| Composer David Lang speaks on his work to an audience during the New Music Festival at BGSU. (Photo: Enoch Wu/Sentinel-Tribune) |
David Lang started his career by disappointing his parents.
He went to Yale to study chemistry on his way to becoming a doctor. He ended up studying composition
instead, a field he described as "a sub-niche of expression.".
And, the Pulitzer Prize winning composer said, he was "a bad student."
Now he teaches at Yale with some of those same teachers he tangled with.
Lang is at Bowling Green State University through Saturday as featured guest composer for the New Music
Festival. His composer’s talk, which serves as the festival’s keynote address, turned into a wide
ranging discussion prompted by questions from the audience.
Lang is known for extending the parameters of the style known as minimalism, and promoting the
performance of contemporary in new ways as a founder of Bang on a Can, a festival that later spawned a
touring ensemble.
"What we do," he said addressing his fellow composers in the audience, "is very strange.
"We’re involved in refreshing something that’s a complete ….body of work that doesn’t need
us," he said. Yet classical music does need to be revitalized. "I think everything in the past
should be looked back so it can be pulled forward."
His music constantly challenges what is taken for granted, Lang said.
When he arrived at Yale in the mid-1970s, the reigning academic compositional style was serialism, a
highly intellectual and rigid form. Lang instead favored writing long, quiet pieces intended to unfold
over the course of an entire night or day influenced by composers such as Terry Riley and Steven Reich.
Then as his studies were coming to an end, he realized once he graduated he would not have access to al
the musicians he did on campus, so he started writing pieces in widely varying styles, further annoying
his professors.
He did form a strong bond with composer Jacob Druckman, though he said he wasn’t the composer’s favorite
student. It was Druckman who brought him back to Yale to teach.
In 1996, Druckman called Lang to ask if he would teach his classes and lessons while he was undergoing
treatment for cancer.
The elder composer said he would be fine, and this would just give him a chance to concentrate on his
treatments. Lang took over his classes. Two weeks later, Druckman died.
Lang said he was angry. "I got angry that I didn’t get a chance say anything nice to him," Lang
said. "I was angry at God."
At the time he was working on an orchestral piece meant to depict a fanciful machine. As he first
envisioned it as "light-hearted."
But after Druckman’s death "I didn’t feel lighthearted."
The character of the piece became more menacing, the tone darker. The piece expressed the composer’s
"rage at life."
That piece, "Grind to a Halt," will conclude the festival Saturday. It is one of three Lang
pieces as well as work by four other composers on the concluding concert at 8 p.m. in Kobacker Hall of
the Moore Musical Arts Center. The concert features the university’s Collegiate Chorale, Wind Symphony
and Philharmonia. Advance tickets are $10 and $7 for seniors and students. Tickets are $3 more each on
the day of the concert.
"Music is a perfect way to communicate this animal, this unmediated, way of feeling," Lang
said.
Such discussion of music as an emotional experience for both performer and listener was "off
limits" when he was a student.
Still in music in the classical tradition – "this weird thing we’re involved in whatever you want to
call it" – the emotions are more nuanced, more complicated than in commercial music where the
intent is a direct appeal to get you to buy something.
"I’m suspicious," he said earlier, "of anything that reveals itself immediately. I prefer
the thing that reveals itself over time."
That would be a work of art that decades after first being experienced still communicates something new.
Lang said he found it strange that music was now studied in universities. While he said he loved
teaching, especially private lessons – "those lessons are so personal, so revealing. . . . Lessons
are like psychoanalysis for both parties" – he feels music should be more of an apprenticeship than
an academic discipline.
He said he learned most during his five summers at the Aspen Musical Festival. As a composer, he didn’t
have a strict schedule, so he attended every orchestra and opera rehearsal. "To hear the music put
together, polished and shaped, that was very good for me."
