To impress, to move

Hearing a children's song, a summer pop hit, an aria, a string quartet movement, the sound of the street or the song of a bird, feelings and emotions are aroused within us and we can be clear that we are encountering a composition. Unless we resonate emotionally to the refined structure of a piece of music, to its embracing creative power, to the creative attention paid to the smallest detail, to the thousand years of experience giving shape to sounds, in other words, to everything which raises the sequence of musical phenomena to the rank of "composition", then the composer has been working in vain. "The essence of composition" says David Lang "is impact." 

There are some who feel that a Bach fugue is simply a contrapuntal display while others detect only a pale collection of formulae in a Mozart movement. But others will see the former as proof of God and an unsurpassably profound experience in the latter. One listener encounters compositions, another hears just notes. Impact is infinitely subjective. This sort of relativism is not a unique feature of post-modernism. We can quote an article from a German encyclopaedia published in the 1820s about compositions and composers. "Composition is the craft of making new works of music. To this belongs the mental talent for creating music, the knowledge of ordering a thesis and the practical treatment of instruments. Therefore, only those can call themselves composers who create works rich with spirit and feeling."

David Lang (photo: Peter Serling)
 

The Californian David Lang (1957) began his composition studies at Stanford where in 1976 he met Donald Martin Jenni (1937–2006), who arrived from Iowa University to substitute for a single semester. "He taught French music from the Middle Ages to Pierre Boulez. A unique, mysterious figure," said Lang in his movingly beautiful remembrance about his professor. "I could never figure out where he was really from and when pressed he would tell amazing stories of traveling in Morocco or Eastern Europe or India. He had a strange and vaguely unrecognizable accent. Even his name was mysterious – at Stanford when I had met him he was called Donald Jenni, with the accent on the "Jen." The next year when I went to Iowa everyone called him Martin Jenni with the accent on the "ni." It seemed that people knew him differently in different worlds and places. It also seemed that changing his location was a part of changing himself. Each week we would look in depth at one piece or composer: Messe de Notre Dame, La Mer, Leonin's Magnus Liber, the Berlioz's Requiem, Solage, Fauré, Messiaen. His ability to subject even the most seemingly obvious musical materials to laser-like microscopic analysis was miraculous."

Jenni exerted a fundamental influence on Lang's musical thinking. And so when it came to choosing where to do his masters' degree, there was no question that it would be with Jenni at Iowa University (1978–1980). "This was the golden age. Rare talents came together and we were taught by superb teachers, Richard Hervig, William Hibbard and Peter Todd Lewis. It was said that this university alone won as many BMI Student Prizes as all the other American universities combined. The teachers seemed to try to outdo each other with uniquely revelatory courses. I took a semesterlong analysis course with Hibbard on Pierrot Lunaire, for example. But the classes of Jenni's were the most wide-ranging: a semester on the 114 songs of Charles Ives; a semester on William Byrd's My Ladye Nevell's Booke; a semester on the piano music of Brahms. Ultimately it didn't matter what subject he was teaching. If he taught the class, I took it because I knew it would be deep. Martin gave me what was one of the two best lessons I ever had from a teacher, and it was done with a devastatingly dramatic flair. I was just beginning to experiment with making music out of repetitive patterns, and I brought in the beginnings of a piece of music to my lesson, something schematic and very mathematically composed. Martin spent about 30 seconds looking at it and then moved over to another chair, picked up The New York Times and started reading. I didn't know what to do, but I didn't want to fall into any trap he was setting for me, so I just sat there, fuming patiently, waiting for the next student to arrive an hour later. And so we sat. When the next student finally came Martin looked up and said ‘You know, sometimes something makes so much sense that you have to ask yourself, why do it?' I have such a great memory of Martin, sitting in front of a harpsichord, a cigarette-length of ash dangling from his lip, with his bright eyes and a slight smirk on his face, playing Bach and seeing something in it that amused him, something that I would never see if I looked at it forever."

Illustration of Lehel Kovács for the 26 October 2014 evening booklet
 

David Lang attracted attention to himself in the mid-1980s. An orchestral work, barely eight minutes long and dedicated to Hans Werner Henze – Eating Living Monkeys – caused a great stir. The work was inspired by an 18th century report about the strange eating habits of the Chinese Imperial family (for example eating the brains of living monkeys). These "news reports" were essentially rumours, documenting the prejudices of their period, in which uniquely, humour and brutality are inseparably mixed. The simultaneous presence of two irreconcilable feelings that extinguish each other has been a central thought in David Lang's music. In 2008 he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for The Little Match Girl Passion in which he tells one of the saddest stories in world literature within the framework of the Matthew Passion – with concrete references to the music and text of Bach's work. The critic of the Washington Post, Tim Page praised this work about a child freezing to death: "I don't think I've ever been so moved by a new, and largely unheralded, composition as I was by David Lang's Little Match Girl Passion, which is unlike any music I know."