Musically, New York was in a slump in 1987, and the first Bang on a Can festival caught the city sleeping. No one realized that the decade had been pregnant with a new musical ear, and no one expected a new style to emerge full-blown at an audacious, oddly- named little festival never heard of before. (At least one audience member actually brought his own can). No one expected these things, that is, except Michael Gordon, Julia Wolfe, and David Lang, the composers who started Bang on a Can.

Post-minimalism, the New Tonality, the New Dissonance, the New Formalism: all these murky labels together circumscribe the concerns of the Bang on a Can composers, but no one term does their diversity justice. By 1987, minimalist repetition had become unfashionable, but Bang on a Can music began with minimalism’s reduction of materials and grew outward. Dissonance was once again OK, but twelve-tone music’s scattershot diffuseness wasn’t; even the thorniest Bang on a Can music tended to pick a few meaty chords and stick with them. Most Bang on a Can music sounded arguably tonal, but the tonalities were built up by emphasis on a few unchanging pitches rather than by harmonic syntax. Rhythm, not harmony, was the structural basis.

Best of all, Bang on a Can brought form back into music as a central concern, and in a way that nonmusician audiences could respond to (and have, every year, enthusiastically). In so doing, the festival rebuilt a bridge between classical audiences and the downtown Manhattan scene. In best Downtown tradition, some of the Bang on a Can composers (such as Michael Gordon) had also played rock clubs, while others (like Evan Ziporyn) were working jazz musicians. Despite diverse backgrounds, though, nearly all presented a music that classical listeners could relate to. The pieces on this disc exhibit the variety, but also the trends, in postminimal or new-tonal form. Those by Doerrfeld, Gordon, and Cameron set up repeating patterns to work against; those by Lindroth and Wolfe are more rhapsodic, repeating nothing literally, but they still create form from a few carefully-chosen materials. Diverse in personality, the pieces intuitively belong together.