The winner of this year's Pulitzer Prize in Music and co-founder of New York's legendary Bang on the Can collective, David Lang has succeeded in creating a brave new alternative world for contemporary classical music, writes Belinda McKeon.
IMAGINE YOU'RE a New York-based composer, living in Manhattan and reckoning with those same challenges of space and of square footage that every Manhattan resident must face. You live in a Soho loft, but not in one of those Soho lofts that resembles an aircraft hangar; yours is the last building on a street of condos and retail giants which retains some of Manhattan's old-style charm, meaning full-frontage graffiti and a five-storey walk-up.
Your apartment is also your studio, so you must work there as well as live there, and your apartment is also your family home, and you and your wife - also an artist, and also in need of some space for her practice - have three young children, with all the stuff and the spaciousness that young children will bring. You also have two parakeets, which take up more room than you might think. Oh, and a Pulitzer Prize, but that can tuck itself away in a cupboard somewhere.
Now imagine that you find yourself with an extra room. Something opens up, a space becomes ripe for renovation, for colonisation - it offers itself to you as another bedroom, as a living-room, as a place to keep your instruments, as a place for your no-doubt colossal collection of music. What do you do with it?
David Lang, co-founder of New York's legendary Bang on a Can collective and the winner of this year's Pulitzer Prize in Music, took the extra room in his Manhattan apartment this year and built a theatre.
A mini-theatre, certainly, but one scarcely more so than its famous Soho neighbour at 33 Wooster Street, with a stage, with seating, with stage lighting, and with performances which sound like they would not be out of place in the home of the Wooster Group - the premiere of a Mac Wellman play, and a solo bass piece by the German visual artist Hanne Darboven.
IT'S AN APPROACHto environment, to the facts and to the fixtures of what he finds around him, that is typical of Lang, who this week comes to Ireland for the first time, with a new piece written especially for Crash Ensemble. When Lang founded Bang on a Can with Julia Wolfe and Michael Gordon 21 years ago, it was out of similar desire to push at the boundaries of a limited realm.
"I'm only interested in building the world that I want to live in," he says. And when Lang, Wolfe and Gordon established their collective, which started out as a one-day festival in 1987, it was with the intention of creating an alternative world for contemporary music. Because the existing terrain as it displayed itself to them, back then, was anything but encouraging.
"It felt like we wanted, as composers, to live in a world that was freer than the world that we were moving into in New York," Lang explains. "Because in New York, every scene, every musical style and ideology had a place to go. So if you wanted to go to hear Elliott Carter's music you would go uptown and you would go to Lincoln Center and to Columbia. And every scene was like this. There was John Zorn at the Knitting Factory and there was Philip Glass at BAM (the Brooklyn Academy of Music), or Meredith Monk in a loft. Every scene had the people who were good in that scene, and the people whose music was stylistically related.
"So I think what we found was that because we were looking at our music as being something that wasn't stylistically derived, but as us taking what we needed from each of these different categories, we didn't want to make a world where style was the way that all ideas got sorted."
The way that the Bang on a Can founders began to sort the ideas upon which they stumbled was, rather, in terms of freshness, of originality, of difference.
"There's lots of great conservative music out there, lots of beautiful melodies which are not trying to do anything fresh, and there's nothing wrong with that," he adds, "but we thought that maybe, if you just try to find the people from every category who are trying to do something innovative, then maybe you will come to a concert and come out of it feeling like the world is full of lots of different options. Because that's what we felt like we missed. We felt like the world was not full of options, but of warring camps. And we didn't really belong to them, so we didn't want to perpetuate that world. We wanted to make it so that our music, and the music we wanted to hear, had a place to go." That place was the Bang on a Can marathon, the 12-hour festival of music which was the collective's first incarnation and which is now an annual institution, albeit with a determination to avoid any of an institution's connotations of confinement and definition.
This year's festival took place on the last weekend of May in the Winter Garden of the World Financial Center, a beautiful space which literally opens up to the dawn which mark's the marathon's culmination. Crash Ensemble were participants this year, with their performances including Donnacha Dennehy's Grá agus Bás(with the sean-nós singer Iarla Ó Lionáird, and described as "really spectacular" by Lang), sharing space with (among others) the Canadian singer/violinist Owen Pallett (who has worked with Arcade Fire, and who is also known as Final Fantasy), the chamber ensemble Alarm Will Sound, the rock musician Dan Deacon, Bang on a Can themselves, Brian Eno (via the Canadian group Contact) and the little-known Danish composer Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen.
THE MARATHON FINISHEDup this year, as the morning light streamed in, with a performance of Stockhausen's 1968 work for six vocalists, Stimmung, one of Lang's "all-time favourite pieces".
The process of designing each year's marathon is a microcosm of how Lang and Bang on a Can have always made their way through the music world; stumbling on new work, following trails to undiscovered treasures, fusing together disparate sounds.
"The interesting thing about normal music is that you find it everywhere," he says. "So if you only want it normal, you get normal music all the time without really thinking about it. But the minute you dedicate your life to strange music, then you end up having to go out and search for it. The people who are in my part of the music world, you know, the experimental world; we're all a little crazy.
"Because we're passionate about it, about building that world we want to live in."
Part of Lang's own version of "crazy" is his story of how, when he was Composer-in-Residence at the New York Philharmonic several years ago, he used to go into the offices of music publishers around the city and ask to be allowed to immerse himself in their libraries, pulling sheet music and recordings from their racks and acquainting himself with as many sources of contemporary music as possible.
"Because, when people recommend things to me, I may not like it," he says, "but I want to know everything that I can know."
Lang's own work as a composer displays an almost indefinable range. Recent pieces have included the orchestral work The Passing Measures, The Difficulty of Crossing a Field, an opera for the Kronos Quartet, loud love songs, a concerto for the percussionist Evelyn Glennie, and Walking on Water, a project for the London Sinfonietta, with visuals by the English film-maker Peter Greenaway.
He was awarded the Pulitzer for The Little Match Girl Passion, a 35-minute piece for four voices and percussion which arose out of a consideration of the Hans Christian Andersen story in the context of Bach's St Matthew's Passion. It was premiered last autumn at Carnegie Hall by Paul Hillier and the Theatre of Voices.
Hillier has recently become the new artistic director of the National Chamber Choir, who, Lang reveals, will perform the world premiere of The Little Match Girl Passionin a full choral form this November.
The work arose partly out of Lang's grappling, as a Jewish composer - his parents were immigrants from Germany and Russia - with the legacy and the monolith that is Christian music, and indeed with the way that that tradition manifested itself in Paul Hillier's work.
"I've never felt that any aspect of participating in classical music should go unchallenged," he says. "And my interest was always experimental music first, and I grew up playing in a rock band and in a jazz band, so I began being interested in classical music as an outreach of these other outsider things. And I've always been dealing with what it is to be in a field which is based on Christian music, because classical music comes completely out of that tradition. And this music is great.
"Were I a composer 400 years ago, I would be writing Christian music, in the way that William Byrd, a Catholic, wrote music which was used for Protestants because the religion determined where the work was. All music, from time immemorial, is music which is produced for a particular social environment, and paid for by that environment. It's always been a question of how to reconcile these things.
"And so when I got this commission, I thought, finally, after 30 years of thinking about this, I was going to be able to deal with this."
LANG, WHO HASa music PhD from Yale, is vocal about what he sees as the restrictions of the classical genre, about how the category itself, with its connotations of "erudition and refinement and intellectual improvement" made it difficult for the music to reach out to new and diverse audiences, audiences who need that music.
"I think the minute that you can say that something is useful, you limit it," he says. "You know, I don't want to be 'smarter'. I don't want my culture to be 'smarter'. It's not like vitamins.
"What people like in contemporary art is the visceral sense of trying to use their powers of perception to deal with danger, to deal with mystery, to deal with confusion. Those are the things which are underneath the human experience. But somehow classical music got away from that and just became about being smart."
Given his long-standing criticism of the field, he was, he says, shocked to hear that he had been awarded the Pulitzer.
Forced March, Lang's piece for Crash Originals, the Crash Ensemble event, comes out of yet another attempt to buck the constraints of category and convention.
"It's music with a problem," he says. "It's melody with no beginning and end, really, and no discernible larger metre. It's a sort of always-moving forward, free-flowing, hard-to-predict piece, and I've done this through a mathematical process which spins out this infinite, never-repeating tune, about the attempt of different instruments or groups or rhythms to sort of push this tune into more regular way of being perceived."
He works with mathematics in the piece, he says, not as a way of planning and plotting its shape, but as a way of keeping his own "intuition" out of the composition.
A way of remaining that messed-up composer, then?
"Yeah. Because if you want to make something that never repeats, you have to have a book-keeping system to make sure it never does. So I worked for months and months to get with this incredibly simple way of making this very strange melody continue to change and go on forever. And I spent so long working on that, you know? But that's sort of where the fun is for me."
Crash Ensemble premieres a new work by David Lang in a programme of music written especially for Crash. With special guest Iarla Ó Lionáird. In Dublin's Vicar Street tomorrow, booking: 0818 719 390, www.ticketmaster.ie
