This DVD contains two films, and each is a delight. Frank Scheffer's In the Ocean (2000) is an engaging look at a group of passionate, iconoclastic, contemporary New York–based composers who call themselves Bang on a Can; a vigorously filmed and edited, Koyaanisqatsi-like homage to the streets, bridges, bustle, and kineticism of turn-of-the-twenty-first-century Manhattan; and a music-soaked fifty-three-minute history of the post-Cage American rejection of the European tradition from Schoenberg through Boulez and Stockhausen.

The film Music for Airports (1999) features sensitive and effective new arrangements, by Bang on a Can composers, of the four pieces on Brian Eno's landmark 1978 tape-loop album Ambient 1: Music for Airports, performed by the Bang on a Can All-Stars ensemble. The result is a salutary dose of classical ambient music overlaid with Scheffer's diffuse, watercolor-like, atmospheric cinematography of airport images—not unlike what you might experience at one of Eno's own audiovisual installations.

Frank Scheffer (b. 1956) is a Dutch filmmaker whose long career credits include Conducting Mahler (about the 1995 Mahler Festival in Amsterdam); numerous documentaries on modern composers from Louis Andriessen to Frank Zappa (both of whom appear as key supporting characters in In the Ocean); and a number of collaborations with John Cage (including Ring, a hilarious three-minute-and-fifty-second distillation of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen, which is included as a bonus track on the present DVD).

In the Ocean is about Bang on a Can's search for good music in any form, an inclusive approach to modern composition and performance, as well as identity—when you've grown up with rock 'n’ roll but want to be a serious composer. Since its founding in 1987 by three such young questing musicians in New York City, Bang on a Can has become a major force in new music. Why was Bang on a Can founded? As co-founder David Lang put it in an interview in 2000 for In the Ocean: “The places for weirdos are not very well established. And we've always wanted to be the place for weirdos.”

In the Ocean explores the virtual ocean of music, terrible and liberating, that opens up when you abandon the received academic wisdom—when technology shrinks the world and its history to a vanishing point of all-music-is-all-here-now, and formerly isolated musical genomes cross-fertilize and thrive. As John Cage (1912–92), whose Zen-like elder statesman presence suffuses the film, declares at the outset, “The way I would put it: The river is in delta. There are many possibilities. And we may even have left the river and gone into the ocean.” In current parlance perhaps, into the cloud.

Scheffer portrays Bang on a Can's three founding composers—Michael Gordon (b. 1956) David Lang (b. 1957), and Julia Wolfe (b. 1958)—as part of the larger current that runs from grandfather figure Cage through father figures Steve Reich (b. 1936) and Philip Glass (b. 1937) and older-cousin figure Brian Eno (b. 1948)—and flows into the all-embracing ocean: an embrace not only of classical Western musical forms and high standards of musicianship, but also of rock, rhythm and blues, world music, electronics, urban noise, and the whole world of unfiltered sound. We are treated to excerpts of twenty-six pieces, widely varying in style, by thirteen composers.

Throughout the film, Scheffer neatly underscores the storied uptown/downtown split: We hear the spiky, crystalline tones of Milton Babbitt's Concerto for Piano and Orchestra (1985) against video of bright, sunny, expansive, expensive banners announcing concerts at upscale Lincoln Center with its marble plazas and fountains—immediately followed by Lang's brooding, darkly tonal Slow Movement (1993) against gritty images of the Brooklyn Bridge, black water moving over rocks, a freighter plying New York Harbor, and, symbolically, the Statue of Liberty. Similar artful juxtapositions are used to good effect throughout the film: Scheffer translates the music into metaphorical images of the city. Sometimes he just lets his camera rest on the Bang on a Can All-Stars as they deftly pull off devilishly difficult musical maneuvers with flair and uncommon intensity.

In the 1970s English art-student-turned-glam-synth-rocker-turned-conceptual-composer Brian Eno pioneered the ambient genre with albums such as Ambient 1: Music for Airports—an LP's worth of music consisting of four long, tranquil acoustic soundscapes, each produced by running multiple tape loops of different lengths simultaneously. Was even the “composer” a robot? The music was conceived to be played by, and was played by, machines—yet, miraculously, it sounded soft, gentle, relaxing, tonal, mantra-like, intricate, beautiful—fascinating or ignorable as you will.

The arrangements of the four pieces on the present DVD sound a lot like the originals—the Bang on a Can composers have remained largely faithful to the original notes, and their arrangements are purely “orchestrations.” But Eno's original 1978 work was a long-playing vinyl record, whereas Bang on a Can performs the music as if it were classical concert fare. Says Eno: “The first of the four pieces . . . sounds almost identical to my record. But it's somehow very emotional because it's played by people rather than by tape loops. And you automatically impute a lot of emotional material that actually I didn't put there.”

Identity is often defined by opposition: the other, the shadow, the enemy—and simply the unknown. The musical characters on this DVD explore what it's like to search for one's voice in the midst of an ocean of opposites: youth versus the establishment; Western music versus world music; quality music versus mediocre music; older, accepted music (“classics,” “oldies”) versus more current, innovative music in both the art (“it's experimental”) and the popular (“it's a hit!”) spheres; and even music versus noise (classical tastes versus Elliott Carter; rock fans versus rap).

One of Eno's aphoristic Oblique Strategies oracle cards advises: “Turn it upside down.” In the Cagean Sea, you might find yourself embracing your opposite—as nonmusician conceptual-thought-experimentalist Eno does in allowing his tape-loop piece to be played by a classically trained ensemble.

What about black versus white? Black versus white spawns some delectable New World opposites: James Brown versus Pat Boone; blues versus bluegrass; the Temptations versus the Beach Boys; spirituals versus Episcopal hymns; jazz versus rock. African American music runs like a magic river through In the Ocean. As a youth, Eno was a huge fan of 1950s American doo-wop, which sounded to him like “Martian music” because he heard it totally outside its context among urban black American youth. Dutch composer Louis Andriessen (b. 1939) cites avant-garde, progressive jazz as an important influence on his music. Reich scolds his peers and former music teachers who still haven't heard the news that it's time to “Roll Over, Beethoven”: “You grew up with Chuck Berry and hot dog stands and ‘A million burgers sold at McDonalds!’ That's running though your subconscious. . . . Don't tell me some lie and tell me you're in Vienna in 1912.”

Opposites identified, integration can begin. Julia Wolfe describes her piece Lick as arising from the harsh, aggressive electric guitar sounds and energy of rock—as well as from the complex, funky, push-pull rhythms of James Brown. Reich's It's Gonna Rain is a 1960s-era civil rights protest shout—as well as an early minimalist manifesto. Frank Zappa pays homage to the history of jazz with his immortally weird, wonderfully preposterous (and preposterously difficult to play) Bebop Tango.

Go beyond the opposites, the adventurous Bang on a Can composers seem to say: Don't fixate on one dichotomy and feel compelled to take sides. Steve Reich endorses the efforts of this “younger generation” (the Bang on a Can gang is now in their early fifties) with characteristic enthusiasm: