Bang on a Can festival cuts loose in the Berkshires

Summer music festival! High-profile guests! International participants! The Berkshires!

Tanglewood? Try Banglewood.

That's the unofficial handle for Bang on a Can's summer festival at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. This is the sixth summer that New York's veteran contemporary music organization has ensconced itself in North Adams, and it's becoming an institution in its own right: a destination for those who think that edginess and musical challenge don't take summers off.

The festival, which kicked off last Thursday, brings together about 35 fellows (including nine composers) and 11 faculty members for three weeks of total immersion in contemporary fare. There are two gallery recitals every day -- one organized by the fellows at 1:30 and a faculty concert at 4 p.m. And there are two large-scale performances as well: a show tomorrow night by the Bang on a Can All - Stars, the organization's house band; and a six-hour marathon concert July 28 that closes the festival.

But the activities go beyond rehearsal and concertizing, according to composer Michael Gordon, one of Bang on a Can's three codirectors.

"One of our main jobs is not only to make and play music but to inspire these young musicians in regard to their future," he says over the phone. He points out that despite the high level of talent among today's musicians, "the traditional avenues of performing and earning a living are becoming fewer and fewer."

To help them negotiate the increasingly tricky practical side of the music world, Gordon and his cofounders, composers David Lang and Julia Wolfe , offer a series of business seminars to answer questions rarely covered in conservatories. "How do you survive as a freelance musician? How do you start a group? How do you commission a composer? How do you get a grant to do this and that?"

There aren't many better guides to staking out territory on the new-music map than Gordon and his cofounders. Over the past 20 years, Bang on a Can has evolved from a loose series of concerts to an association that includes composers, performers, and a record label. It has a distinctive, if hard-to-pin-down vibe: musically serious but laid-back on decorum, intense yet funky, and uninterested in genre distinctions. Perhaps the greatest achievement of Bang on a Can is to have established itself not just as a music group, but as a brand.

"The fact is that you have to be an activist: no one's gonna knock on your door," Gordon says. But he and his cofounders were optimistic when they started, and "one of our main jobs is not only to make and play music but to inspire these young musicians in regard to their future. We want everyone to leave and feel, 'Oh, I'm optimistic about my life.' "

Each of the two main concerts will feature a guest artist, each of whom has worked with Bang on a Can before and shares their inclusive artistic ways. Tomorrow's guest is Iva Bittova, a Czech violinist and vocalist.

"I can't even think of a word to describe her because she's fluent in so many genres," says Gordon. "Think of her own music as a kind of cross between Czech folk music and a certain type of performance art." She'll play "Elida," a 50-minute song cycle she recorded with the All - Stars in 2005 that clothes Czech folk melodies in the ensemble's angular sound.

The marathon concert is something of a Bang specialty: Their first event in 1987 was a 12-hour concert in a SoHo art gallery. That, though, seems like a mere moment in comparison with the most recent New York show last month, which ran 26 hours.

The Mass MoCA marathon will run from 4 to 10 p.m. and feature all the seminar's participants in various ensembles. The guest will be the omnivorous clarinetist and composer Don Byron, whose music embraces jazz, avant-garde, klezmer, funk , and much else. The program is still being assembled, but Byron's "Four Thoughts on Marvin Gaye" for string quartet should make a fascinating companion to George Crumb's harrowing Vietnam-era quartet "Black Angels."

"I find that you can present a lot of great stuff as a single event," Gordon says of the standard concert format. "But in the marathon format, you can have one single great event followed by some other completely different great event."

413-662-2111; massmoca.org, bangonacan.org.

The New York Philharmonic has become the latest orchestra to get younger at the podium. Earlier this week the orchestra announced that 40-year-old American conductor Alan Gilbert will be its next music director. Gilbert's ties to the orchestra run deep: Both of his parents are orchestra violinists. (His father retired in 2001.) He'll take over from Lorin Maazel in 2009.

Gilbert had long been rumored a prime candidate for the Philharmonic job. Another was the 65-year-old Riccardo Muti, widely seen as the safer and more conservative choice. The orchestra came up with a Solomonic decision: retaining Muti for an expected six to eight weeks of concerts a year in a supportive, elder-statesman sort of role.

Gilbert is currently chief conductor of the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra. He attended Harvard as an undergraduate and made his Boston Symphony debut in 2003.