F.A.S.T. New Music Marathon @ MIT :: 5 hours of genre-bending mind-blowing new music :: Friday, April 15, 2011 from 7:00 p.m. to midnight :: MIT Kresge Auditorium, 48 Massachusetts Avenue (Building W16), Cambridge, MA :: Tickets on sale now! http://mit-newmusic-marathon.eventbrite.com :: Purchase BY 5:00 p.m. Friday and get 25% off! Use code “25off-marathon” at checkout :: Normal ticket prices $30, $10 for non-MIT students, FREE to MIT students and community

World-renowned new music powerhouses Kronos Quartet, Bang on a Can All-Stars and Chinese pipa virtuoso Wu Man team up with Gamelan Galak Tika and MIT Chamber Chorus for a 5-HOUR MARATHON CONCERT featuring Brian Eno’s complete Music for Airports, as well as works by Evan Ziporyn, Christine Southworth, minimalist guru Terry Riley, and a world premiere by MIT’s Tod Machover (featuring a live appearance by Noam Chomsky).

This marathon concert is brought to you by MIT150 Festival of Art + Science + Technology, celebrating MIT’s culture of creativity and invention.

The evening will bring together, for the first time ever, two trailblazing ensembles of the contemporary classical world: the Kronos Quartet & the Bang on a Can All-Stars. Each group will present a profusion of their own signature works, all Boston premieres, and, together with MIT Chamber Chorus & Wu Man, will perform Brian Eno’s Music for Airports, as arranged by Bang on a Can composers Michael Gordon, David Lang, Julie Wolfe, and Evan Ziporyn. The progenitor of today’s ambient music, Brian Eno’s four-part electronic 1975 masterwork redefined the listening experience and challenged our notion of what – and where – music could be. Bang on a Can’s arrangements imbue this cold beauty with the warmth of human breath, with voices, strings, clarinets, and guitars. As Eno himself put it, upon hearing the arrangement, “I’ve witnessed a birth – my original is the demo tape for Bang on a Can’s version.”

The concert will begin with the Kronos Quartet, presenting three groundbreaking new collaborations: the world premiere of a new work by Tod Machover featuring a live, on-stage appearance by Noam Chomsky, and the Boston premieres of Christine Southworth’s Super Collider and, with pipa virtuoso Wu Man, 3 movements from Terry Riley’s The Cusp of Magic.

Performed with Gamelan Galak Tika’s new Gamelan Elektrika, an electronic gamelan designed by Media Lab alum and video-game pioneer Alex Rigopulos and built by a team of engineers including Laurel Pardue, Matthew Boch, Andrew Boch, and Noah Feehan, Southworth’s Super Collider is inspired by the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Exploring two obverse sound worlds and traditions: the vast culture of the string quartet juxtaposed with the ancient performance methods of a gamelan, unleashed through the unlimited sonic universe of electronics, Southworth creates a moment of musical collision hopefully achieving unparalleled results.

Part Two of the evening focuses on pipa virtuoso Wu Man, ‘the artist most responsible for bringing the pipa to the western world,” (NY Times) performing her own solo compositions, and then joining Gamelan Galak Tika for Evan Ziporyn’s stunning Aradhana, a concerto for pipa and Balinese gamelan.

Part Three will feature the Bang on a Can All-Stars performing works by David Lang, Michael Gordon, and Julia Wolfe.

For more information please visit: http://mit-newmusic-marathon.eventbrite.com