David Lang, one of America’s preeminent living composers and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for music, brings his contemplative work darker to Saint Paul for its Midwest premiere. As much a hypnotic sonic and visual object as it is a piece of music, darker weaves its intricate solo lines into a delicate and subtly emotional fabric. The performance will feature mesmerizing projections created live by New York based visual artist Suzanne Bocanegra. Logan Coale, an NYC-based bassist and occasional performer with the SPCO, will be joining for this performance. Below is a conversation Logan and David had on November 9, 2016 in a Greenwich Village coffee shop. In addition to introducing the inspirations and ideas behind darker, they discuss classical music conventions, the challenges young composers face, as well as Bonnie Raitt and Bob Dylan.
Why the title darker?
Part of the idea in titling it darker was asking myself, can I make something that is emotional without specifying the moment where it becomes emotional? Can I make something which becomes a little more introspective without doing it in the way we normally do in classical music which is to build something big and then take it away suddenly and we are left bereft and quiet and we feel emptiness. Classical music can be very manipulative in this way, where the composer determines what kind of emotions the listeners should have. We try to make the audience have this experience all at the exact same time so that everyone is full of hopefulness at this moment and then bursts into tears at this particular moment. This piece, darker, is a very different way of looking at it. One of the things I love about religion, quite honestly, is when you are in organized religion and are performing actions over and over again, the amount of thoughtfulness is up to you. You can be in that space but thinking about something else completely or be thinking about something very deep and personal. The action doesn’t change, it’s what you bring to the action that determines what kind of experience you have. And it’s nice to actually think that sometimes a piece of music can do that.
What do you think the audience should know going into this performance?
darker is more of an event than it is a piece. The music does actually change over time but the changes are so subtle that you sort of have to adjust your metabolism before you can notice what’s changing. It takes a while before you ask yourself, “I don’t know how I got into this environment, this is slightly different than where I thought I was, was the music eternally that way and I just didn’t know?” There’s never a brand new section where something surprising and exciting happens. So in that way, it’s similar to watching life go by and gradually realizing that there are moments and elements you can track over time.
Unlike a lot of classical music which usually uses very dynamic and extreme emotions. Did you write darker in this way to try to draw similarities between the the experience of listening to a piece and the experience of life?
There are two answers to that question. Point number one is that this piece is a memorial for Jeanette Yanikian and I have a sneaking suspicion that I will be the only person in every audience, including in St. Paul, who knew her. [You can read more about David’s accounting of Jeanette Yanikian here]
Point number two is just sort of a general though about classical music. I think we get used to things being a particular way but there’s no reason for those things to be set in stone except for the fact that we love and revere the music that came before us. We learn that that’s the way well-made pieces work. For example, we love how in a Mahler or Beethoven symphony, but Mahler in particular, the emotional range is really exhausted and we consider that to be exciting in a concert hall. But if that were our real lives, we would be wiped out.
It would be like watching that same Hollywood movie over and over and over.
Right, so I just think in order do what I want music to do, I have to use music to figure out how I actually feel things, in real life. Sometimes it’s necessary for me to say “music has to be more like the life I have.” You know, in a piece of music you hear something really exciting and you go, “Well that’s just the obligatory part where something exciting happens”. Bartok’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celeste is unbelievably cool, creepy, intellectual, and heady for the first two thirds of the piece and then it goes "Oh, we'll leave you with a folk tune because we want you to be happy." There are these tropes that we don’t examine in classical music because we like to follow the patterns that were set by our “betters” from the past. So in order to have an experience which reminds us of who we are, now, it might be necessary to challenge some of those with new music.
Do you feel the challenges young composers are facing today are similar to the ones you faced or are they different?
The biggest thing that happens for any composer is you feel like you put all this work into a piece and all you want to do is to be taken seriously. No one is in the field for money or fame. You’re in the field because you have a musical opinion, you work really hard on something, and it’s unbelievably satisfying if somebody comes up to you and says “oh what you did, I appreciate it” and you can live for a year on that! That, plus whatever other horrible things you have to do for a year… And I think that’s the biggest problem with our field. I think what people need is to just really feel like they are part of the whole ecology of the system. We need all these young composers, performers, musicians, to feel like they have a purpose. To tell them we respect them and their voices are valued. Even if they never become successful… we need all of these people in order to keep the whole ecosystem fresh. Keep ideas passing from person to person and keep people optimistic. So I think that’s probably the biggest problem is that we have a system in which it’s very difficult to remind ourselves to be optimistic all of the time.
Students at the Bang on a Can summer Festival, an annual new music retreat held at Mass MoCA organized by David and the other founding members of Bang on a Can.
Are you the kind of person where when you were a young kid you said “I’m going to be a musician or a composer” or did it come to you a little later?
Well I was a chemistry student as an undergraduate so I was going to school to be a doctor. I never thought that I would do it for real though. I spent every waking minute playing music on as many instruments as I could. I played in rock bands, jazz bands, orchestras and marching bands. And I’m very nerdy, I played bugle in the boy scouts. During this time I always assumed that I would be going to medical school because that’s what I had been programmed to do from birth. My father’s a doctor.
So when was that moment, where you switched and said “Oh I’m doing this”?
Well it was really traumatic for me actually. I really wasn’t enjoying doing the sciences. In college, all the time I should been studying for my Calculus final, that was time I spent doing music. When I decided to go onto music graduate school my parents were very angry with me and actually never got over it really.
But do you actually remember that specific moment.
Yeah I actually do because it was so traumatic. I actually transferred away from Stanford to the music department at UCLA half way through school and at the end of the summer I never told Stanford that I wasn’t coming back so I just woke up one day and said to my parents, "I actually don’t want to go to UCLA but I do want to study music. So I’ll go back to Stanford, but I’ll do music there." They were not happy, that made them really angry.
So we’re meeting on the 9th of November...I was going to end with a dorky question about what music you listen to when you clean your house but maybe I’ll change that question now to say. What music do you think you’ll listen to tonight?
You mean because of the political situation?
I don’t know, just your mood.
I’m not in the mood to listen to music today. I’m completely distraught actually. And I think there are some moments where you’re not a musician any longer because being a citizen is just so much more powerful. I don’t know, I’m just afraid basically. I don’t want to use music to make me more or less afraid. I’m only going to be able to figure out how to live in the future..
But if you were home alone...and you had to clean your house…
Oh always listen to Dylan, Bob Dylan.
It’s you, a vacuum cleaner and Bob Dylan.
If the vacuuming is very loud I can put on something incredibly obnoxious but I listen to various kinds of classical music everyday but I can’t actually clean the house with it. You know if it’s on I have to sit and I have to listen to it. What do you clean the house with?
Bonnie Raitt gets played a lot for that. There’s “Let’s give them something to talk about” I think it’s partly because that’s what my parents listened to maybe when we were doing similar things so you know it feels like the right thing. But you gotta skip the love songs because they’re too sad.
But anyway, is there anything else you want the good people of Saint Paul to know?
If you think you’d like the most meticulous passage work from Vivaldi but heard by Arvo Pärt and then stretched out for an hour accompanied by a psychedelic light show, you should come to this concert.
David Lang’s darker will be presented at the Ordway Concert Hall in Saint Paul, MN on Saturday December 3rd at 8:00pm.
Tickets can be reserved at: http://www.liquidmusicseries.org/tickets
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