The Weis Center for the Performing Arts will welcome Bang on a Can All Stars featuring the Bucknell Choir, under the direction of Professor Caleb Hopkins, on Sunday, March 1 at 2 p.m. at the Weis Center.
They will perform David Lang’s before and after nature with music and text by David Lang and video design by Tal Rosner.
There will be a pre-performance interview from 1:15-1:45 p.m. in the Weis Center Atrium between Professor Hopkins and David Lang.
This performance is part of the Weis Center’s year-long Trees Series.
Co-sponsors include Bucknell’s Department of Music, the Class of 1953 Lectureship, and Sunbury Broadcasting Corporation.
Since its first Marathon concert in 1987, Bang on a Can has been creating an international community dedicated to innovative music, wherever it is found. With adventurous programs, it commissions new composers, performs, presents and records new work, develops new audiences and educates the musicians of the future.
The ensemble will perform David Lang’s before and after nature, which is based on The End of Nature by Bill McKibben and After Nature by Jedidiah Purdy. Both books discuss humanity’s relationship to nature.
The performance will feature the Bucknell Choir under the direction of Professor Caleb Hopkins and Bang on a Can All-Stars will provide instrumental support.
ABOUT THE PIECE
When Stanford University alumnus David Lang set out to write a new composition for Bang on a Can All Stars, the electrifying music ensemble he co-founded, he looked to his alma mater for inspiration.
Commissioned by Stanford Live specifically to bring Lang and the BOAC All Stars back to its campus, before and after nature is a meditation on the natural world, both before human existence and after humans are gone.
Lang met closely with scholars, faculty, and students in Stanford’s Doerr School of Sustainability, and with the Doerr-affiliated Environmental Justice Working Group. He combined what he learned with his own readings from the past fifty years of environmental thinking, leading him to write his own texts that explore the different ways we define and understand nature.
Lang set these texts for voices and Bang on a Can All Stars, and he enlisted video pioneer Tal Rosner to invent a way to visualize the meanings of the music in video and projection. The result is an immersive spectacle of sound and vision, both heartbreaking and miraculous, full of beauty, wonder, and awe.
Lang is a renowned Grammy Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning composer with an extensive body of work, including choral compositions and operas.
The Bang on a Can All Stars ensemble is recognized worldwide for ultra-dynamic live performances and recordings of today’s most innovative music. Freely crossing the boundaries between classical, jazz, rock, world, and experimental music, the six-member amplified group has consistently forged a distinct category-defying identity, taking music into uncharted territories.
TICKETS
Tickets are $30 for adults, $24 for seniors 62+ and subscribers, $20 for youth 18 and under, $20 for Bucknell employees and retirees (limit 2), free for Bucknell students (limit 1) and $20 for non-Bucknell students (limit 2).
Tickets can be reserved by calling 570-577-1000 or online at Bucknell.edu/BoxOffice.
Tickets are also available in person from several locations including the Weis Center lobby (weekdays 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.) and the CAP Center Box Office, located on the ground floor of the Elaine Langone Center (weekdays 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.).
For more information about this event, contact Lisa Leighton, marketing and outreach director, at 570-577-3727 or by e-mail at lisa.leighton@bucknell.edu.
For more information about the Weis Center for the Performing Arts, go to Bucknell.edu/WeisCenter or search for the Weis Center on Instagram, Facebook, or YouTube.