press
news

Oneohtrix Point Never remixes ‘darker’ at River to River festival

On Saturday July 14 at 8pm at the World Financial Center Plaza, Lang’s hour-long, slowly-evolving work for strings, darker, is the starting point for a live re-imagination by Oneohtrix Point Never (Daniel Lopatin), who will real time loop and electronically process the live string sound of A Far Cry Orchestra back over and on to themselves.

Lopatin will also present his own work with selections from of his critically acclaimed albums (Returnal and Replica) specially arranged for A Far Cry Orchestra…

continue reading
news

David Lang is Musical America’s 2013 Composer of the Year

Musical America, now in its third century as the indispensable resource for the performing arts, announced the winners of the annual Musical America Awards, recognizing artistic excellence and achievement in the arts.

The announcement coincides with the publication of the 2013 Musical America International Directory of the Performing Arts, which, in addition to its comprehensive industry listings, pays homage to each of these artists in its editorial pages.

The annual Musical America Awards, sponsored by Deutsche Grammophon will be presented in a special ceremony at Lincoln Center on Thursday, December 6…

continue reading
news

Tallis Scholars perform ‘sun-centered’ at Carnegie Hall

“Tallis Scholars: the rock stars of Renaissance vocal music!”
The New York Times

On Monday April 8 — appropriately, the 2024 Solar EclipseThe Tallis Scholars give the New York premiere of David Lang’s sun-centered at Carnegie Hall/Zankel Hall. Commissioned for the Tallis Scholars by Cal Performances, Carnegie Hall Corporation, Hopkins Center, John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Stanford Live, Virginia Tech and Concertgebouw Bruges (Belgium), the work is a meditation on humanity’s predilection for disbelief…

continue reading
news

‘death speaks’ premiere sells out Carnegie Hall!

In October 2007 Paul Hillier and Theatre of Voices premiered David Lang’s the little match girl passion at Carnegie Hall. People in the audience that night knew they had heard something special. But this special? Only a few months later the piece won the Pulitzer Prize, then the recording on Harmonia Mundi won a Grammy, and the piece has gone on to become a hit around the world.

Carnegie Hall and Stanford Lively Arts bring back Theatre of Voices and the little match girl passion, along with the premiere of a major new work they have commissioned just for the occasion…

continue reading
news

love fail premieres at Yale

Lang’s newest work, love fail, premieres June 29 at the New Haven International Festival of Arts and Ideas. Performed by the legendary vocal ensemble Anonymous 4, love fail is an evening-length work that weaves together snippets of medieval courtly love narratives, short stories by MacArthur Fellow Lydia Davis, scraps from the libretto of Wagner’s opera Tristan and Isolde, and text by Lang himself.

Out of these sources, Lang has conjured a single story, in which two unnamed lovers meet each other, love each other, and lose each other—not necessarily in that order…

continue reading
writing

NYT Opinionator Blog

May 11, 2011

It’s spring and baseball season is under way again — for me, always a welcome event. Lately, I’ve been thinking about the game and its history. Which reminded me of the recent passing of the baseball legend Duke Snider. And, surprisingly, that made me think of classical music. Honest! I grew up in the 1960s in Los Angeles, a die-hard fan of the Dodgers. I loved baseball, loved going to the games, but I identified with the team in other ways as well…

continue reading
writing

Jacob Druckman’s Horizons

January 1, 2000
Jacob Druckman’s Horizons an article for an unpublished Druckman memorial edition of Contemporary Music Review, (2000), Harold Meltzer, editor. What we are celebrating with this festival is all the new music. So wrote Jacob Druckman in the program booklet for Horizons ’84, The New Romanticism – A Broader View, the second festival of three that Druckman curated for the New York Philharmonic in 1983, 1984 and 1986.  The statement is not totally true – the Horizons Festivals were never supposed to be about all the new music  …continue reading
news
news

Collected Stories at Carnegie Hall 4/22-29

As part of the 2013/2014 Debs Chair composer-in-residence at Carnegie Hall, David Lang has curated an amazing series of concerts to focus on the art of storytelling in music. From April 22-29, Carnegie Hall presents: Collected Stories

Lang comments on the mini-festival:

Music and storytelling began their lives together—music to accompany heroic tales, music to worship by, music to suggest the emotions running deep below the surface of a text…

continue reading