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…
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The Mount Holyoke College Chamber Singers
NYRB Review: ‘the loser’
Francine Prose9/13/2016 The Loser, David Lang’s beautiful and startlingly original opera, had its world premiere this month at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Composed for a solo baritone, a chamber ensemble, and a concert pianist, the opera (Lang not only wrote the music but is also responsible for the libretto and the stage direction) has been adapted from the Thomas Bernhard novel of the same name—a book which, since its publication in 1983, has attracted an almost cultish following…
continue readingflower, forget me (2022) 14'
baritone and piano
Konzerthaus Dormund
Friday, April 7, 2017
‘just (after song of songs)’ performed by The Mount Holyoke College Chamber Singers
South Hadley, MA
pierced (2007) 15'
solo cello, solo piano, solo percussion, strings
Real Quiet
daisy (202406) 30'
string quartet
Venice Biennale, Parabola/Kings Place, and the Amsterdam String Quartet Biennale
just (after song of songs) (2014) 13'
SSA + perc, vla, vc
Louth Contemporary Music Society
solitary (2016) 8'
text by David Lang (after the Book of Lamentations)
chamber choir or 12 solo voices
Cappella Amsterdam
Setting a Rant to Music: On Adapting Thomas Bernhard’s ‘The Loser’ for the Opera
By David Lang
http://www.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…
continue readinga house (2016) 18'
text by David Lang
SATB
Northwestern University