When Stanford alumnus David Lang set out to write a new composition for the Bang on a Can (BOAC) All-Stars, the electrifying music ensemble he co-founded, he looked to his alma mater for inspiration. Commissioned by Stanford Live specifically to bring Lang and the BOAC All-Stars back to campus, before and after nature is a meditation on the natural world, both before human existence and after humans are gone.
Lang met closely with scholars, faculty and students in Stanford's Doerr School of Sustainability, and with the Doerr-affiliated Environmental Justice Working Group. He combined what he learned with his own readings from the past 50 years of environmental thinking, writing his own texts that explore the different ways we define and understand nature, now that it has been forever changed by our behavior. He set these texts for voices and the BOAC All-Stars and he enlisted video pioneer Tal Rosner to invent a way to visualize the meanings of the music in video and projection. The result is an immersive spectacle of sound and vision, both heartbreaking and miraculous, full of beauty, wonder and awe.
Lang is a renowned Pulitzer Prize-winning composer, the recipient of a Grammy Award and an Oscar nomination, with an extensive body of work, including several pieces co-commissioned and presented by Stanford Live, including the little match girl passion (2007), death speaks (2012), and sun-centered (2022). His most recent work includes large scale choral compositions the writings (2019) and poor hymnal (2023), and the operas prisoner of the state (2019) and note to a friend (2023).