David Lang

Born: January 8, 1957, Los Angeles, California

“With his winning of the Pulitzer Prize for the little match girl passion (one of the most original and moving scores of recent years), Lang, once a postminimalist enfant terrible, has solidified his standing as an American master.” —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.

Lang is one of America’s most performed composers. Many of his works resemble each other only in the fierce intelligence and clarity of vision that inform their structures. His catalogue is extensive, and his opera, orchestra, chamber and solo works are, by turns, ominous, ethereal, urgent, hypnotic, unsettling and very emotionally direct. Much of his work seeks to expand the definition of virtuosity in music—even the deceptively simple pieces can be fiendishly difficult to play and require incredible concentration by musicians and audiences alike.

the little match girl passion, commissioned by Carnegie Hall and premiered by Paul Hillier and Theatre of Voices, was recently listed by The Guardian as “one of the top 25 works of classical music written in the 21st century.” It won the Pulitzer Prize in 2008, and the recording received a Grammy Award in 2010. Lang’s simple song #3, written as part of his score for Paolo Sorrentino’s acclaimed film Youth, received many award nominations in 2016, including the Academy Award and Golden Globe.

His opera prisoner of the state (with libretto by Lang) was co-commissioned by the New York Philharmonic, Rotterdam’s De Doelen Concert Hall, London’s Barbican Centre, Barcelona’s l’Auditori, Bochum Symphony Orchestra, Bruges’ Concertgebouw, and Malmö Opera, and it premiered June 2019 in New York, conducted by Jaap van Zweden. It is a dark retelling of a portion of the story of Beethoven’s only opera Fidelio, in which a woman alone must change her identity to survive within the state.

His most recent opera note to a friend premiered at the Japan Society in New York as part of the 2023 Prototype Festival. Co-commissioned by the Japan Society and the Tokyo Bunka Kaikan, and with music and libretto by Lang, note to a friend combines and reimagines three texts by Japanese novelist Ryunosuke Akutagawa—his story “Death Register,” the last chapter of his In a Grove, and his suicide note “Note to a Certain Old Friend”—as a monodrama that addresses the eternal human fascination with death, love, family and suicide.

Other recent works include the writings, commissioned by Carnegie Hall and the Netherlands Kamerkoor and premiered by Theatre of Voices; the mile-long opera co-created with architect Elizabeth Diller and premiered in New York City’s mile-long elevated park The Highline, with texts by Anne Carson and Claudia Rankine; the loser, which opened the 2016 Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and for which Lang served as composer, librettist and stage director; the public domain for 1000 singers at Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival; the concerto man made for the ensemble So Percussion and a consortium of orchestras, including the BBC Symphony and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and recorded by the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra (CSO); mountain, commissioned and recorded by the CSO; and death speaks, a song cycle based on Schubert, but performed by rock musicians including Bryce Dessner from The National, Shara Nova from My Brightest Diamond, Owen Pallett from Arcade Fire and composer/pianist Nico Muhly.

Lang is Professor of Music Composition at the Yale School of Music and co-founder and co-artistic director of New York’s legendary music collective Bang on a Can.

His music is published by Red Poppy Music and G. Ricordi & Co., New York (ASCAP) and is distributed worldwide by the Universal Music Publishing Group.

the national anthems

• Composed: 2014 on commission from LA Master Chorale, Berlin Radio Choir and Yale Choral Artists
  
• Premiere: June 8, 2014 at Walt Disney Hall in Los Angeles, Grant Gershon conducting the LA Master Chorale
  
• Instrumentation: SATB chorus, strings
• May Festival Notable Performances: This is the first May Festival performance of the national anthems.
• Duration: approx. 24 minutes

Every country has a history—how it came to be, how its wars were won or lost, how strong its people are, or how proud, or how sad. We group ourselves into nations, but it has never really been clear to me what that means, or what we get out of it. Are we grouped together because we believe something together and are proud of associating with others who believe the same way? Or are we grouped together because our ancestors found themselves pushed onto a piece of land by people who didn’t want them on theirs? It seems that all nations have some bright periods and some dark periods in their past. Building a national myth out of our bright memories probably creates a different character than if we build one out of the dark.

I had the idea that if I looked carefully at every national anthem I might be able to identify something that everyone in the world could agree on. If I could take just one hopeful sentence from the national anthem of every nation in the world I might be able to make a kind of meta-anthem of the things that we all share. I started combing through the anthems, pulling out from each the sentence that seemed to me the most committed. What I found, to my shock and surprise, was that within almost every anthem is a bloody, war-like, tragic core, in which we cover up our deep fears of losing our freedoms with waves of aggression and bravado.

At first, I didn’t know what to do with this text. I didn’t want to make a piece that was aggressive, or angry, or ironic. Instead, I read and re-read the meta-anthem I had made until another thought became clear to me. Hiding in every national anthem is the recognition that we are insecure about our freedoms, that freedom is fragile, and delicate, and easy to lose. Maybe an anthem is a memory informing a kind of prayer, a heartfelt plea:

There was a time when we were forced to 
 live in chains.
Please don’t make us live in chains again.

—David Lang