The first of several large-scale free music events this month in New York City will take place on June 14 on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, when four vocalists will join 22 musicians playing more than 50 tablas for “Tablaphilia,” a musical interpretation of the four stages of life in Hindu philosophy. On June 19, the annual Bang on a Can Marathon will take place from 11 a.m. to midnight at the World Financial Center, with performers to include the Asphalt Orchestra, JACK Quartet, Young People’s Chorus of New York City, Prism Saxophone Quartet, and the Bang on a Can All-Stars. Composers to be featured at Bang on a Can include Kati Agócs, Timo Andres, Glenn Branca, David Lang, and Julia Wolfe. On June 20 at 7:30 p.m., the chamber orchestra The Knights will perform the world premiere of Lisa Bielawa’s Tempelhof Etude in the Naumburg Bandshell in Central Park; Tempelhof Etude is the first part of a 60-minute piece that will be performed by more than 600 musicians on the tarmac of the former Tempelhof Airport in Berlin in September 2012. On June 21, the annual Make Music New York event will occur all day throughout the city, with highlights including GROUP, in which audiences using the iPhone apps perform a new work by Aaron Siegel at the intersection off Broad and Wall Streets; Louis Andriessen’s Hoketus, scored for two spatially separated quintets and presented from the outdoor balconies of the New York Stock Exchange; and, in Morningside Park in Harlem, John Luther Adams’s Inuksuit, a 70-minute work for 99 percussionists, led by Douglas Perkins, organizer of last summer’s performance of Xenakis’s Persephassa in Central Park Lake. More information and complete schedules of events for the Bang on a Can Marathon and Make Music New York are available here and here.
Posted June 14, 2011
