The Robert Black Foundation Bass Scholarship is awarded annually to one double bassist to attend the 3-week Bang On A Can Summer Institute at MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts.
Bang On A Can processes applications and selects the awardee. Apply here.
The 2019 awardee is John Paul Northrop.
Valentin Jost, was commissioned to write a work for double bass and small ensemble. The commission was a collaborative project with the Philadelphia based Network for New Music. The piece, titled Bubbles and scored for solo double bass, flute, bass clarinet, violin, cello, piano, and percussion was premiered on November 23, 2019 on the opening concert of the Network for New Music 2019-2020 series at the Settlement Music School in Philadelphia, PA.
Brian House and Sue Huang have been commissioned to create a 10-channel audio/video installation reflecting on the Anthropocene for double bass and environment, filmed at the Fresh Kills landfill in New York City.
New York City's Fresh Kills is an engineered landscape—once the largest municipal dump in the world, it will soon be a public park. But as an environment formed by glacial recessions at the end of the ice age, then re-shaped by waste disposal during the industrial age, this landmark will outlast civilization.
A series of data-driven musical pieces performed by a double bassist interpret layers of time—from the thousand-year decay of consumer plastics to the gathering of clouds overhead—to cultivate a temporal politics beyond humans.
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