works

daisy (202406) 30'

string quartet

Venice Biennale, Parabola/Kings Place, and the Amsterdam String Quartet Biennale

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interviews

New Music at Carnegie Hall

October 25, 2008
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I wanted to tell a story. A particular story—in fact, the story of The Little Match Girl, by the 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…

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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…

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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Jacob Druckman’s Horizons an article for an unpublished Druckman memorial edition of Contemporary Music Review, (2000), Harold Meltzer, editor.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
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Slate.com

December 9, 2015

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…

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news

David Lang appointed Carnegie Hall Composer-In-Residence

David Lang has been appointed as holder of the Richard and Barbara Debs Composer’s Chair for Carnegie Hall’s 2013–2014 season. Full details about the concert activities associated with his residency will be shared in late-January as part of Carnegie Hall’s full 2013–2014 season announcement. But we can reveal that a key element of his season-long appointment includes a special collaborative workshop in November 2013, offering commissioning opportunities for composers and chamber ensembles.

Creating New Music will invite several young composers and chamber ensembles to work together on the creation and performance of new works specially commissioned by Carnegie Hall…

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themillions.com

September 22, 2016

In 1998, I wrote music for a production of Friedrich Schiller’s play Mary Stuart at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco.  The director was my friend Carey Perloff, the music was sung by the spectacular men’s vocal ensemble Chanticleer, and the translation of the text was by the writer and Village Voice theater critic Michael Feingold.  There can be a lot of down time for a composer and a translator during theater rehearsals so Michael and I passed the time telling each other stories about books we should be reading, and Michael suggested I read Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser

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‘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…

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Lang’s score “gorgeous” in Sorrentino’s film premiered at Cannes 2015.

Cannes Film Review: ‘Youth’

Variety Magazine

http://variety.com/2015/film/festivals/youth-review-cannes-michael-caine-paolo-sorrentino-1201501415/

Jay Weissberg

Cannes, France — In “The Great Beauty,” there’s a flashback in which a young Jep Gambardella recalls the promise of love — its loss, with the betrayal of youthful ideals, leads to Jep’s crushing self-contempt. It’s a tender moment in a film of deep cynicism, and now Paolo Sorrentino, with “Youth,” delivers his most tender film to date, an emotionally rich contemplation of life’s wisdom gained, lost and remembered — with cynicism harping from the sidelines, but as a wearied chord rather than a major motif…

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