When David Lang was a young composer, he read every review he received, hoping someone would describe his music as muscular and inventive. No one ever did.
Now, the Stanford University alumnus — who returns to campus on Feb. 1 for the world premiere of his latest work, before and after nature, presented by Stanford Live — is open to many more ideas about how a new composition of his might turn out. A piece’s he writing could be beautiful and quiet, loud and obnoxious, or land in some space in between.
In conversation with SF Classical Voice, Lang said he’s “super pumped” to discover how both he and the audience will react to before and after nature. The work, which was written for the Bang on a Can All-Stars and the Los Angeles Master Chorale, is also set to feature visuals by video artist Tal Rosner.
Lang said he’s loath to dictate what his — or anyone’s — art can or can’t do. “I don’t like to have people in art or in life tell me what to think. I like to have the opportunity to find out what I think for myself,” he explained. “A piece of art [can] propose a problem and then indicate a space to think about it. I like to offer that to other people, give them space, and treat them the way I like to be treated.”
Lang’s new work considers the complexity of how human beings might contemplate nature without centering themselves in it. But finding the artistic language for that has sometimes felt like “a too-tall task,” the composer admitted. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
This project began with an invitation from Stanford Live and a visit to campus last year. How did these initial interactions establish the work’s foundation and perhaps its structure?
I met with people from different [university] departments. They were interested in political science, ecology, conservation, and [engaging with] people in the arts who were trying to figure out the role of the arts in [the future of our world]. On the one hand, it was exhilarating to see people galvanized across campus, thinking about the issue and how it would intersect with their research.
But it was ultimately confusing because I didn’t come away feeling any one person had figured out an answer to these problems. I started thinking maybe the point of my piece shouldn’t be “climate change is terrible” or “here’s what the future will look like.” It was to go underneath all these issues and see why we can’t even agree on what the problems or solutions are. Sometimes you write music about what you know; sometimes you write music that’s an opportunity to experiment with what you don’t know. I ended up thinking, “Why are there limits to our ability to understand how important it is to live in the world?”
How did those thoughts become a piece of music? And how do you compose in a way to suggest those limits?
The first thing that comes to mind is that this is a piece with people in it. It’s not just abstract. It has people singing. What are they singing about? You’re already imagining a world with people in it.
I thought about how difficult it is for us to imagine nature without putting ourselves in it. That’s the core of the piece: trying to describe, define, and value something where we’re already tipping the scale. We’re in the landscape we’re evaluating. I looked for opportunities to show the futility of that [perspective] or a reaction to it. We can’t imagine what everything is and our place in it without talking about values. People’s values get in the way because they don’t align. Quickly, they become political, and everything’s a mess.
You also spent time in Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve during the piece’s development. What visual or sensory elements do you recall there, and are they manifest in the composition?
I’m not sure how much that got into what I was composing, but I loved being there. It was for that conference where people from different disciplines explained their specialties to each other. So they were being open and very nontechnical. It was super interesting. In this one location, here are all these different perspectives on what’s valuable. Each perspective leads to a different idea of what’s worth saving and how to go about saving it. It was an example of how all these people who [broadly] believe in the same things probably don’t agree on what exactly they’re valuing.
So language matters?
When you have facts and things that can be [put in extremely technical terms], you might instead say them in [a more open] language so that people understand them. The role of the arts is to do something abstract that opens an emotional doorway and gives people something they would not get if they were reading an article or book or hearing a lecture.
What most intrigued you or led to your richest explorations while working on before and after nature?
[In the first part of the piece] there are excerpts from over 50 creation myths that I rewrote. Every creation myth describes the moment before [humanity] came around. What was the world before we got here? What was the first thing that happened before there was light, dark, division, time? I took a line from each myth about that state of not-being and made it into a text. There’s no way we can imagine [that state], so the text is mostly a bunch of negations. We have light [where] there was no light. We have time [where] there was no time. [This section] tells of things that were not there that we now take for granted.
Because it’s Stanford and [more generally] the American West, I [was thinking about] John Muir’s journals. He was doing explorations in the West, and I remembered [having read] his beautiful description of first seeing Yosemite. He’s trying to describe this thing that white people have never seen before. He describes it as awe-inspiring. He ends up describing it with his religious background. That gave him the language and avenue to put his feeling of awe into a place he could acknowledge.
[Yet] that seemed weird to me. Religion is a framework, a human construct invented so that we can talk about things we can’t possibly explain or understand. [So] I rewrote and amplified the religious nature [of that message]. You see something and want to understand it, but language is inadequate. We invented these tools to describe the world around us, but this colors and also narrows the world we see and keeps us from agreeing with people who don’t have that same framework. There’s nothing wrong with that at all, but it’s an example of our limitations.
In one movement [of before and after nature] that I love, a part that resonates completely, the text is “I thought all this would last forever.” Either that’s true or not true. Maybe [humanity will] be tremendously disappointed, but that’s the way we live. I didn’t want to write a depressing piece or a textbook or miserable political scolding. I wanted to write something human, something I do imagine: a world lasting forever. I don’t know what that means, but I’d like to spend seven minutes with nice music thinking about it.
You worked with video artist Tal Rosner for this piece. What drew you about him?
I saw a video he made where he had taken a film of trees in the wind and used his computer to draw — animate and scratch — over them. I saw it as a metaphor for this piece: a human intervention into an organic experience. Everything he’s done is about [taking] real images from the world that are [then] interfered with. He’s manipulated them, or there are two images moving at different speeds that are put on top of each other. [For this piece] there’s a landscape with the motion of rippling water underneath it. You don’t see water; you see an unstable landscape. He’s done dramatic and beautiful things to mess with the organic world. That’s taking the program of the entire piece to heart.
Does collaborating stretch you as a composer?
So much of what I do is collaborative, and every [project is different]. Sometimes I write the libretto and music, hire the musicians and singers, direct the opera. I do practically everything except selling the beer. And sometimes I’ve sold the beer, too. Other times, your collaborative part is very small. I write the music and stand back. This is in between. I’m in this gray zone where I’ve encouraged everyone to go down this path but haven’t yet seen how they go.
You’re the parent of three adult children. Has that provided urgency or emphasis to your work or your thoughts about the climate crisis?
Like all larger issues in life, music is only a small part. Political action requires that you live in the world. Good deeds require doing them in the world. Having children has been beautiful, but it hasn’t made me a better or deeper composer.
Does ritual have a role in your process?
Ritual is definitely part of my work. I’m moderately religious and [notice] a certain way live performance overlaps with something I recognize from religious experience. It’s everyone paying attention together, believing in advance that something has the power to do good, opening themselves to each other. [Things are] ennobled by connecting them to ritual power. That’s the gift of live performance. It’s an opportunity for 700 people to see the same thing and have relationships with each other through experiencing what’s in front of them. That’s ritual power.
Finally, a tangentially related subject: You mentioned someone whom you admired as a model for how to review and comment on music.
Yes, composer and critic Tom Johnson. He was the reviewer for The Village Voice in the mid-1970s when Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Meredith Monk, and Terry Riley were all doing their thing. His attitude was “I’m going out, seeing something cool, writing something cool about it.” He didn’t write that the clarinet player was sharp, the singer sounded good or bad. He just wrote that he went, had a new experience, and described it to you.
The message I got was not that there’s good or bad music or people worth following or not worth following. Instead, the message was the world is full of people doing really exciting things. It made me want to do exciting things. I’m not going to know if I love [before and after nature] until I see it in the hall. I’m going to have an experience I’ve never had before. I learned that from Tom Johnson.
