David Lang (composer)

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David Lang (born January 8, 1957 in Los Angeles, California) is an American composer living in New York City. He was awarded the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Music for The Little Match Girl Passion, composed in 2007 and based on the children's story by Hans Christian Andersen. [1]

Together with Julia Wolfe and Michael Gordon, Lang co-founded Bang on a Can in 1987. His first recognition came from the BMI Foundation's Student Composer Awards in 1980 and 1981.

Lang sometimes gives his concert pieces strange and even iconoclastic titles such as Eating Living Monkeys (1985) and Bonehead (1990). His music can be in turn comic, abrasive, and soothing, and it usually retains elements of conceptualism. It is also informed by modernism, minimalism, and rock -- and can perhaps be best described as postminimalism.

He was a major contributor to the music performed by the Kronos Quartet in Requiem for a Dream.

In 1999 he collaborated with composers Julia Wolfe and Michael Gordon and librettist/illustrator Ben Katchor in the composition of the "comic strip opera" The Carbon Copy Building. The production won an Obie Award for Best New American Production.

Also in 1999, Lang based his opera The Difficulty of Crossing a Field on a short story by Ambrose Bierce, about an Alabama planter named Williamson who purportedly vanished while walking across a field in 1854.[2] (Bierce's story reoccurs in urban-legend form, in which, coincidentally, the vanished man is often given the name David Lang.)

Lang holds degrees from Stanford University, the University of Iowa, and Yale University (DMA, 1989). His teachers have included Donald Jenni, Richard Hervig, Jacob Druckman, Hans Werner Henze, and Martin Bresnick.

Lang's music has been released on the Argo/Decca, BMG, Cantaloupe Music, Chandos, CRI, Point, and Sony Classical labels. His scores are published by Red Poppy Music (available from G. Schirmer, Inc.)

His notable students include Kevin Puts.


Contents

[edit] Film

  • New York Composers: Searching for a New Music (1997). Directed by Michael Blackwood. Produced by Michael Blackwood Productions, in association with Westdeutscher Rundfunk. New York, New York: Michael Blackwood Productions.

[edit] External links

[edit] Recordings

  • Are You Experienced (1992)
  • The Passing Measures (2001)
  • Child (2003)
  • Elevated (2005)

[edit] Listening

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