Calling All Music Creators: Apply for the 2025 Bang on a Can Summer Festival!
Program dates: July 14-Aug 3, 2025
Application deadline: Jan 13, 2025
Early bird! No application fee before Dec 13.
The Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival at MASS MoCA (the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art) is a 3-week musical utopia for innovative composers and performers in the beautiful Berkshire mountains of western Massachusetts dedicated entirely to adventurous contemporary music.
This joyful, collaborative program includes daily rehearsals and seminars, performances in the museum galleries, world music and improvisation workshops, technology and music entrepreneurship seminars, and concerts and events in the community. The Bang on a Can Summer Festival has been described as "utterly transformative" and "life-changing," and it's a place where musicians generate powerful connections with new life-long collaborators, friends, and colleagues.
The residency culminates in a world-class 3-day festival called LOUD Weekend including high octane performances by festival ensembles and world premieres by the festival composers! It also features many special guest luminaries of experimental music converging to create an eclectic supermix of over 30 concerts, taking over every space in and around the museum.
Our FACULTY members are some of the most innovative musicians of our time. These are musicians who have dedicated their lives to commissioning, rehearsing, recording and performing music beyond the cutting edge.
Tuition assistance is available!
In the words of past participants:
Bang on a Can has changed my life. I never thought it would be possible to find a community that is devoted to new music with such a high caliber of musicianship, such enthusiasm and mutual supportiveness, and such a sense of joy for everything we do. I know I'll be looking to recreate this feeling in my future collaborations, always.
Bang on a Can is really everything I want the music world to be -- inclusive, engaging, innovative, fun, thought-provoking, beautiful, challenging, and rewarding. The festival brings all of that and more directly into focus, and it has made all the difference in the world to have been a part of it.
I have never had an experience like this before: the idea of building the kind of musical world one wants to live in seems to be something that is really possible here -- it's a place of community and possibility that is utterly transformative.