How a scrappy arts group survived the '90s
Bang on a Can, a contemporary music organization, fought government cuts with an innovative crowdfunding program.
by William Robin
(NYT NEWS SERVICE)
.- When things are tough all around us, we dream, composers Michael Gordon, David Lang and Julia Wolfe wrote in a letter to potential donors in 1996.
Bang on a Can, the contemporary music organization they had founded a decade before, had recently lost about a fifth of its budget because of massive cuts to the National Endowment for the Arts. But Gordon, Lang and Wolfe were undeterred.
Its a Bang on a Can thing, they added in the letter. Just as arts funding is collapsing, were mounting new projects to build a new audience for a new kind of music. Within a year, the group had started one such project: the Peoples Commissioning Fund, an innovative program which pooled small donations in order to commission composers to write works for a house ensemble, the Bang on a Can All-Stars.