About: Interviews
David Lang Checks In
WNYC New Sounds
July 9, 2009
David Lang visits the WNYC studio for this edition of New Sounds. Featured are his Pultizer Prize-winning piece ''the little match girl passion,'' and other recent recordings.
Sounds Heard: the little match girl passion
New Music Box, the Web Magazine from the American Music Center
By Molly Sheridan
June 8, 2009
''I wanted to tell a story,'' writes David Lang, introducing the new recording (just out on Harmonia Mundi) of his 2008 Pulitzer-Prize winner the little match girl passion. Such a simple and powerful desire; such a simple and powerful story to tell. (...)
To read the entire article, please download the pdf.
Listen here
Sonically Sound and Pounding... A Discussion with David Lang
Naxos Blog
By Collin Rae
March 31, 2009
(...) What I find so fascinating about David’s music is its direct sonic link to what we now call “Indie Rock”. His homage to the Velvet Underground is a fine illustration of this link. It is however pieces like Pierced and Cheating, Lying, Stealing with their organic and almost awkward loops, the spaces and hesitations that flow within that circular-like sound which really grab and propell the listener. There are moments where I feel like I’m listening to some form of post-modernly abstract electronica. Enough of this! Here’s David. (...)
To read the entire interview, please download the pdf.
Building the Waiting Room: An Interview with David Lang
Sequenza 21
By Galen H. Brown
November 5th, 2008
On November 3rd, I sat down with David Lang at a cafe in Downtown Manhattan. I recorded the interview (on my iPod) intending to transcribe it, but the audio, while still marred by a lot of background noise, is actually listenable. (...)
The Little Match Girl Passion
New Music at Carnegie Hall
Carnegie Hall Commissions
October 25, 2008
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. (...)
'Bang on a Can' Showcases Inventive Classical Music
PBS Online News Hour
August 21, 2008
For the past several years, classical music composers have gathered to share their more eclectic scores at the 'Bang on a Can' festival in North Adams, Mass. Jeffrey Brown explores the origins of the event.
Watch the interview here
To read the transcript, please download the pdf.
The Wordless Music Series
WNYC
June 1, 2008
The Wordless Music Series pairs rock and electronic musicians with more traditional chamber and new music performers, to create an entirely new concert experience.
Episode One: Mihailova/Electrik Company/Do Make Say Think/Greenwood
Jad Abumrad hosts, joined by David Lang
[at 09:15min]
David Lang Wins Music Pulitzer
NPR Music
By Tom Huizenga
April 7, 2008
Listen to excerpts of the interview here
To read the entire interview, please download the pdf.
David Lang, a New York-based composer, has won the Pulitzer Prize for music with his piece, The Little Match Girl Passion, based on the children's story by Hans Christian Andersen.
Lang's music makes a big impact with small forces. The piece is scored for only four voices and a few percussion instruments, played by the singers. They sing the sad story of a little girl who freezes to death selling matches on the street during a cold winter's night.
In notes Lang wrote to accompany the Carnegie Hall premiere last October, he says he was drawn to Andersen's story because of how opposite aspects of the plot played off each other.
''The girl's bitter present is locked together with the sweetness of her past memories,'' Lang says. ''Her poverty is always suffused with her hopefulness. There's a kind of naïve equilibrium between suffering and hope.''
Lang was also intrigued by the religious allegory he saw beneath the surface of the story, and he found inspiration in the music of his favorite composer, J.S. Bach.
''Andersen tells this story as a kind of parable,'' Lang says, ''drawing on a religious and moral equivalency between the suffering of the poor girl and the suffering of Jesus. I thought maybe I could take the story of Bach's St. Matthew Passion and take Jesus out, and plug this little girl's suffering in.'' (...)
To read the entire interview, please download the pdf.
Salles des Departs
WNYC Radiolab
January 29, 2008
Imagine that you're a composer. Imagine getting this commission: ''Please write us a song that will allow family members to face the death of a loved one…'' Well, composer David Lang had to do just that when a hospital in Garches, France, asked him to write music for their morgue, or ''Salle Des Departs.''
What do you do? What should death sound like?
Producer Jocelyn Gonzales brings us this piece about David Lang and his commission for the ''Salle Des Departs.''
David Lang & Phil Kline: Messiah Remix
WNYC The Leonard Lopate Show
December 14, 2004
David Lang and Phil Kline re-imagine Handel with their Messiah Remix.
The Last Goodbye: Salles des Departs
BBC Radio 4
October 13, 2003
A moving and inspirational feature about an extraordinary humanitarian project to create a musical and artistic space in a hospital morgue.
Listen here
To read the entire article, please download the pdf.
The Passing Measures
WNYC New Sounds
June 7, 2003
On this edition of New Sounds, composer David Lang presents his CD-length ambient concerto, ''the passing measures.'' The new album is a most unusual concerto for bass clarinet, chorus, and orchestra that explores mortality, time, and the function of music. As Lang explains, ''My piece is about the struggle to create beauty. A single very consonant chord falls slowly over the course of forty minutes. That is the piece.''
Bang on a Can
New Music Box, the Web Magazine from the American Music Center
May 1, 1999
To read the entire interview, please download the pdf.
FRANK J. OTERI: On behalf of NewMusicBox, the American Music Center's new web magazine, I'd like to welcome you all here at ASCAP today. I think it's very symbolic that we're meeting with you to launch this, because this year is the 60th Anniversary of the founding of the American Music Center which was an organization founded by 6 composer/advocates of new music back in 1939 just as the three of you are composers and advocates of new music now. I guess for all of us the most obvious question that a lot of us are still asking and people who are going to visit the site will ask is: What exactly is Bang On A Can? Is it a presenter, an ensemble, a style of music or a way of life?
MICHAEL GORDON: Everything but the last one. [laughs]
JULIA WOLFE: I thought it was only the last one. [laughs]
DAVID LANG: Am I supposed to say something witty now? [laughs]
RICHARD KESSLER: Not now. [laughs]
FRAN RICHARD: Profound. [laughs]
DAVID LANG: Basically, Bang On A Can started because we were three young composers. We got out of school. We came to New York. We looked around, and there were 5 million things that just off the top of our heads we thought we could change. Most of them are really obvious things.
MICHAEL GORDON: Wait a second. The first thing is,...
DAVID LANG: Oh yeah . . .
MICHAEL GORDON: ...before that...
DAVID LANG: I'm sorry.
MICHAEL GORDON: . . .is that we liked each other...
DAVID LANG: We were all friends.
MICHAEL GORDON: ...and we all wanted to get together.
DAVID LANG: Well, we were already getting together every day and we were just wasting our time. We would get together every day and we would talk all day about how, you know, the world wasn't set up to do a lot of the things that we wanted to do. Basically, a lot of what we were doing was. . . we got out of school, we'd sit around, we'd meet every day for breakfast or coffee or whatever, we'd show each other our music and we'd complain about how the world sucked, basically. And then you go, well, it's easy to identify lots of things that need to get changed in order to make sure that, you know, interesting music always gets played, and the right audience knows about it, that music actually can mean something large in society, that young composers get treated well...
MICHAEL GORDON: The people who are interested in dance and theater and poetry, you would know who you are. . . I think fifteen or twenty years ago, it was not inconceivable -- it's not inconceivable now -- that an intellectually curious person would think that the contemporary equivalent of Bach was Stevie Wonder, or someone like that. Not to take anything away from Stevie Wonder, but. . .
JULIA WOLFE: I mean, the point about Stevie Wonder isn't that he isn't a great artist, but that in other areas of the arts people are pushing boundaries. . . I think more of the equivalent would be the Talking Heads; they're kind of experimental in a rock band. . . but that's as far as many people would go, and, you know, these are our good friends, college friends, who go to see very avant-garde art films, and really ''out there'' dance, and really strange exhibits of new sculpture, but there's no relationship to music. So that's something that really bugged us. And, actually, the first year, the very first year, Bang On A Can, to answer your question, initially, was only a one-day festival. It was a sort of like a marathon, and since, of course, it's expanded...
FRAN RICHARD: Mother's Day.
JULIA WOLFE: Mother's Day, right... [laughs] But that very first year one of the things we did was get mailing lists from the dance workshop, get some lists, get the dance list. I don't even think we took a music list.
DAVID LANG: No, we didn't do it on that year. And we did it in an art gallery in SoHo. The whole point, was basically, I mean... The people that we know, our friends in other disciplines, the people who are in the arts, it's just part of their life to go, ''I want to know what's exciting, what's new, what's fresh,'' and all these different things. They want to read the most difficult book. They want to see, you know, the really strange foreign film, you know, they really want to be able to read the totally incomprehensible poetry. There are people who sort of have a circuit of knowledge that's important, and music wasn't even on that circuit.
MICHAEL GORDON: That's really the whole thing. [laughs]
(...)
To read the entire interview, please download the pdf.
Oral History, American Music: David Lang
Yale School of Music and Library
Oral History of American Music (OHAM) is the only ongoing project in the field of music dedicated to the collection and preservation of oral and video memoirs in the voices of the creative musicians of our century.