Bang on a Can, a contemporary music organization, fought government cuts with an innovative crowdfunding program.
From left: David Lang, Michael Gordon and Julia Wolfe in 1987, when they founded the contemporary-music organization Bang on a Can amid a long decline in public arts funding.Credit.Robert Lewis
By William Robin
Feb. 18, 2021
âWhen things are tough all around us, we dream,â the 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.
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 C
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