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…
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…
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an article for an unpublished Druckman memorial edition of Contemporary Music Review, (2000), Harold Meltzer, editor.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
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
