watch a featurette on Lang’s music in Youth.
David Lang’s Simple Song #3, written for Paolo Sorrentino’s film Youth, has been nominated for a 2016 Golden Globe for Best Original Song.
Lang’s score for Youth represents the compositions written by the film’s protaganist (a classical composer and conductor toward the end of his career) and most importantly his Simple Song #3, an integral and recurring musical and cinematic theme…
continue readingIt’s been a long time coming, but Shelter is finally here!
The latest collaborative work by Michael Gordon, David Lang, and Julia Wolfe is a modern oratorio that reunites the Bang on a Can founders with Deborah Artman (author of the libretto for 2001’s Lost Objects). Produced by Michael Riesman, this premiere recording was performed by Ensemble Signal under the baton of conductor Brad Lubman, and features solo voices Martha Cluver, Mellissa Hughes and Caroline Shaw…
continue readingDavid Lang’s prisoner of the state—co-commissioned by the New York Philharmonic, De Doelen, Barbican Centre, L’Auditori, Bochumer Symphoniker, Concertgebouw Bruges and Malmö Opera – premiered in June 2019 with the New York Philharmonic, conducted by Jaap van Zweden, and received its British premiere in January 2020 at the Barbican Centre in London with BBC Symphony Orchestra, BBC Singers and conductor Ilan Volkov…
continue readingOn this edition of New Sounds, composer David Lang presents his CD-length ambient concerto, ”the passing measures.” The new album is a most unusual concerto for bass clarinet, chorus, and orchestra that explores mortality, time, and the function of music. As Lang explains, ”My piece is about the struggle to create beauty. A single very consonant chord falls slowly over the course of forty minutes. That is the piece.”
By Molly Sheridan
Read more…”I wanted to tell a story,” writes David Lang, introducing the new recording (just out on Harmonia Mundi) of his 2008 Pulitzer-Prize winner the little match girl passion. Such a simple and powerful desire; such a simple and powerful story to tell. (…)
I wouldn’t say that I am super religious, but I am definitely religion-curious. It is a big part of my family background, and, to be honest, a big part of the history of my chosen field, Western classical music. For the past 1000 years, the church has been the most powerful commissioner of Western music, and its most active employer of musicians.
Because of this, much of our foundational repertoire is explicitly on the subject of how music helps a listener get in the mood for a religious experience…
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