DAVID LANG
About the
Composer
Passionate, prolific, and complicated, composer David Lang embodies the restless spirit of invention. Lang is
at the same time deeply versed in the classical tradition and committed to
music that resists categorization, constantly creating new forms.
Lang’s pieces often resemble each other only in the fierce intelligence and
clarity of vision that inform their structures. His catalogue is extensive, and
his opera, orchestra, chamber, and solo works are by turns ominous, ethereal,
urgent, hypnotic, unsettling, and very
emotionally direct. Much of his work seeks to expand the definition of
virtuosity in music—even the deceptively simple pieces can be fiendishly
difficult to play and require incredible concentration by musicians and
audiences alike.
the little match girl passion,
commissioned by Carnegie Hall for Theatre of Voices, was awarded the 2008
Pulitzer Prize for music. His other recent projects include reason to believe for Trio Mediæval and
the Norwegian Radio Orchestra; concerto
(world to come), premiered by cellist
Maya Beiser and the NorrlandsOperans Symphony Orchestra; darker, premiered by Ensemble Musiques Nouvelles; plainspoken, a new work for the New York
City Ballet; writing on water, for
the London Sinfonietta, with libretto and visuals by English filmmaker Peter
Greenaway; the difficulty of crossing a
field, a staged opera for Kronos Quartet; loud love songs, a concerto for the percussionist Evelyn Glennie;
and the oratorio Shelter, with co-composers
Michael Gordon and Julia Wolfe at the Next
Wave Festival of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, staged by Ridge Theater
and featuring the Norwegian vocal ensemble Trio Mediaeval.
Lang is one of America’s most performed composers. Audiences
around the globe are hearing more and more of his work, in performances by the
Santa Fe Opera, New York Philharmonic, Netherlands Chamber Choir, Boston
Symphony Orchestra, Münchener
Kammerorchester, and Kronos Quartet; at Tanglewood, the BBC Proms,
Münchener Biennale, Milan’s Settembre Musica Festival, Sidney’s Olympic Arts
Festival in 2000, and the Almeida, Holland, Berlin, and Strasbourg festivals;
in theater productions in New York, San Francisco, and London; alongside the
choreography of Twyla Tharp, La La La Human Steps, Netherlands Dance Theater,
and Ballet de l’Opéra de Paris; and at Lincoln Center, Southbank Centre,
Carnegie Hall, Brooklyn Academy of Music, and the Barbican.
Lang is the recipient of numerous honors
and awards, including the Rome Prize, the BMW Music-Theater Prize
(Munich), and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, Foundation for
Contemporary Performance Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, New York
Foundation for the Arts, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1999,
he received a Bessie Award for his music in choreographer Susan Marshall’s The Most Dangerous Room in the House, performed
live by the Bang on a Can All-Stars at the Next Wave Festival of the Brooklyn
Academy of Music. The Carbon Copy
Building won the 2000 Village Voice
Obie Award for Best New American Work, and the recording of The Passing Measures was named one of
the best CDs of 2001 by The New Yorker.
His recent CD, Pierced, was praised
both on the rock music website Pitchfork
and in the classical magazine Gramophone.
The commercial recording of the little
match girl passion received the 2010 Grammy Award for Best Small Ensemble
Performance.
Lang is co-founder and co-artistic director of New York’s legendary music
collective Bang on a Can.
the little match
girl passion
In the
Composer’s Own Words
I wanted to tell a story—a particular story—of The Little Match Girl by Danish author Hans Christian Andersen. The
original is ostensibly for children, and it has that shocking combination of
danger and morality that many famous children’s stories do. A poor young girl,
whose father beats her, tries unsuccessfully to sell matches on the street, is
ignored, and freezes to death. Through it all, she somehow retains her
Christian purity of spirit, but it is not a pretty story.
What drew me to The Little Match Girl
is that the strength of the story lies not
in its plot, but in the fact that all its parts—the horror and the
beauty—are constantly suffused with their opposites. The girl’s bitter present
is locked together with the sweetness of her past memories; her poverty is
always suffused with her hopefulness. There is a kind of naive equilibrium
between suffering and hope.
There are many ways to tell this story. One
could convincingly tell it as a story about faith or as an allegory about
poverty. What has always interested me,
however, is that Andersen tells this story as a kind of parable, drawing a
religious and moral equivalency between
the suffering of the poor girl and the suffering of Jesus. The girl suffers, is scorned by the crowd, dies, and is transfigured. I started wondering what
secrets could be unlocked from this
story if one took its Christian nature to its conclusion and unfolded
it, as Christian composers have traditionally done in musical settings of the
Passion of Jesus.
The most interesting thing about how the
Passion story is told is that it can include texts other than the story itself. These texts are the reactions of
the crowd, penitential thoughts,
statements of general sorrow, shock, or remorse. These are devotional
guideposts, the markers for our own responses to the story, and they have the
effect of making the audience more than spectators to the sorrowful events
onstage. These responses can have a huge range; in Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, these extra texts range from famous chorales (that his congregation was expected to sing along with) to
completely invented characters, such as the “Daughter of Zion” and the “Chorus
of Believers.” The Passion format—the telling of a story while simultaneously
commenting upon it—has the effect of placing us in the middle of the action,
and it gives the narrative a powerful inevitability.
My piece is called the little match girl
passion and it sets Hans
Christian Andersen’s story in the format of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, interspersing Andersen’s narrative with
my versions of the crowd and character
responses from Bach’s Passion. The
text is by me, after texts by Hans Christian Andersen, H. P. Paulli (the
first translator of the story into English, in 1872), Picander (the nom de
plume of Christian Friedrich Henrici, the
librettist of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion), and the Gospel According to St. Matthew. The
word passion comes from the Latin
word for suffering. There is no Bach in my piece and there is no Jesus—rather,
the suffering of the Little Match Girl has been substituted for Jesus’s,
elevating (I hope) her sorrow to a higher plane.
death speaks
In the
Composer’s Own Words
death speaks was commissioned by
Carnegie Hall and Stanford Lively Arts, specifically to go on a program with the little match girl passion. The
opportunity came without many other parameters, so there were a lot of
questions I had to answer. Would the new piece be for an existing ensemble or some group I would assemble for these performances
only? Would it relate
to little match girl, musically or
emotionally, or would it start from its own place?
Something that has always interested me about The Little Match Girl story is that the place where we are left
emotionally at the end is so far away from where the Little Match Girl is. We are all weeping at the end and yet she is
happily transfigured, in the welcoming arms of her grandmother in
heaven. The original story switches starkly back and forth at the end, between
her state and ours, perhaps in order to show us just how far away from
redemption we are; it is Andersen’s way of making us feel left behind.
This reminded me of certain other stark
comparisons between the living and
the dead. I remembered the structure of Schubert’s beautiful song “Der Tod und
das Mädchen,” in which the text is divided in half; the first half of the song
is in the voice of the young girl, begging Death to pass her by, and the second
half of the song is Death’s calming
answer. This seemed to be the same
division as in the Andersen story—the fear of the living opposed against the
restfulness of death.
What makes the Schubert song interesting is that Death is personified. It isn’t a state of being or a place or a metaphor, but a person, a character in a
drama who can tell us in our own language
what to expect in the world to come. Schubert has a lot of songs with texts
like these; I wondered if I assembled all of the instances of Death speaking
directly to us, maybe a fuller portrait of his character might emerge. Most of
these texts are melodramatic, hyper-romantic, and over-emotional; one of the
knocks on Schubert is that he often saved his best music for the worst poetry.
Nevertheless, I felt that taking these overwrought comments by Death at face
value just might lead me someplace worth going.
I went alphabetically in German through every single Schubert song text (thank
you, internet!) and compiled every instance of when the dead send a message to
the living. Some of these are obvious and some are more speculative: Death is a
named character in “Der Erlkönig”; the brook at the end of Die schöne Müllerin speaks in Death’s name when it talks the miller
into killing himself; the hurdy gurdy player at the end of Winterreise has long been interpreted as a stand-in for Death. All
told, I have used excerpts from 32 songs, translating them very roughly and
trimming them, in the same way that I adjusted
the Bach texts in the little match girl
passion.
The question then arose of what musicians should play and sing this new piece.
Art songs have been moving out of classical music for many years; indie rock
seems to be the place where Schubert’s sensibilities now lie, a better match
for direct storytelling and intimate emotionality. I started thinking that many
of the most interesting musicians in that scene made the same journey
themselves, beginning as classical musicians and drifting over to indie rock
when they bumped up against the limits of where classical music was most comfortable. What would it be like to put together
an ensemble of successful indie composer-performers and invite them back
into classical music, the world from which they sprang? I asked rock musicians
Bryce Dessner, Owen Pallett, and Shara Worden to join me, and we added Nico
Muhly, who, although not someone who left classical music, is certainly known and welcome in many musical environments. All
of these musicians are composers who can write all the music they need
themselves, so it is a tremendous honor for me to ask them to spend some of
their musicality on my music.