For 23 of our 25 years, the Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival has transformed MASS MoCA into a genre-bending musical utopia for innovative composers and performers. Over three weeks, every nook and cranny of the campus comes alive with performances, workshops, and seminars focused on adventurous new music—culminating in LOUD Weekend, when renowned special guests, BoaC faculty, and young players take the Hunter Center stage in a series of playful and heady collisions of jazz, classical, rock, and beyond. Fueled by more than three decades of Marathon concerts, Long Play Festival in Brooklyn, countless world tours and staged productions, Bang on a Can’s LOUD Weekend at MASS MoCA is a fully loaded, three-day, eclectic super-mix of creative, experimental, and unusual music.

LOUD Weekend kicks off Thursday, August 1 at 7:30pm with Duet Behavior, featuring legendary composer-vocalist Meredith Monk and percussionist John Hollenbeck — an intimate concert of Monk’s music combining her pioneering vocal magic with Hollenbeck’s inventive and masterful percussion plus SHABAKA, one of today’s undeniably leading voices of British Jazz performing live with Bang on a Can All-Stars. Other Highlights of the weekend include MEMORY GAME featuring Meredith Monk and Vocal Ensemble with the electrifying Bang on a Can All-Stars, cellist extraordinaire Maya Beiser’s variation of Terry Riley’s minimalist manifesto In C, Queens College Gamelan Yowana Sari performing a new work by Michael Gordon, Tristan Perich’s Dual Synthesis for 1-bit electronics and harpsichord, GEORGE (Anna Webber, Sarah Rossy, Chiquita Magic, John Hollenbeck), HxH (Chris Williams and Lester St. Louis), Lainie Fefferman’s one-woman band White Fire, visiting guest composers Huang Ruo, Marcos Balter, Mathew Rosenblum, Annika Socolofsky, Jeffery Brooks, music by Louis Andriessen, Julius Eastman, David Lang, Julia Wolfe, and much more. Tickets are available now for $149 (3-day Pass).

LOUD Weekend 2024 includes (to be confirmed hourly schedule is available here):

• Legendary composer-vocalist Meredith Monk and percussionist John Hollenbeck team up on opening night in Duet Behavior – an intimate evening of Monk’s music as it has never been experienced. Through a conversational approach, long-time friends and colleagues Monk and Hollenbeck expand and improvise on pieces from across Monk’s 50+ year catalog, combining her pioneering vocal magic with his inventive and masterful percussion to generate new arrangements of Monk’s iconic compositions
• MEMORY GAME featuring Meredith Monk and Vocal Ensemble with Bang on a Can All-Stars explores all-new arrangements of never-before-recorded selections from her award-winning sci-fi opera The Games, and more
• SHABAKA, one of today’s undeniably leading voices of British Jazz (Sons of Kemet, The Comet Is Coming, the Ancestors) teams up with the Bang on a Can All-Stars for a meditative journey through a sea of sound
• Huang Ruo‘s extraordinary string quartet A Dust In Time traces a meditative journey inspired by Tibetan Buddhist sand mandalas
•  Queens College Gamelan Yowana Sari performs new works by Michael Gordon, Kyle Miller, Vivian Fung, Balinese master composer Dewa Alit, Margapati (traditional) and more
• Cellist Maya Beiser — who has singularly reinvented solo cello performance through her virtuosity, eclectic repertoire, rock-star charisma, and passion for new ideas — takes on Terry Riley’s minimalist manifesto In C, armed with just her instrument, a looping machine and percussionists Shane Shanahan and Matt Kilmer
• Hatis Noit is a Japanese vocal performer hailing from distant Shiretoko in Hokkaido who now resides in London. Her accomplished range is astonishingly self-taught, inspired by everything she could find from Gagaku — Japanese classical music — and operatic styles, Bulgarian and Gregorian chanting, to avant-garde and pop vocalists
• Dual Synthesis, the third release of Tristan Perich‘s “Compositions” is a dense cascade of 1-bit electronics and harpsichord, performed by Karl Larson
• HxH, the improvisatory electro-acoustic duo of Lester St. Louis and Chris Williams, utilizes a mix of trumpet, cello and electronics to build worlds traversing through expansive pools of acoustic and electric sounds, grainy textures, breaks, cuts and beats
• GEORGE is Anna Webber (tenor sax/flute), Sarah Rossy (voice/sax/keyboards), Chiquita Magic (keyboards/voice), and John Hollenbeck (drums/piano/composition). All bandleaders in their own right, their group sound is firmly planted outside any categories or labels, so good luck with that! From experimental jazz, ambient electronics, chamber music and more
• Tristan Perich’s Dual Synthesis for 1-bit electronics and harpsichord performed by long-time Bang on a Can collaborator Karl Larson.
• Lainie Fefferman’s White Fire is the composer-singer’s one-woman-band feminist Torah commentary
• Some prayers are gentle, some are about spreading good will and health and happiness throughout the world. Some are just about getting a good night’s sleep. Hear David Lang’s prayers for night and sleep on a special concert set of David’s vocal music
• Annika Socolofsky sings Don’t Say a Word, a song cycle of feminist-rager lullabies for a new queer era, and then goes ‘Country’ as EmmyJean Jenkins and Friends
• Marcos Balter’s Meltdown Upshot, originally written for a large ensemble plus Deerhoof, featuring Bang on a Can All-Star David Cossin on drum-set!
• Mathew Rosenblum’s We Lived Happily During the War, inspired by a poem by Ilya Kaminsky, plus Circadian Rhythms, for microtonal custom-designed percussion
• Guest composer Jeffrey Brooks returns with a brand new work for 2024
• tilt (vocalist Isabel Crespo Pardo, vocalist/bassist Carmen Quill, and trombonist/vocalist Kalia Vandever) combine to create intricate, viscerally affecting art-pop that blends carefully composed interwoven motifs with improvisation
• Lesley Flanigan’s Resonances is a performance and installation for voice, speakers, electronic tone, and the resonance between. Small wooden speakers act as a choral ensemble for the listener to experience as a meditation on how we listen
• In Symphony for Open Strings, Dutch-master composer Louis Andriessen has twelve strings all tuned differently and playing only on the four open strings. The sonic result is extremely mysterious and fascinating, powerful and dramatic
• George Crumb’s hauntingly beautiful Quest for guitar, soprano saxophone, harp, double bass, and percussion expresses the concept of a ‘quest’ as a long and tortuous journey towards an ecstatic and transfigured feeling of ‘arrival.’
• Julius Eastman’s insistent and mesmerizing open-score work Gay Guerrilla seethes with a tension that continues to both resonate with and challenge the boundaries of the classical and minimalist music scene today as when it was composed over 40 years ago
• WORLD PREMIERES by the 2024 summer festival composition fellows Jessica Ackerley, Anak Baiharn, Maya Fridman, Alex Groves, Juwon Lim, Justin Wright, Annija Zarina, Alexey Logunov
• Music by Bang on a Can co-founders Michael Gordon, David Lang, and Julia Wolfe.
• Performances by Vicky Chow, David Cossin, Kebra Seyoun-Charles, Arlen Hlusko, Nick Photinos, Todd Reynolds, Mark Stewart, Maya Stone, Ken Thomson, plus fellows from the 2024 Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival at MASS MoCA
• Plus tons more! Whether it’s your 1st LOUD Weekend, or your 23rd, you don’t want to miss this year

Make a Plan

• All seating is general admission. All festival passes include museum admission.
• LOUD Weekend programming is fluid and subject to change. Final schedules with location will be available closer to the performance dates. Events are limited capacity and first-come, first-served for Advance ticket holders/tickets do not guarantee admission to gallery or B-10 concerts.
• Preferred tickets include reserved seating for Hunter Center main stage events, a Bang on a Can shirt, a signed poster, and an invitation to Breakfast with the Founders & Artists on Saturday morning.
• All events at MASS MoCA are accessible to all audiences. Please contact boxoffice@massmoca.org if you would like to inquire about accessibility needs and services.
• By purchasing a ticket to join MASS MoCA’s visitors, staff, and artists on the museum campus, you agree to follow a Courtesy Code, detailed here.
• Performers subject to change.
• All sales are final; no refunds or exchanges.