In 1987, David Lang was a 30-year-old composer and doctoral student who, with his Yale buddies Michael Gordon and Julia Wolfe, founded Bang on a Can, a scruffy organization dedicated to the proposition that all musics are created equal. These days, Lang is an eminence: Pulitzer Prize winner, member of the Yale faculty, and composer in residence at Carnegie Hall for 2013-14. Justin Davidson talked with him midway through “collected stories,” a six-concert festival he curated at Carnegie’s Zankel Hall, and days before the release of his recordinglove/fail…
continue reading Search Results for:
Portland State University
‘the little match girl passion’ new recording
Since its premiere by Paul Hillier and Theatre of Voices at Carnegie Hall in 2007, David Lang’s the little match girl passion has been performed close to 600 times in over 40 countries…
continue readingBang on a Can All-Stars Premiere Field Recordings
At the Barbican Centre in London, on March 20, 2012, the Bang on a Can All-Stars premiere Field Recordings — with new works by Gordon, Lang and Wolfe. The evening-length project that is as much a mystery as a concert – a kind of ghost story. The ghosts aren’t the physical presence of people gone before, but they are the ghosts of sounds, images, ideas, and voices. Each composer has been asked to find and interact with something recorded before, using the power of music made right in front of us to reach out to other things not present…
continue readingdeath speaks on NPR’s “First Listen”
Although we all eventually face death, it’s a topic most avoid — except perhaps for philosophers, who explain it to our heads, and artists, who present it to our hearts.
Composer David Lang offers something for both head and heart — and goes one step further in his new song cycle, Death Speaks. Here, death is less a lofty concept than a personality.
“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,” Lang wrote for the Carnegie Hall debut of the piece last year…
continue readingLang composes score and original song for Sorrentino’s Youth, in US theaters 12/4
On Friday December 4, Paolo Sorrentino’s film Youth — with score and original song composed by David Lang — is released throughout North America; the soundtrack to the film is released digitally on iTunes.
Click here to qread a New York Times feature on Lang’s music in the film.
Click here to listen to an NPR interview with Lang and All Things Considered‘s Robert Siegel…
continue reading10 Years of ‘the little match girl passion’
On October 27, 2007 Paul Hillier and Theatre of Voices premiered David Lang’s the little match girl passion in Carnegie Hall. The composition won Lang a Pulitzer Prize, the recording won a Grammy Award, and the score has since become one of the most performed new works in the world.
Staged by Glimmerglass Opera and Portland Opera, choreographed by the Paris Opera Ballet and the Royal Swedish Ballet, with theatrical productions in Moscow, London, Edinburgh, and Sydney, it has been performed over 400 times across 35 countries…
continue reading‘the little match girl passion’: Best of 21st Century
The Guardian UK has listed David Lang’s the little match girl passion as one of the top 25 works of classical music written in the 21st Century. The composition received a Pulitzer Prize, the recording won a Grammy Award, and the score has since become one of the most performed new works in the world.
the little match girl passion has been staged by Glimmerglass Opera and Portland Opera, choreographed by the Paris Opera Ballet and the Royal Swedish Ballet, with theatrical productions in Moscow, London, Edinburgh, and Sydney…
continue readingWaPo Best of 2019: Classical Music
By Anne Midgette
Classical music critic
Dec. 10, 2019
People often ask: Why can’t we update old operas for our time? With “Prisoner of the State,” David Lang has done just that. He remakes Beethoven’s only opera, “Fidelio,” a problem child of the repertory, into a new work that hews to the original in form while underscoring its relevance to today’s society…
continue readingBiography
— The New Yorker
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…
continue readingSlate.com
I had two jobs my senior year in high school—a music-related job and a film-related job. All these years later, both are on my mind, since I have been spending time in Los Angeles helping to promote Paolo Sorrentino’s new film Youth, for which I wrote the music.
I live in New York, but I grew up in Los Angeles, in Westwood, which is the neighborhood that surrounds UCLA. These days Westwood is a kind of anonymous shopping district, but in 1973, when I worked there, it still felt like a college town…
continue reading