September - 21st Century Music

Bang on an Ear:
An Interview with David Lang
MARK ALBURGER
Post-minimalist composer David Lang (b. Los Angeles) is one
of the founders of the Bang on a Can Marathon and the Bang
on a Can All-Stars. His Modern Painters was premiered at
Santa Fe Opera in 1995. He has received commissions from
the Boston Symphony, Cleveland Orchestra, St. Paul Chamber
Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, City of Birmingham
Symphony Orchestra, and the American Composers
Orchestra.
I met with David Lang, directly after having interviewed
Christian Wolfe and hours before an interview with Jacob ter
Veldhuis (a marathon day which will not likely be surpassed
by this writer), on March 17 in San Francisco, the day after the
performance of six of his memory pieces by pianist Aki
Takahashi at the sixth Other Minds Festival.
ALBURGER: Unlike some of the other Other Minds
participants, you can perhaps relax now.
LANG: Well, yes. But Paul Dresher's doing a piece in the
Opus415 Marathon this Sunday [March 19]. It's called
Follow. It's a nice piece -- not very long. It's kicky.
ALBURGER: The memory pieces that we heard were
wonderful, but also not very long. There are two more that
weren't played.
LANG: One is called "wiggle," which is in memory of Frank
Wigglesworth. He was a great American composer, very
funny and human person, a real wonderful spirit in the New
York music scene, instrumental in all sorts of generous
projects. He was on the Virgil Thomson board, on the CRI
board; he was involved in all sorts of "money give-aways."
He was a really good guy who lived around the corner from
me in the West Village. I used to see him all the time. And
the last piece is called "beach," in memory of David Huntley.
He was the promotion person for Boosey & Hawkes for many
years. He was the same person to whom John Adams
dedicated his Violin Concerto. He was an unbelievably sweet
and knowledgeable person -- very smart, very interested in all
sorts of music. He would call me and tell me about music that
he thought we should program at Bang on a Can that had
nothing to do with Boosey & Hawkes. He would hear
something that he liked and he'd say, "There's this piece, it's
published by Universal! And you should get it!" He was a
tremendously interesting person who had dedicated his life to
new music. He was really one of the old-guard new-music
people who knew everything.
ALBURGER: How is "cage" notated As a series of
tremolos
LANG: It's just tremolos, yes.
ALBURGER: And it's notated staff to staff
LANG: Some are normal, some are 8va, some are 15 basso.
ALBURGER: But there are always just two notes
LANG: It's just two notes, which alternate in every measure.
ALBURGER: And change in every subsequent measure.
LANG: Yes. It's basically just a bunch of scales. The next
note of the scale up goes to the right-hand side, the next note
of the scale down goes to the left-hand side, until it reaches a
certain barrier. The piece is a kind of a mathematical rule, in
reference to where the barriers are. When the top note hits the
upper barrier, it just reflects down an octave until it reaches
the left-hand barrier, and then it reflects back up. The piece is
just a series of demonstrations as to how those two notes
change. It's the same scale. How those two notes change
depends on the barriers. It's really how all the set of piano
pieces work. There are seven mathematical frameworks.
ALBURGER: I had a sense of that, particularly in the
arpeggio canon piece "spartan arcs," which begins in the right
hand and continues in the left. The right hand started alone,
and when the left hand finished alone, I said, "Yes!"
LANG: It's actually two canons. A double canon where the
accidentals get changed in certain weird ways. Every one has
a weird problem. This is one of my personal favorites. It's a
bunch of six-note arpeggios --
ALBURGER: -- descending --
LANG: -- where gradually the next arpeggio starts before the
first one finishes. The net result sounds like fairly complex
chords, but they're really the first three notes of the new chord
superimposed over the last three notes of the old one that
hasn't finished yet.
ALBURGER: And rhythmically it's complex, with
asymmetrical rhythms.
LANG: Yes, there are asymmetrical rhythms.
ALBURGER: Time signature changes
LANG: Yes, time signature changes in every measure
ALBURGER: 6/8 becomes 5/8, and so on.
LANG: 6/16, 5/16, 4/16, 3/16, then back up to 6/16 in a very
complicated process, that guarantees all sorts of asymmetries.