Bang on a Can Presents Violist and Composer Jessica Pavone at The Noguchi Museum on August 13
Friday, August 13, 2021
Doors 6:15pm / Performance 6:30pm–7:30pm
The Noguchi Museum | 9-01 33rd Road | Long Island City, NY
Extremely limited tickets ($10) on sale beginning Friday, July 30 at 12pm at www.noguchi.org/bangonacan
Celebrating their eleventh season of collaboration, on Friday, August 13, 2021 at 6:30pm, Bang on a Can and The Noguchi Museum present the first of three concerts in the 2021 Artists at Noguchi season, a monthly series of performances in the Museum’s garden and galleries. The Bang on a Can | Artists at Noguchi series features musicians performing an inclusive blend of music from across genres and across the world. Concerts in September and October will be announced soon.
On August 13, violist and composer Jessica Pavone will present an acoustic program of original music for solo viola. The New York Times has described Pavone’s music as “distinct and beguiling…its core is steely, and its execution clear.” Her indeterminate pieces for solo viola stem from years of concentrated long tone practice and an interest in repetition, song form, and the interplay between musical instrument and the human body. She combines her long-tone rituals with delay, understated melodies, and sparse lyrical content while continuously experimenting with new forms within the music. The compositions are informed by her physical relationship to her instrument and the role the body plays in the sound and intention.
In 2011, Pavone was featured in NPR’s “The Mix: 100 Composers Under 40” and The Wire magazine has since praised her “ability to transform a naked tonal gesture into something special.”
This performance will take place in The Noguchi Museum’s first floor gallery, with only 30 public tickets available. Tickets are $10 (the same price as museum admission) and allow patrons access to the galleries and garden after hours. Doors open at 6:15pm and the performance runs from 6:30pm–7:30pm. Masks are required. More information is available at 718.204.7088 or www.noguchi.org/bangonacan. The Noguchi Museum is located at 9-01 33rd Road (at Vernon Boulevard), Long Island City, NY.
About Jessica Pavone: As both an instrumentalist and composer, Pavone explores tactile experience in her compositions and performances and has produced four albums of solo viola music, all of which present indeterminate pieces that stem from years of concentrated long tone practice and an interest in repetition, song form, and sympathetic vibration. Pavone has been a composer in residence at the Ucross Foundation, Soaring Gardens, Arts Letters & Numbers, and Mise-En_Place; has received commissions from New Music USA, Queens Council on the Arts, MATA Interval, the Jerome Foundation, Tri-Centric Foundation, and Experiments in Opera; and has premiered work in NYC venues including Roulette, Abrons Art Center, the Museum of Art and Design, and The Kitchen. Her albums have been produced by Tzadik, Taiga Records, Thirsty Ear, Astral Spirits, Relative Pitch, Birdwatcher, and Skirl Records, and she has released four collaborative duo recordings with guitarist Mary Halvorson. From 2005 to 2012, Pavone toured regularly with Anthony Braxton’s Sextet and 12+1tet, and she appears on his discography from that time.
About Bang on a Can: Bang on a Can is dedicated to making music new. Since its first Marathon concert in 1987, Bang on a Can has been creating an international community dedicated to innovative music, wherever it is found. With adventurous programs, it commissions new composers, performs, presents, and records new work, develops new audiences, and educates the musicians of the future. Bang on a Can is building a world in which powerful new musical ideas flow freely across all genres and borders. Bang on a Can plays “a central role in fostering a new kind of audience that doesn’t concern itself with boundaries. If music is made with originality and integrity, these listeners will come.” (The New York Times)
Bang on a Can has grown from a one-day New York-based Marathon concert (on Mother’s Day in 1987 in a SoHo art gallery) to a multi-faceted performing arts organization with a broad range of year-round international activities. “When we started Bang on a Can, we never imagined that our 12-hour marathon festival of mostly unknown music would morph into a giant international organization dedicated to the support of experimental music, wherever we would find it,” write Bang on a Can Co-Founders Michael Gordon, David Lang and Julia Wolfe. “But it has, and we are so gratified to be still hard at work, all these years later. The reason is really clear to us – we started this organization because we believed that making new music is a utopian act – that people needed to hear this music and they needed to hear it presented in the most persuasive way, with the best players, with the best programs, for the best listeners, in the best context. Our commitment to changing the environment for this music has kept us busy and growing, and we are not done yet.”
In March 2020, when the pandemic began, Bang on a Can responded with the Live Online concert series including its signature Marathon concerts. With this online series, Bang on a Can has been able to support composers and performers and engage audiences throughout the pandemic shutdown. Other in-person programs include two festivals LOUD Weekend at MASS MoCA and LONG PLAY, current projects include The People's Commissioning Fund, a membership program to commission emerging composers; the Bang on a Can All-Stars, who tour to major festivals and concert venues around the world every year; recording projects; the Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival at MASS MoCA, a professional development program for young composers and performers led by today’s pioneers of experimental music; Asphalt Orchestra, Bang on a Can’s extreme street band that offers mobile performances re-contextualizing unusual music; Found Sound Nation, a new technology-based musical outreach program now partnering with the State Department of the United States of America to create OneBeat, a revolutionary, post-political residency program that uses music to bridge the gulf between young American musicians and young musicians from developing countries; cross-disciplinary collaborations and projects with DJs, visual artists, choreographers, filmmakers and more. Each new program has evolved to answer specific challenges faced by today’s musicians, composers and audiences, in order to make innovative music widely accessible and wildly received. Bang on a Can’s inventive and aggressive approach to programming and presentation has created a large and vibrant international audience made up of people of all ages who are rediscovering the value of contemporary music. Bang on a Can has also recently launched its new digital archive, CANLAND, an extensive archive of its recordings, videos, posters, program books, and more. Thirty-three years of collected music and associated ephemera have been digitized and archived online and is publicly accessible in its entirety at www.canland.org. For more information about Bang on a Can, please visit www.bangonacan.org.
About The Noguchi Museum: Founded in 1985 by Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988), one of the leading sculptors and designers of the twentieth century, The Noguchi Museum was the first museum in America to be established, designed, and installed by a living artist to show their own work. Widely viewed in itself as among the artist’s greatest achievements, the Museum comprises ten indoor galleries in a converted factory building, as well as an acclaimed outdoor sculpture garden. Since its founding, it has served as an international hub for Noguchi research and appreciation. In addition to housing the artist’s archives and catalogue raisonné, the Museum exhibits a comprehensive selection of sculpture, models for public projects and gardens, dance sets, and his Akari light sculptures. Provocative installations drawn from the permanent collection, along with diverse special exhibitions related to Noguchi and the milieu in which he worked, offer a rich, contextualized view of Noguchi’s art and illuminate his enduring influence as a category-defying, multicultural, cross-disciplinary innovator. For more information, please visit www.noguchi.org or follow @noguchimuseum.
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