegade Bang on a Can survived—and thrived—in a tumultuous and idealistic moment that made new music what it is today.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780190068653
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	02/22/2021
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	8.30(w) x 5.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

William Robin is an assistant professor of musicology at the University of Maryland's School of Music. He has published work on contemporary music, orchestral culture, and early American hymns in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Musical Quarterly, and the Journal of Musicology, and he contributes regularly to The New York Times.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations
Introduction
1. Academics
2. Horizons
3. Festivals
4. Funding
5. All-Stars
6. Lincoln Center
7. Record labels
Epilogue
Chronology
Acknowledgements
Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

"Aiding Robin in his efforts to weave the history of Bang on a Can through these broader vistas are his tremendous skills as a writer, honed through his experience as a professional music critic. The result is a book that is not only illuminating but also a genuine pleasure to read." — Eric Drott, Journal of the Royal Musical Association

"This book is a tribute to the survival of emerging musical forms." — S. Lenig, CHOICE

"Ready-made for introducing scholars, students, and the general public to the culture of new music in the late twentieth-century. Accessible and informative, Robin—in the spirit of his subject—has written scholarship that nonetheless just might reach new people." — Journal of Musicological Research

"This book is a tribute to the survival of emerging musical forms. Summing Up: Highly recommended." — CHOICE

"This is an excellent book. It tells a series of interwoven stories – a tale of three composers and their music, a tale of a festival and its house band, a tale of new music in New York and how that music configured itself in relation to state and corporate funding. Industry is a reminder that a book with real scholarly significance can also be a good read." — Christopher Fox

"Industry: Bang on a Can and New Music in the Marketplace, by William Robin, an assistant professor of musicology at the University of Maryland, is a colorful, insightful, and admirably evenhanded study of Bang on a Can in its early years and, by extension, of the creative upheavals in the music world at the end of the twentieth century." — Tim Page, New York Review of Books

"Sparks vital conversation about what music based on solidarity might one day look like." — The Wire

"In the past decade, William Robin has established himself not only as one of America's most formidable younger musicologists but also as an incisive, eloquent writer in the public sphere. His study of Bang on a Can gives lavish evidence of his multisided brilliance: it is at once an absorbing historical narrative and an exacting work of critical analysis. No scholar or fan of contemporary American music can do without it." — Alex Ross

"William Robin breaks important new ground with this thick historical and ethnographic description of how networks of ensembles, institutions, listeners, and new technologies come together to forge new experimental music communities and marketplaces. Much more than a history of a new music ensemble, this book incisively chronicles a larger movement aimed at revitalizing expression, reception, and diversity in contemporary American classical music." — George E. Lewis, author of A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music

"One thing that becomes clear over the course of Industry is the degree to which the group's embrace of the market in practical terms amounted to an embrace of marketing." — Eric Drott, Journal of the Royal Musical Association

From the Publisher